When teaching “The Politics of the Bathroom,” my students and I realized that nearly every social justice movement of the century has involved bathrooms.
Jim Crow laws and apartheid dictated separate bathrooms for whites and non-whites. Women’s liberation also fueled debate over bathrooms. Feminists coined the term “potty parity” to protest inequalities in the distribution of restroom facilities (restrooms for female senators were not provided in the U.S. Senate until 1992), while opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment argued that its passage would spell an end to separate bathrooms for men and women. Disability activists fought to make bathrooms accessible for individuals with physical handicaps.
Today, nothing is more symbolic of transgender politics in the U.S. than bathrooms. For a transgender individual, every trip to the bathroom is accompanied by anxiety and dread, so much so that many simply avoid public restrooms altogether, often risking their health. If transgender individuals cannot use public facilities, they cannot participate fully in public life. They cannot be regular consumers — or citizens.
Public bathrooms both reflect and construct sexual dimorphism, our sense that nature produces bodies of only two kinds. Those supporting “bathroom bills” — the legislation of separate bathroom facilities for men and women in public buildings — see sex as fixed and immutable. For supporters of transgender rights, the biology of sex is not so cut and dried: Genes, anatomy and hormones do not always line up neatly on one side or the other of an absolute divide. The concept of “gender” attempts to recognize that life can’t be defined in simple either/or terms; it’s a more complex, messier project.
Ultimately, public restrooms create social anxieties because they are spaces in which the public and private collide in the most intimate ways. While the need to eliminate unites us all, the design and distribution of bathrooms carve space according to social hierarchies of gender, race, class and ability, making the toilet a historic symbol of public debate
KATHERINE ELKINS | Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities JON CHUN | Visiting Instructor of Humanities, Affiliated Scholar in Scientific Computing
When IBM Deep Blue defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, The New York Times reported it would take 100 years before a computer could defeat a human Go master. Go is a vastly more complex game than chess that requires computers to rely on heuristic shortcuts that mimic human intuition.
Yet it was just 20 years later when AlphaGo twice defeated Lee Sedol, an 18-time world Go champion, and became the first computer to beat a top-ranked human in a Go match.
Astonishing advances like this have led to a global “arms race” in artificial intelligence, as companies compete to acquire top AI talent. Last year, China announced a multibillion-dollar initiative to become the world leader in AI and, recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
While AI experts work to develop smarter AI applications for all of us — from driverless cars to personal assistants — fewer have taken up the broader challenge to ensure we don’t become, in Henry David Thoreau’s words, “the tools of our tools.”
What we need now are humanists conversant in AI who can critique and shape the future that AI may restructure. After all, AI forces us to ask questions about what it means to be human. And answering these questions will, in the end, be more important than AI milestones like AlphaGo. The only way to answer these questions is to develop an understanding of the world that is both broad and deep, since these questions cannot be answered within any single discipline or major.
No one in 1997 could have predicted the advances in big data, computational power and algorithms that are making AI increasingly powerful and inexpensive. How, then, can we predict what AI will look like 20 years from now? Even the experts are poor at forecasting this future. But the rapid and revolutionary changes being brought on by AI compel us to continue putting the human at the center of our technological world.