Wake me up when the gender wars are over

AI has just answered the burning question that’s plagued generations of humans, and I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep peacefully again, writes Aspasia Karras

They’re marketing sleep holidays now. Come on vacation, they say, so you can sleep your way through it. “Power down” on our beautiful beds. Get your sleep hygiene right in our sleep spa. Basically, take a break by way of an extended nap. Why leave your hotel room and, I don’t know, actually go and look at stuff, when you can stay in bed and catch up on your 40 winks?

You know what, sleep tourism is sounding rather appealing right now. I’d like to get a bit of shut eye and wake up to a less complicated existence. Or, at least, be rested enough to make sense of things as they appear to be. Because my brain is fried and that’s making peaceful sleep a thing of the past.

Every day I hear or read something new that makes me wonder if I know or understand anything at all. I can hear the sound of lightly simmering brain cells at any given moment. If you look closely, you can actually see the smoke seeping out my ears. It’s the vaporising effect of news on my brain. Take, for example, this morning’s attack on my frontal lobe. I was sitting in the dark, a good hour before my morning alarm was due. In truth, I’m already alarmed and I don’t need it any more.

I have inadvertently become a team player for the 5am club, except I’m early for the group meetings. So at 4.15am or so, I read that at Stanford, an AI program has answered the burning question that’s plagued generations of humans — are men really from Mars and women from Venus?

Dr Vinod Menon and his team fed huge sets of data to a really smart AI device, which has now shown something that most selfrespecting feminists, like me, have railed against for the sake of equality. Because for years we’ve known that while the sex chromosomes we’re born with determine many parts of our development by releasing all sorts of hormones into our brains and systems, it was almost impossible to prove that the sex hormones were having concrete effects on how the human brain develops. Up to now, that is, with the old-school technology available to us.

It was gospel that the brain structures of men and women looked pretty much the same, and research on brain activity had consistently shown no gender-based differences. Which led to the argument that the differences between the sexes are a matter of social construction. If you stop dressing small pink babies in pink and blue and give everyone little toy guns to play with, they will all grow up indifferent to gendered roles and just land somewhere on a continuum from here to Putin’s army.

Now AI has gone and shown something that is anathema to these “set in stone” truths. The deep neural network model, created by the scientists at Stanford, classifies brain imaging data in a previously unimaginable granular way. As the scientists fed it dynamic MRI scans and indicated which were male and female, it began to notice subtle patterns that could help it tell the difference. They then tested the model on about 1,500 random brain scans from around the world and the AI could accurately tell the difference between male and female brains of every stripe.

Prepare for the brain sizzle — they conclusively showed that the way we process cognitive tasks differs between the genders. In short, we really are from different planets.

Obviously, I was by now fully awake and seriously worried about my ability to ever fall asleep again. Give this information to a bunch of men — whose authority resides in heaven, like Andrew Tate and other misogynist influencers — and you can be sure they’ll put women into full burkinis, rapidly remove their reproductive rights, pay them less for doing the same job and then deprive them of basic schooling as quickly as you can say “Switzerland only gave women the vote in 1972”. In other words, full Handmaid’s Tale.

So, what’s to be done? I suppose we could go back to the law and insist that everyone is equal before it, whatever their brains look like. But I worry that’s the sort of plan that relies on the goodwill of the people — and they have been looking for ways to prove superiority based on differences for millennia.

Look, this information needn’t be all doom and gloom. It could turn out to be for the best. I mean, have the genders ever actually understood each other? Now we have evidence for the weird communication lapses and strange mutually incomprehensible behaviour. We can just put it down to cognitive issues latent in the brains of the opposite sex and go and take a nap instead of an antidepressant. It could even have a virtuous effect — no-one has tested medicines prescribed to women on women for like, ever, because, you know, hormones. Apparently those pesky things make the medicines react differently to the standard population (i.e. men). So maybe now there’s proof we really do work a little differently, it could lead to better health care that’s designed to respond to specifics and not just one gender. But I’d be genuinely surprised.

I hear The Hilton has a brilliant sleep hygiene package — you can find me there. Sleeping it off.