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This is for the matriarchs

This is for the matriarchs

Becoming a Matriarch author Helen Knott examines the legacy of motherhood and the different pathways parents lay for their children.

When I was a little girl, Mama would buy log home magazines, and we would lose ourselves in the construction of elaborate floor plans for our dream house.

My brothers and I claimed rooms in dozens of log homes that never existed. Little did we know that we, her children, were her ultimate blueprints for the future.

In his famous poem Harlem, American poet Langston Hughes asks, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’

Those who came before us made sacrifices to give us all this room to dream

When I look back at the women I belong to, whose limitations arose from intergenerational trauma, gender-based restrictions and the racial prejudices of their time, I know that a dream deferred gets passed on to the children.

Those who came before us made sacrifices to give us all this room to dream.

Four women. Four generations. Four babies. I have one. He is a beautiful, well-rounded one. I have a son, and his name is Mathias.

I am the firstborn and only daughter of Shirley. I am the firstborn of the many granddaughters of Junie. I am the great-granddaughter of Nina.

I am here at this moment in time, standing at an intersection of dreams and prayers

I am a living memory of these women. I am their dreams and hopes bound in flesh and bone. I am here at this moment in time, standing at an intersection of dreams and prayers.

I am stepping into a place that these women cleared for me throughout many generations through seemingly small but deliberate and meaningful actions.

However, the clearing of space is not always gentle or peaceful.

Sometimes change is a quick and brutal flooding that carries away the things we thought we knew.

Sometimes we are stripped down to nothing and find ourselves in a foreign emotional landscape. Other times we cling to what we know and recreate the geography of our childhoods in different ways.

Sometimes change is a quick and brutal flooding that carries away the things we thought we knew

When we enter new territory, our own humanness becomes evident through the errors we make and the time that we spend lost. The women before me broke trail for me, but they also left barricades and pathways that led only in circles.

The maps and dreams of my mother and grandmother were half-formed, and I have inherited these patterns.

I have spent much of my life in circles. I have broken trail and grabbed my own mother’s hand to lead her to a space so that she could have her own dreams.

Since my early twenties, I have understood that a part of my purpose here is to heal the emotional wounds and behaviours that haven’t healed in the generations before me. I am consciously creating maps that will be inherited by my son.

Death has shaped me just as birth has

My time here is limited because just as we are brought into this world, we are called back into the spirit world. The two women who primarily raised me up are gone now.

Death has shaped me just as birth has.

Because they were, I am.

I write this in memory of the women who came before me.

I write this to honour their love, sacrifices and hardships.

I write this because their birth was my birth, and their death was my death.

This is a record of maps and dreams.

This is for the matriarchs.

 

This article was adapted from the introduction to Becoming a Matriarch.

An inspiring exploration of womanhood, grief, addiction and trauma from an Indigenous perspective

Memoir
Paperback
25 July 2024
ISBN 9780715655498

‘A masterpiece of grief and joy, loss and rediscovery, flight and return, and, above all, a paean to the beautiful, eternal and all-encompassing power of matriarchy’ Dr Gabor Maté, author of The Myth of Normal

All her life, Helen Knott has been surrounded by strong women. She has looked to the women in her family and the larger Indigenous community for guidance, absorbed their stories and admired their independence. But Helen’s path hasn’t been easy and when her mother and grandmother died within six months of each other, she drew upon lessons from her ancestors and the land to discover her inner power and refashion her future.

Exploring their struggles and her own with young motherhood, daughterhood, grief and sobriety, Knott offers an inspiring meditation on how we repair ourselves in the face of tragedy, trauma and injustice; on what it is to be a woman – and become a matriarch.

The Evolving Union of Human and Machine

The Evolving Union of Human and Machine

The Evolving Union of Human and Machine

As Ray Kurzweil continues to explore the potential future relationship between humanity and AI, we revisit his seminal works that predicted the current changing landscape.

By Duckworth Books
17 July 2024

It seems that the hottest trending topic of 2024 is AI.

From ChatGPT and Midjourney, to the TikTok algorithm, to the development of self-driving cars, the ways in which AI is currently being used and possibly could be used is being explored, debated, ridiculed, and potentially regulated.

Numerous tech companies are incorporating it into their user experience, with Apple most recently announcing the release of Apple Intelligence as part of iOS18, generative AI that intertwines with, to quote Apple CEO Tim Cooke, the ‘user’s personal context to deliver truly helpful intelligence’.*

It is timely then, to reissue two groundbreaking titles from the world’s preeminent AI futurist.

It is timely to reissue two groundbreaking titles from the world's preeminent AI futurist

Described by Bill Gates as ‘the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence’, Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, prize winning author, and advocate for futurist and transhumanist movements, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions.

A pioneer in his field, he is credited with inventing text-to-speech synthesizers, has worked with Stevie Wonder to create music synthesizers that mimic real instruments, and was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page to work as a principal researcher and AI Visionary within the company.

His hugely influential work, The Singularity is Near, published by Duckworth in 2006, was the radical, original vision of the future of human-machine civilization.

The Singularity is Near is the radical, original vision of the future of human-machine civilization

Kurzweil’s innovative vision of the future, that the limitations of our biology will be overcome when human consciousness is able to meld with intelligent technology, has shaped the current conversations about AI, and has been a fundamental influence for tech companies across the globe.

In addition to our reissue of The Singularity is Near, we are also reissuing How to Create a Mind, a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilisation: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.

Kurzweil mediates on the development of pattern recognition, where creativity and love exist within the brain, and what consciousness really means in the development of AI systems. He envisions a disease-free future in which the problems of aging have become obsolete.

Kurzweil’s innovative vision of the future is that the limitations of our biology will be overcome when human consciousness is able to meld with intelligent technology

While we have not yet reached this future, Kurzweil has a strong belief that we will. Only the passage of time will tell, but given Kurzweil’s track record for predictions, some version of this potential future seems likely.

These two books, stunningly reimagined, are for readers who have been interested in AI but are unsure where to begin, for readers who have always been meaning to get around to reading Kurzweil, for the AI fanatics, for the AI sceptics, for fans of smart thinking non-fiction.

*Tim Cooke as quoted in ‘Introducing Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac’.

From the world's preeminent AI futurist: his radical and influential original vision of the shared destiny of humans and machines

The Singularity is Near
ISBN 9780715654521

‘Startling in scope and bravado’ The New York Times

In his now-classic and hugely influential exploration of the evolving union of human and machine, world-renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil foresees the dawning of a new civilisation where humans will transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity by combining our aptitudes with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing abilities of Artificial Intelligence. This melding of human and machine is what he terms ‘the singularity’.

How to Create a Mind
ISBN 9780715654538

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kurzweil sets out how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increased and evolving intelligence in addressing the world’s problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical – arguably inevitable – future of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating, aka ‘the singularity’.

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