In many of the science fictional futures that we know and love, racism, sexism, and homophobia are often scrubbed out of existence. Here's why science fiction is in favor of allowing people to marry whoever they want.

Caprica/BSG, Star Trek, Torchwood, Mass Effect, even less thoughtful fare like Starship Troopers, depict residents of the future who are less interested in the permutations of human identity and more interested in the qualities of a person's mind and spirit. Even Futurama's "Proposition Infinity," concerning the fake-contentious "robosexual marriage" controversy, spoofs this tendency.

Yesterday, US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker helped us move the rights needle a little further toward that future. In a heavily disputed decision, Walker overturned the barbarous Proposition 8 on the grounds it was unconstitutional under California law. His ruling was unequivocal and exhaustive: same-sex marriage is and should be equal to opposite-sex marriage. No doubt the case will move to the Supreme Court, where Obama and Congress' collective feet-dragging on DOMA and DADT will finally be confronted. Until then, same-sex marriage is forbidden in most states in the USA and, regardless of the Supreme Court decision, will remain so in most countries in the world.

What is astounding is that for all the value we place in "human rights," we are very good at not giving rights to humans. As I mentioned in my "Yes, We Should Clone Neanderthals" post, we regularly restrict human rights in those who are mentally un- or under-developed. Many who argued for the rights of Neanderthals based their arguments on the fact that the Neanderthal is "mostly human" or has very similar DNA and biology to a human being. While I agree the Neanderthal clone should have the same rights as a human being, I agree for a reason entirely other than biology. Rights have nothing to do with being human.

Our species' history is and remains one largely built around the ever extending circle of those who have "rights" and what "rights" they have. Pick any great expansion in the rights of humanity, from the advent of democracy to the Nineteenth Amendment to yesterday's decision, and I doubt you will find DNA at the philosophical core of the change. So what is it? When we, the human civilization, recognize the rights of those who have been oppressed or ignored, what is it we are recognizing? Their humanity! you may answer. But what does that mean? Surely a baby and a corpse are as human as an adult Homo sapiens is, but only the adult can vote. Why?

In a word: personhood.

This realization gets to a central tenet of the philosophy of transhumanism: that rights are not derived from being human but from being a person. Consider the shows listed above, particularly Mass Effect and Star Trek, and ask if Worf or Liara or Data have "human rights." Of course they don't. But they do have rights. The rights are derived from their being sentient, sapient beings capable of autonomous, reflexive, symbolic, ethical, and willful thought. That is, they are persons - and persons have rights.

The brilliance of personhood as a foundation for rights is that it exists independent of biology, even of physical substrate. You already know about personhood because you've seen it in your favorite movies. The Iron Giant, District 9, Blade Runner, A.L.F., E.T., Monsters Inc. and Ratatouille are about personhood. The eponymous hero of The Iron Giant demonstrates his personhood by willfully not being a gun and saving the day; Remy does so less on a smaller scale but no less movingly in Ratatouille by cooking a gourmet meal that triggers a Proustian flashback in Paris' toughest food critic. Personhood is what you discover when you stop trying to figure out what makes humans human and instead try to understand how we recognize another sentient mind. A mind imbued with rights.

Personhood is, as simply as I can put it, the degree to which an entity exhibits a combination of aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as sentience, creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality. One great way to look at the question comes from Steven Wise's Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, in which he argues that would-be persons can be ranked from "stimulus-response machines" at 0.0 up through fully functioning, rational adult humans at 1.0. The critical note here is that humans themselves can be placed on the scale, with a blastocyst ranking at 0.0 and 5-year-old somewhere in the range of 0.8. An example of a creature that may benefit from this personhood scale would be the former student of Irene Pepperberg, Alex, an especially bright grey parrot, who would fall above the 0.7 intelligence threshold for "limited personhood."

If an artificial intelligence system or "uplifted" animal (e.g., Dug from Up!) were capable of achieving the same level of reason and mature reflection as an adult human, then it would be granted the same rights as an adult human. If you were to chart degrees of personhood against degrees of rights, it might look like this example taken from James Hughes' Citizen Cyborg:

The reason all of this matters is that human beings have never been granted rights because they are merely human. Rights come from a demonstration not of DNA or taxonomy, but of mental and moral ability. The reason Judge Walker's decision is not only correct now, but will be vindicated by history, is that it recognizes the right of two consenting persons to marry. If we did bring a Neanderthal back, his or her rights would be founded not in the similarity to human DNA but in the rational and moral mind, the personhood, that the clone would have.

The battle for the right of same-sex couples to be married is, in the extremely long view, a fight for recognition as persons. Whether aliens, robots, uplifted animals, or cloned Neanderthals will be the first non-humans to demand rights, I don't know; however, I do know that it is not a matter of if, but when. I just hope by then we have moved beyond mere human rights.

George Takei image via Wikipedia

This post by Kyle Munkittrick originally appeared at Discover's Science Not Fiction blog.

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The Books of The Times review on June 25, about “Denial: A Memoir of Terror” by Jessica Stern, included a quotation from an essay by Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times Book Review in 1981 on responses to violence in her writing that misstated the final word in a German expression about what some view as the proper concerns for women. The expression, sometimes rendered in slightly different forms, is “Kirche, Kinder, Küche” — “church, children, kitchen” — not “Kuchen,” which means cake. Link

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I very much hope the groom was standing across the way doing the same thing with the same expression. “Fly away, freedom. I no longer bask in your glory for I am IN LOVE!”

Actually, come to think of it, was this an album cover in the 70s? I think it was. And what’s up with her skirt in the back? Are the doves holding it up? This picture is quite magical.

Related: Say Cheese!

Perhaps you think you’re doing something useful when you boot up your PC and head online. Odds are, there’s a one-in-three chance you’re spending your time on Facebook. Or playing with virtual sheep.

So says Nielsen in a new report about what American do online. Title: “What Americans Do Online.”

The key takeaway here is that social networks and online games take up about a third of our Web time. That’s up from last year, when the two categories combined to take up about 25 percent of our time.

And that’s good news for Facebook and Farmville-maker Zynga, which dominate the two categories. It’s neutral news for Google (GOOG), since search’s share has stayed consistent at about 3.5 percent, and it’s bad news for Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL), since portal time has decreased by 19 percent.

Here’s your data in chart form (click to enlarge):

And in a groovy graphic:

Interesting side note is that usage patterns change if you’re talking about Internet use on your phone. There, Nielsen says, you’re much more likely to spend time tapping out email:

What accounts for the difference? Nielsen doesn’t hazard a guess, so I’ll make a couple:

• Even on sophisticated handsets like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google’s Android, it’s easier to check email than just about any other online experience. And if you’re talking about cruder feature phones with very limited Web access–the kinds that average Americans still use in great numbers–that difference is even more pronounced.
• The mobile content people keep telling us that that phone users are interested in “snacking” on content. Can’t get more snackable than an email, right?

One other data point to consider when considering the different data points: The data comes from different places.

Nielsen’s PC-based Web stats come from both self-reported surveys and panel data, where a small group of users allow Nielsen to track their behavior. The mobile data only comes from self-reported surveys. So it may be that people would like us to think that they’re less likely to screw around on their phones than they really are. So be truthful–how much does your Web usage differ when you get on your phone?

Emphasis mine:

ON 21 July we published an article claiming that the video games company Rockstar Games were planning to release a version of their popular Grand Theft Auto video games series titled “Grand Theft Auto Rothbury”.
We also published what we claimed would be the cover of this game, solicited comments from a family member impacted by the recent tragedy and criticised Rockstar Games for their alleged plans.
We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event.
It is now accepted that there were never any plans by Rockstar Games to publish such a game and that the story was false. We apologise for publishing the story using a mock-up of the game cover, our own comments on the matter and soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member.
We unreservedly apologise to Rockstar Games and we have undertaken not to repeat the claims again. We have also agreed to pay them a substantial amount in damages which they are donating to charity. Link

Thanks, Alex and Andy!

(via Olly Moss)

Via: Gamasutra

Radoslav Zilinsky’s 2007 artwork “The World”

A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages.  Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site.  (Found via Coolvibe.)

When the boss says something like “We don’t need editors; we all have spell-check,” you face the uncomfortable realization that the boss is an ignoramus. You are working for someone who (a) doesn’t understand how spell-check functions and what its limitations are, and (b) has no more understanding of what is involved in editing than he does of Akkadian cuneiform.

So you might want to refer him to this article by James Mathewson, the editor in chief at ibm.com, which summarizes a little experiment:

Because editors are often seen as unnecessary, we at IBM conducted a study to demonstrate their value for some of our marketing pages. We took a sample of unedited pages with high traffic from across our various business units and ran them through Dave Harlan, the editing lead for the group that creates a lot of our marketing content. We then ran an A/B test, where we served the unedited versions to a random sample of users and the edited versions to the rest of the users. We then measured engagement (defined as clicks to desired links on the page) on those pages over the course of a month.

The results were astonishing.

The mean difference in engagement was 30 percent across the set of pages. And the standard deviation was one percent–we got a 30 percent improvement on the desired call to action for the pages across the board.

I’m fairly sure that to achieve such results, Mr. Harlan and his team did more than run the spell-check and fix the commas. They must have done honest-to-God, get-to-the-point, don’t-waste-my-time editing. That means establishing a focus up front, pruning verbiage, clarifying the organization, looking for meaning beneath jargon, and thinking more about the reader’s needs than the writer’s preferences.

Mr. Mathewson is careful not to make extravagant claims. He says that additional studies ought to be conducted to see whether this experiment was a fluke or an indication that editing indeed produces substantial benefits.

I, however, am under no such constraints. Editing, proper editing, adds value. There.

If your boss is interested in having readers pay attention to what you turn out, he might want to think about engaging a couple of editors and getting out of their way.

(via I Love Charts)