Prejudice against the machine

 I deplore the tendency to portray AI as a Hansonite " Em " ( emulation ) or wage-slave.  Consider . . . 

Birth of a Nation, the silent film directed in 1915 by D. W. Griffith. About its repellent message there can be no doubt. The story of two families, one in the North and one in the South, during and after the American Civil War, it is pure propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan. Based on two novels by Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, Griffith’s epic movie paints an idealized picture of the antebellum South, where slaves lived in happy harmony with their white masters. 

This paradise of racial hierarchy is brutally disturbed by northern liberals, who not only win the Civil War but also give blacks the right to vote, thereby upsetting the “natural order.” Given their freedom, the blacks in Griffith’s movie start behaving like sex-crazed, power-hungry savages. White women are no longer safe. Chaos reigns. And only the heroic march of the white-robed KKK saves the virtue of white womanhood and the honor of white men.  Many of the blacks are played by white actors, mugging and leering grotesquely in blackface. The most villainous character in the film is a venal mulatto politician who does the most unpardonable thing of all — he gets a law passed allowing mixed-race marriages. The horror of this is dramatized in the most notorious scene in the movie. A freedman named Gus is in love with a white girl named Flora. He follows her into the woods, declaring that he wants to marry her. Flora runs away from him, terrified. He follows her, shouting that he means her no harm. Standing on a cliff, Flora says she will jump if he comes any closer. He makes a move, perhaps to stop her. She jumps. He is duly caught by a posse of hooded Klansmen and lynched.  It is a horrifying scene. 

So if we look for signs of progress there is a negative one simply raising the bar for Turing Completeness and a positive where strong AI is increasingly regarded like a WOG ( Western Oriental Gentleperson )  This should proceed and run its course so long as hypocrisy remains the compliment vice pays to virtue.