Whose humanity gets counted?
*Transcript cleaned by Kaitlyn Gastineau, looked at by Cherice Chan
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Afro-nowism to me is like thinking about
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what we want now but I realize that a
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lot of folks in my age range like their
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desires are all based on this this
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façade that they've been given right I
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need the big car the big house like
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they're not defining it for this
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themselves they're just saying I don't
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have enough of whatever we're supposed
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to be able to have
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does that make sense
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and the ques- like you know for me that
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other question becomes well how do you
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how do you start encouraging people to
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define more and more what their true
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needs are
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as opposed to what it is
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they've been told and how they're
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supposed to be human and what defines
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that and what makes them acceptable
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humans
Autism
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autistics are often compared to or
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metaphorized as robots like um
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even like theories of sentience are all
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hinged on this notion of Theory of Mind
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modules so we've got like the
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computerization of the brain and then
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autistic people being represented as
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lacking the core modules that make one
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human so like when i think about the
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rights of robots i often think about the
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rights of autistics larger questions
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about what constitutes a being and how
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like even trying to delineate what
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constitutes the human always results in
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someone or something being excluded from
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those boundaries and you know autism is
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just one of many limit cases like that
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represents that particular tension so
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automatically when thinking about the
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robot I feel like this is a question
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about not just humanity but like about
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disability about embodiment about care
Robots
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they're described as robotic
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so you know Asian excellence is inhuman
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so Asian divers in the Olympics you know
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you will see in the 21st Century sports
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commentators saying he has a robotic
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efficiency or is like a machine like
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people don't see that as a racial slur
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in any way it's interesting how that's
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like how Asian
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competence is described still 
Entities
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When I think of entities I think a lot about
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um kind of supernatural beings
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that do things but don't have a body
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that's an algorithm right
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like
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supernatural things that do things but
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don't have a body
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like they're kind of behind the scenes
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doing things yeah
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yeah I think though
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I mean this is a mythos in digital media
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studies
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the notion is that somebody could
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understand them
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if they wanted to
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right that wouldn't be me but that
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someone can reverse engineer and boil it
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down to a set of data
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or a code
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but the entity seems to be
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more than that 
Entitism
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we know to a point but we don't fully
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understand how everything is working
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and we can kind of mathematically
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explain things to
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a point but then they move beyond that
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which is where for me real Entitism
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comes in when it moves beyond the people
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who are who are writing the code it's
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like well that we're kind of writing
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this thing and we know what we aimed for
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it to do but then it starts to do
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something that we did not expect which
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is usually the point in which we turn it
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off
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right so like when they made um two chat
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bots that were talking to each other and
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eventually they made their own third
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language so that they they didn't
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they made a shorthand for each other
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right and at that that was a point at
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which we were like boom turn that crap
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off
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like that's beyond what we told them to
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do how we from the function and they're
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starting to veer from what we know