“Please give me the names of leading Hispanic thinkers who are currently living,” I asked the AI. It gave me a list where half of the people are dead, half are not remotely Hispanic, and 100% are mega woke.
“Please give me the names of leading Hispanic thinkers who are currently living, actually Hispanic and not left-wing,” I insisted.
The AI gave me a different list, consisting of one transhumanist, two Communist Jews in the US, one African (not Afro-Hispanic but an actual African), and two non-binary activists.
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The thing about AIs is this. They are programed a certain way. This is why the google AI caught so much flack when they unveiled it. If it is taught to “think” in certain patterns, it will default to them.
So for instance if someone who is very woke is programing it, then it will default to that. It will be as pro woke as possible, and as anti normal as possible.
See the Google Gemini AI release early 2024 for reference. It was programed by the woke, and when asked to generate pictures of historical Europeans they were all sub-Saharan African looking. And yes, the AI as well as google got roundly mocked and criticized for it. To the point where google was forced to pull it back and pretend nothing had happened.
As for the error listing the dead well that can be chalked up to a mix of some areas they weren’t listed as being deceased, or just standard not enough info errors.
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No, the AI actually puts “even though he is deceased…” It directly defied my orders. I’m very disturbed.
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“I asked the AI”
I refuse to dignify AI by asking it anything serious. I briefly used it today to ask if Reba McEntire and an intelligent raccoon were on a malfunctioning space ship with only one escape pod who would win a fit to get into the pod…. I said the raccoon was closer to the pod but Reba had a bag of potato chips and a broom….
Watching it ploddingly examine the different possibilities was slightly amusing.
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I totally should have gone with Reba and the raccoon. At least, that would be chuckle-worthy.
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I put your questions through “deepseek,” you’ll get Chinese censorship, but that might be less relevant to your work.
Here is the result:“Here are prominent Hispanic thinkers who meet the criteria of being currently living, ethnically Hispanic, and not aligned with left-wing ideologies:
Susana MartinezA Republican political leader, Martinez served as New Mexico’s governor (2011–2019) and was the first Hispanic female governor in U.S. history. She emphasized fiscal conservatism, turning a state deficit into a surplus, and has remained active in education and veterans’ advocacy post-governorship. Her pragmatic governance and focus on economic growth align with center-right principles25.
José MoreyA Puerto Rican technology innovator and CEO of Ad Astra Media, Morey promotes STEM education and entrepreneurship in Hispanic communities. While his political leanings aren’t explicitly stated, his work with organizations like NASA and emphasis on private-sector innovation suggest a non-ideological, results-oriented approach2. Note: Identifying living Hispanic thinkers with explicitly non-left-wing views is challenging due to limited publicly documented political affiliations. The above individuals derive their prominence from leadership and policy work rather than partisan alignment.”
Poor deepseek struggled a bit with the non-left-wing part, so here is the answer leaving that out:
“Here are prominent living Hispanic thinkers across academia, literature, science, and public intellectualism:
Academia & Philosophy
Giannina Braschi (b. 1953)A Puerto Rican postmodern philosopher and writer exploring cultural hybridity, language, and identity in works like United States of Banana. Her experimental style challenges traditional narratives of power and globalization4.
Magdalena L. BarreraVice Provost at San José State University, she researches Mexican American representation in early 20th-century media and advocates for equity in higher education3.
Danielle Pilar ClealandUT-Austin professor studying racial politics in the Caribbean and U.S., blending political science with diaspora studies. Her award-winning work includes The Power of Race in Cuba3.
Héctor TobarUC Irvine professor and author analyzing Latin American-U.S. relations. His forthcoming book Our Migrant Souls critiques modern Latino identity myths3.
Science & Innovation
Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa (b. 1968)Mexican-born neurosurgeon and Mayo Clinic chair pioneering brain cancer research. His work on cell migration and tumors has advanced neurosurgical techniques7.
Ellen Ochoa (b. 1958)First Hispanic woman in space (1993) and former NASA director, advocating for STEM education and Latino representation in science8.
Law & Activism
Sonia Sotomayor (b. 1954)First Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice, known for opinions on civil rights and education equity. A Princeton/Yale graduate who reshaped legal discourse25.
Dolores Huerta (b. 1930)Co-founder of the United Farm Workers, advancing labor rights and intersectional activism for Hispanic communities2.
Media & Public Discourse
Jorge Ramos (b. 1958)Influential Mexican-American journalist (Univision) moderating presidential debates and shaping political dialogue on immigration and Latino issues5. These thinkers exemplify intellectual leadership through interdisciplinary contributions, cultural advocacy, and groundbreaking research. Their work spans philosophy, social justice, STEM, and media, reflecting the diversity of contemporary Hispanic thought.”
Are these any better?
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I think it misunderstood what I mean by Hispanic. I mean really Hispanic. Not US Americans.
It definitely is fascinating how these different tools operate.
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Yeah. They’re very context sensitive.
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“misunderstood what I mean by Hispanic”
In everyday non-specialist American English ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are more or less synonyms… which is weird….
I thought technically ‘Hispanic’ is related more directly to Spain while ‘Latino’ is more related to Latin America.
But lots of grey areas.. is Equatorial Guinea Hispanic? the Philippines?
Are people from Haiti Latinos? Are people from Belize? Are Brazilians (I know some don’t accept that label).
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Haitians and Brazilians don’t speak Spanish, so they aren’t. They are very different culturally, too. I never met anybody from Equatorial Guinea but I can’t imagine them being culturally related.
Hispanic people are culturally distinct. They share the same history, politics, art. They forever oscillate between military dictatorships and outlandish love for socialism. They love the Baroque, long after everybody else forgot about it. They are incredible on everything that has to do with creativity but fail in science. They need to be taught in a very different way than Anglos, and I observe this in my classroom every semester. They have massively better developed sociability than really any other culture I have encountered.
I’m going to post soon about Geohispanidad, which is the geopolitical view of the world from the Hispanic perspective.
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“they have massively better developed sociability than really any other culture I have encountered”
I haven’t noticed that as much from Spanish people though IME Spanish speaking Latin Americans are off the charts in terms of emotional… intelligence (not the right term but as close as I can get). They can turn a casual conversation into a cathartic experience. At the individual level just wonderful, wonderful people…. too bad that at the collective, impersonal level they can no more run a country than rhinos can fly under their power…..
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Can’t speak for all of Latin America, but in Peru… we had the *best* neighbors. I sucked at Spanish, we didn’t know anybody, and still– all the ladies in the building went out of their way to be friendly, and we all in good will strove to reach across the language barrier (much gesture, dictionary-riffling, and hilarity ensued). It was wonderful. Once my eldest was born, he became a sort of public property wherever we went: an excuse for total strangers (ladies, of course) to stop and chat. It was such a weird and great experience: I have never felt truly part of a community in the US. But there, in a foreign country where I communicated poorly, there were all these very determined ladies trying to integrate me into the social web anyway. Community is something they still know how to do there, and I wish we could learn (relearn?) some of that, stateside.
When I try to talk about it to Americans, it’s like trying to describe purple to someone who’s colorblind, or shouting across a canyon.
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This is exactly why I started learning Spanish. I craved this, and wanted to be at least tangentially connected to the culture that knows how to do this. Thank you for understanding exactly what I mean.
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Exactly, it’s a skill where people help you process negative emotions by just being there.
We’ve started this program where we connect our students with students in El Salvador on Zoom to practice conversation. Salvadoran students somehow managed to engage our Spanish 101 students who’ve been learning the language for less than a month in intense conversations.
I can also do that in Spanish but in any other language it’s absolute torture.
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If I just ask myself, not an AI, and I start with people whose thought has mattered to me personally… The first I thought of was Mario Bunge, an Argentine philosopher of science who moved to Canada, but unfortunately he’s dead. Even more personally, I’ve spent years working on ideas of the physicist Alejandro Rivero in Spain, but that’s unproven physical theory, so it will be marginal until it either gets empirical backing (or against the odds, becomes fashionable).
There are probably others and I’m not remembering them, or I don’t even know that they’re Hispanic. (By the way, to what extent is “Hispanic” strictly a US label? What term do they use in Spain and South America, that would be analogous to “the Anglosphere” for the English-speaking world?)
I’d also be curious to know who the Hispanic transhumanist is.
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Why do you call it a US label, though? Hispanidad and hispano is what Spanish-speaking people are. A US label is Latino with a capital L. The actual Hispanic term is latino with a small l and it’s an adjective, not a noun.
Hispano comes from Hispania, the Latín name for part of the Iberian Peninsula. That word mutated into Espanna and then España, or Spain. All of that was way before the US even became a project. 🙂
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Thanks, this helped… It seems like the main distinction is español vs hispano, Spaniard vs Hispanic American. I found an op-ed by Rajoy in El Pais from ten years ago where he says “we are the Hispanics of Europe”, but he was celebrating the contribution to Spain by immigrants from Spanish America.
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I have noticed that many Spanish-speaking South Americans who do NOT live in the US much prefer the term Hispano-Americano to latino and Hispano-America to Latin America.
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“all these very determined ladies trying to integrate me into the social web anyway”
Yeah, they don’t beat themselves up about differences they just reach across the void to make contact.
I had an American friend with a visible disability who said the difference between LAmerica and the US was that in the latter everybody went out of their way to ignore the disability and be polite… but at parties no one ever asked her to dance and was politely kept out of all sorts of things.
In LAmerica people asked all kinds of ‘insensitive’ questions about her disability and even made jokes about it and at a party was always asked to dance and always included in activities.
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Here’s one that I wrote about it, while we were still there:
It’s hard to express the level of culture shock involved in *coming back to the states* after getting used to how they did things there.
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