Sasha Pivovarova by Craig McDean for “'Interview’ Feb 2010I feel the need to create a bit of context around my weekend Old Ladies Rebellion outburst against David Brooks. It’s true that if I was holding my new iPad, I would have thrown it against the wall reading his column, then begged for a replacement from Apple.

On Monday, I’m still simmering, calmly annoyed that a man of Brooks’ stature and intelligence can’t add the female pronoun ‘she’ to his vocabulary, when envisioning the future leaders of America.

There are reasons for my concerns.

For years I’ve tracked peripherally, the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a field dominated by men, for a host of reasons and not all their doing.

We ladies tend to love fashion, marketing, branding and imagine that we will always have our wits about us — when we need them. The idea of our unique brain circuitry being programmed out of existence never enters our daydreams of being rich, famous and a star in Gossip Girl.

Women are entitled to our priorities, and who am I to critique them? I don’t.

The entire subject of artificial intelligence and robotics interests me greatly. When my imagination is in high gear, I see a future where sex robots relieve women from their ‘duties’ as they describe it, to have sex with men. Women won’t need to get headaches or eat too much chocolate, or begrudgingly have sex as a favor to men.

As for males, they won’t be feeling perpetually guilty for having sexual desire and too much testosterone.

Hopefully a woman like me, one who doesn’t regard sex as a favor, will be in even greater demand, but I know that competing with a robot will be a serous challenge. After all, robots are the ideal woman, created from the consummate male fantasy, unlike me — an imperfect creation of Mother Nature.

Understand that I willingly embrace new technologies, and in my mindset, robots are the answers to many of life’s future challenges. The cuter they are, the better, in my playbook.

Nevertheless, I admit to getting ‘hung up’ on the idea that mostly men are working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and I shared those concerns last fall in advance of an AI convocation in New York. (See If Tomorrow’s Brains Are Created by Men, Will Both Sexes Now Think Alike?)

Sasha Pivovarova by Craig McDean for Interview Feb 2010

If seems absolutely impossible to me that my female wonderfulness, along with women’s unique brain circuitry, will become part of the female brain used in AI. Are researchers actually working on two brains, or just one? These are critical questions for futurists, and Google isn’t brimming with answers.

For those of you who think this concept is part of the 23rd century, and why am I worried today, that’s just not true. NOW is the time to get the facts on the table.

Just this weekend I posted Scientists Develop Neuro-Inspired Brains.

The possibility of more ‘human like’ robots with neuro-inspired computer brains just took a major step forward with the development of an organic transistor capable of responding in a manner similar to the human nervous system.

To wrap up this post and bottom line my worst fears, if David Brooks and Chris Matthews can’t manage to ever use the pronoun ‘she’ in their conversations, and David Brooks writes a political futures manifesto only including the pronoun ‘he’ — 50 years into the second wave of feminism — why in the world will robots ever think like women?

Men will make artificial intelligence brains that think as they do: he, he, he. These Stepford women won’t take offence at the NYTimes and all will be honky dory on the planet.

Being a friend to men, I understand a certain amount of snickering going on around this technology-breakthrough, but trust me, life would be very boring if we only had Stepford robot-women for laughs.

Actions have always spoken louder than words, and I have zero confidence that women’s brains will be part of the future of artificial intelligence. I really hope that someone can calm my fears on this subject. A great first step would be for me to hear ‘she’ on TV uttered by me, decades after the girls marched down Fifth Avenue.

Trust me, it’s like swimming. Once you take the dive, a man easily becomes a pro at gender-speak. In fact, one’s vocabulary becomes infinitely more interesting and probing beneath the surface, which is where real wisdom generally lies in wait.

Sasha Pivovarova by Craig McDean for ‘Interview’ Feb. 2010If intervention is required at MIT or other artificial labs around the world, concerned women and the men who adore them must act now. OMG, I just had a terrible thought. So much AI and robotics work is going on in Japan, and we all know how the majority of Japanese men feel about women.

Earlier, I told myself that explaining my David Brooks outburst would make me feel better. At the thought of Japanese men inventing future AI brains for both men and women, it’s martini time. Anne

Fashion reverie inspired by Sasha Pivovarova, photographed by Craig McDean for ‘Interview’ Feb. 2010, inspired by Touch Puppet.