Far Removed

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important. It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution. This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I thin...

Cameras were set up in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. Passersby in each city could see people in the other city on portal-shaped screens connected to those cameras. Less than a week after their installations, these screens were shut down because some people behaved inappropriately in front of them. One New Yorker said, "[H]opefully, when it comes back, people will use it as it was intended." How no one involved in this portal art project anticipated this kind of thing is beyond me. How a resident of New York City could be optimistic about human behavior is equally bewildering. I tried to fit in. I struggled for years and have still had no success. I learned that people had expectations they couldn't reveal. Socializing was a game, and the rules were kept secret in order to keep people who couldn't guess them from playing. I was constantly on the outside because I was only capable of being myself. For all of my early life, this was baffling. I couldn'...