Gender Asymmetry and AI in Society

Geoffrey Gordon Ashbrook
3 min readJan 20, 2024

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Asymetric Intelligence

2024.01.20, Geoffrey Gordon Ashbrook

It is a crime for a woman to use a man’s technology? Ridiculous.

As is routinely painted across the language of society, women are often seen as soft-targets and easy prey for fake outrage clickbait and recreational negativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate ) . There are even prominent court cases going on at the time of writing this article where the problem of seemingly unstoppable hostility towards women is on shameless display to the world.

We must be watchful for asymmetries where women are singled out and slandered for the same actions that men are assumed to do and supported in doing, in particular women in business. As in this case, where a women fashion designer who does her own designs is inarticulately pillaried for using any design technology more sophisticated than stone tools.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/selkie-founder-defends-ai-collection-kimberley-gordon-valentines-day/

It is not ok to have an openly double standard where ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘human nature is what it is’ supports and enables attacks on women and the destruction of society, and women themselves are disproportionately the targets of baseless accusations of offense that, in classic asymmetry, men are suspiciously not accused of.

The asymmetry between this inherently prejudiced attack on a bold and ethical woman in business on the one hand and the CES2024 example of agro-bro businessmen shamelessly and with open ignorance labeling everything within reach as ‘made with AI’ is highly suspicious. There may be some extent to which the aesthetic of Selkie fashion makes the discussion closer to romantic, pre-raphaelite, hyper-natural, zero-technology ways of thinking, so the comparison between Selkie fashion and CES tech may not be simple, but where are the attacks on male run fashion studios who are using AI-powered photoshop and design software? Or does ‘Man uses technology as tool in fashion design’ as a headline for some reason not generate the bloodlust and feeding frenzy that ‘Woman uses technology as tool in fashion design’ apparently does?

The ironies in the Selkie fashion case are profound. It was women who pioneered the software and computing worlds and industries, before being unceremoniously kicked out of the industry they created in the 1970’s in order to make room for, as Daniel Kahneman casually describes them in ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ men who lack the communication skills to do anything more useful in business (my paraphrasing, but a prominent theme across research in the book).

Famously in the 1800’s Ada Lovelace laid the foundation for computer programming with Charles Babbage’s pioneering of general-computation which was directly inspired by and connected to the ‘program cards’ of Jacquard Looms that mechanized the production of textiles (a textile technology going back to the early 1700's). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine And textiles are then again the center of public backlash against technology in the mythologized Luddite movement of physically destroying textile mills in yet another a populist romantic-modernist episode of violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Let’s all try to be as strong as women entrepreneurs really need to be and think before we march down the paths of history’s regrettable mistakes yet again.

See:

For a much more detailed analysis of issues relating to labeling AI in media and the arts (caveat, written by myself): https://medium.com/@GeoffreyGordonAshbrook/should-we-label-images-text-made-by-ai-916df9ac100a

“Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet”, by Claire L. Evans, 2020.

https://www.amazon.com/Broad-Band-Untold-Story-Internet/dp/0593329449/

“Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer” by Kathy Kleiman, 2023.

https://www.amazon.com/Proving-Ground-Untold-Programmed-Computer/dp/1538718294/

“A People’s History of Computing in the United States” by Joy Lisi Rankin, 2018

https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-Computing-United-States/dp/0674970977/

“And for rare coverage of the contributions Clara don von Neumann,

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann”

by Ananyo Bhattacharya https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/B09M2LTKSH/

“The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood” by James Gleick, 2012

https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235/

“The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson, 2015

https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Revolution/dp/1476708703/

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