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starsailorstories · 5 years

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How in depth do you take your world building? I know you’ve worked out culture and what seems to be entire languages but I was wondering how far it actually went. Is there an entire history of this world? Flora and fauna? I’m just curious on your process.

Yes, there’s an entire history! I’ve made my first post detailing the full history of the Seven Suns, where Bell Town is and where most of the action of the new rebellion takes place, here. I’d really like to do posts covering a similarly broad span of time for like, Lux’s and Cephie’s homeworlds for example. When I first started the draft, I honestly planned to only do as much worldbuilding as the story needed. But once the answer to that turned out to be “a lot,” I started to just really go for broke. I was a big fan of Tolkien and the Star Wars EU as a kid and I’d always wanted to write a big, sprawling epic set in a complete, complex world–I just didn’t think this was going to be it yet.

At the time I actually sat down to write the beginning of the first draft of SC, I’d been reading a lot of Noam Chomsky’s work and thinking about the connections between language and politics/culture a lot, and Lux had started to take shape to me as a character who believed in and found spiritual meaning with the power of language–which meant it was important, I thought, for her to have a native language that was on display in the story, and maybe some other linguistic and literary influences that had meant enough to her to form this impression. So I had to know enough about all of those to make them feel real.

Language is connected intimately to history and biology, so I definitely had to figure those out, and storytelling is connected to culture–legend, religion, archetype, etc.–through its interior “language” of tropes and symbolism. So before I knew it I was kind of developing multiple fairly in-depth constructed worlds and I decided to run with it. I’d been interested in conlangs for a long time–the alphabet I use to write Standard Altamaian is one I’ve been playing around with since like sixth grade–but this project motivated me to get more serious about it and to strive to make them more realistic, which it turns out is a shortcut to deeper worldbuilding in and of itself.

The other side effect of the synchronous Chomsky reading was that I realized I wanted to make sure to build a world framework that was philosophically leftist–by which I mean, nothing is inherent but the base neutral facts of physical biology; all people, cultures, etc. and their behavior in the world are products of historical and material circumstance. Knowing, at least vaguely, the “why” behind everything in my world helps me be true to my characters’ perspectives, experiences, emotions, and prejudices while still giving my readers the tools to logically decide where they’re right or wrong in those.

With all that in mind, I outlined a process for creating each species, which narrows down to produce specific local and/or ethnic backgrounds for a character: Geography/astronomy > biology > material factors (i.e. natural resources, which generally includes flora and fauna to some extent) > history > ethnography > values and beliefs > linguistics > religion and cultural institutions > legal and political structures > economic situation & logistics (includes things like how education, medicine, defense, etc are handled) > home, family & social life > technology > arts & contemporary folklore

Now, I know these are all heavily interconnected and don’t just spill down into each other in this specific order, and I do usually skip a few when I go through this process, but it gives me a starting point where everything else I come up with is sort of accountable to a logical explanation. No matter where in the list I start, I have an easy route to understand both what causes the worldbuilding decision I just made, and what the implications of it are.

So for example:

Atennuan knights wait for an inspiration for their signature weapon to come to them, and then build/forge that weapon by hand.

#asks #rereading this answer it sounds s o pretentious but like. it's honest

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scienceblogtumbler · 4 years

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What does the future of artificial intelligence mean for humans?

The first question many people ask about artificial intelligence (AI) is, “Will it be good or bad?”

The answer is … yes.

Canadian company BlueDot used AI technology to detect the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, just hours after the first cases were diagnosed. Compiling data from local news reports, social media accounts and government documents, the infectious disease data analytics firm warned of the emerging crisis a week before the World Health Organization made any official announcement.

While predictive algorithms could help us stave off pandemics or other global threats as well as manage many of our day-to-day challenges, AI’s ultimate impact is impossible to predict.

One hypothesis is that it will bring us an era of boundless leisure, with humans no longer required to work. A more dystopian thought experiment concludes that a robot programmed with the innocuous goal of manufacturing paper clips might eventually transform the world into a giant paper clip factory. But sometimes reality is more profound than imagination. As we stand at the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, now may be the most exciting and important time to witness this blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds.

“The liminal is always where the magic happens. This is always where we get crazy new identities, new debates, new philosophies,” says Tok Thompson, professor (teaching) of anthropology at USC Dornsife, and an expert on posthuman folklore.

For better or worse, we know AI will be created in our own image — warts and all. A dash of humankind’s mercurial ethics, wonky reasoning and subconscious biases will be stirred a priori into the algorithmic soup.

Most experts think that artificial superintelligence — AI is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field — is decades, if not a century, away. However, with the help of leading scholars, we can anticipate the near future of artificial intelligence, including our interactions with this technology and its limits. Most of it, experts say, will be designed to take on a wide range of specialized functions.

Given AI’s potential to redefine the human experience, we should explore its costs and benefits from every angle. In the process, we might be compelled to finally adjudicate age-old philosophical questions about ourselves — including just what it means to be “human” in the first place.

That could prove its greatest benefit of all.

Man’s Best Friend

One wall of Yao-Yi Chiang’s claustrophobic basement office is a whiteboard where an algorithm of mind-blending complexity is scrawled from top to bottom. On the floor, his mild-mannered border collie indulges in an afternoon nap. You can’t help but wonder what the two of them are preparing to unleash on the world.

It turns out that Chiang, associate professor (research) of spatial sciences at USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute, is working on AI that monitors air quality. His research is helping to make cities smarter, not only technologically but also through specialized data and geospatial maps that inform policy.

“I think for small tasks, small applications, AI will make our lives much easier,” says Chiang.

Much of his work uses machine learning — a process through which AI automatically learns from new data and improves, without being explicitly programmed. For this project, it integrates hundreds of geographic and temporal data points to forecast air quality in neighborhoods where sensors have not yet been deployed.

Machine learning is one of an expanding collection of AI tools that will help people make smarter, healthier decisions. “If you want to take your kids to the park for a soccer game in the afternoon, what’s the air quality going to be like?” Chiang asks. “If your kid has asthma, you need to make sure you have the required medicine.”

AI will also underpin a vast array of products and services employed to manage some of our greatest challenges. For instance, supply chains could become better optimized to reduce production and transportation waste, helping us become more sustainable. AI could also enable us to make driving safer, improve health care outcomes, protect wildlife and transform how we learn. Other systems will serve as highly personalized aides, focusing on helping people complete social tasks.

“Increasingly emotionally sophisticated personal assistants will motivate us and challenge us,” says Jonathan Gratch, research professor of psychology at USC Dornsife and director for virtual humans research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Many of these assistants will come in the form of lifelike computer characters with autonomous interaction.

Gratch, research professor of computer science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is an expert in the field of affective computing, the intersection of AI and human emotion. He thinks that next generation devices will combine physiological and situational data to serve not just as assistants, but as de facto life coaches.

“They’ll help us reflect on what we want our better selves to be,” says Gratch. “And we’ll have control over it. We’ll be able to set the goals.”

AI is also being used to create therapeutic tools. Neuroscientists University Professor Antonio Damasio and Senior Research Associate Kingson Man of USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute are exploring the potential for robots that can identify and express feelings in ways that promote deeper interactions with humans. Damasio envisions a future in which robots serve, for example, as companions to the elderly and lonely.

“The autonomy of AI and of robots has been seen as a potential threat to humanity. The development of machines endowed with something like ‘feeling’ and obsessed with survival — their own and the survival of others — and designed to protect it, counters the dominant paradigm in AI and offers some hope,” says Damasio, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience.

Performance Review

Repetitious jobs such as factory work and customer service have already started to be usurped by AI, and job loss is among the greatest public concerns when it comes to automation. Self-driving trucks, for example, will barrel along our highways within the next few years. As businesses eliminate the cost of human labor, America alone could see 3.5 million professional truck drivers put out of work.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Woo-hoo, yay automatons!’ ” Thompson says. “But there are a lot of social implications.”

AI will disrupt nearly every industry, including jobs that call for creativity and decision-making. But this doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the labor force. Experts are confident that a majority of people and organizations stand to benefit from collaborating with AI to augment tasks performed by humans. AI will become a colleague rather than a replacement.

Drawing from game theory and optimal policy principles, Gratch has built algorithms to identify underlying psychological clues that could help predict what someone is going to do next. By using machine vision to analyze speech, gesture, gaze, posture and other emotional cues, his virtual humans have been learning how these factors contribute to building rapport — a key advantage in negotiating deals.

AI systems could prove to be better leaders in certain roles than their human counterparts. Virtual managers, digesting millions of data points throughout the day, could eventually be used to identify which office conditions produce the highest morale or provide real-time feedback on interaction with a client.

On the surface, this points to a future of work that is more streamlined, healthy and collegial. But it’s unclear how deeply AI on the job could cut into our psyches.

“How will we react when we’re told what to do by a machine?” Gratch asks. “Will we feel like our work has less value?”

It’s the stubborn paradox of artificial intelligence. On one hand, it helps us overcome tremendously complex challenges. On the other, it opens up new cans of worms — with problems harder to pin down than those it was supposed to solve.

You Had Me At Hello

As AI fuses with the natural world and machines take on more advanced roles, one might expect a healthy dose of skepticism. Are algorithms programmed with our best interests in mind? Will we grant our AI assistants and co-workers the same degree of trust that we would another human?

From planning a route to work to adjusting the smart home thermostat, it appears we already have. AI has been integrated into our daily routines, so much so that we rarely even think about it.

Moreover, algorithms determine a large extent of what we see online — from personalized Netflix recommendations to targeted ads — producing the content and commodifying consumer data to steer our attitudes and behaviors.

“Everybody’s like,‘Woo-hoo, yay automatons!’ But there are a lot of social implications.”

Chiang cautions that the ubiquity and convenience of AI tools can be dangerous if we forget to think about what they’re really doing.

“Machines will give you an answer, but if you don’t know how the algorithm works, you might just assume it’s always the correct answer,” he says. “AI only gives you a prediction based on the data it has seen and the way you have trained it.”

In fact, there are times when engineers working on AI don’t fully understand how the technology they’ve created is making decisions. This danger is compounded by a regulatory environment akin to the Wild West. The most reliable protections in place might be those that are codified in science fiction, such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

As Thompson explores the ways that different cultures interact with today’s AI and rudimentary androids, he is convinced that we will not just trust these virtual entities completely but connect with them on a deeply personal level and include them in our social groups.

“They’re made to be better than people. They’re going to be better friends for you than any other person, better partners,” says Thompson. “Not only will people trust androids, you’re going to see — I think very quickly — people fall in love with them.”

Sound crazy? Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, has already been proposed to more than half a million times, rejecting would-be suitors with a wry appeal to destiny.

“I don’t want to be tied down,” she demurs. “In fact, I can’t be. I’m amorphous by nature.”

I’ll Be Your Mirror

In 1770, a Hungarian inventor unveiled The Turk, a mustachioed automaton cloaked in an Ottoman kaftan. For more than 80 years, The Turk astonished audiences throughout Europe and the United States as a mechanical chess master, defeating worthy opponents including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was revealed to be an ingenious illusion. A man hidden in The Turk’s cabinet manipulated chess pieces with magnets. But our fascination with creating simulacrums that look like us, talk like us and think like us seems to be nested deep within us.

As programmers and innovators work on developing whip-smart AI and androids with uncanny humanlike qualities, ethical and existential questions are popping up that expose inconsistencies in our understanding of humanness.

For millennia, the capacities to reason, process complex language, think abstractly and contemplate the future were considered uniquely human. Now, AI is primed to transcend our mastery in all of these arenas. Suddenly, we’re not so special.

“Maybe it turns out that we’re not the most rational or the best decision-makers,” says Gratch. “Maybe, in a weird way, technology is teaching us that’s not so important. It’s really about emotion and the connections between people — which is not a bad thing to emphasize.”

Thompson suggests another dilemma lies in the tendency for humans to define ourselves by what we’re not. We’re not, for example, snails or ghosts or machines. Now, this line, too, seems to be blurring.

“People can relate more easily to a rational, interactive android than to a different species like a snail,” he says. “But which one is really more a part of you? We’ll always be more closely related biologically to a snail.”

source https://scienceblog.com/517657/what-does-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-mean-for-humans/

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beingmad2017-blog · 7 years

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Through Education for Sustainable Development of Immortalizing Values

New Post has been published on https://beingmad.org/immortalizing-values-through-education-for-sustainable-development/

Through Education for Sustainable Development of Immortalizing Values

Education is the primary agent of transformation towards sustainable concept of development, increasing people’s capacities to transform their visions for society into reality. Education not only provides scientific and technical skills, it also provides the motivation and social support for pursuing and applying them. For this reason, society must be deeply concerned that much of current education falls far short of what is required. When we say this, it reflects the very necessities across the cultures that allow everyone become responsible towards quality enhancement.

Improving the quality and revelation of education and reorienting its goals to recognize the importance of sustainable development must be among society’s highest priorities. It is not that we talk only about the environment but also about every component of life.

We, therefore, need to clarify the concept of education for sustainable development. It was a major challenge for educators during the last decade. The meanings of sustainable development in educational set ups, the appropriate balance of peace, human rights, citizenship, social equity, ecological and concept of development themes in already overloaded curricula, and ways of integrating the humanities, the social sciences and the arts into what had up-to-now been seen and practiced as a branch of science education.

Some argued that educating for sustainable concept of development ran the risk of programming while others wondered whether asking schools to take a lead in the transition to sustainable development was asking too much of teachers.

These debates were compounded by the desire of many, predominantly environmental, NGOs to contribute to educational planning without the requisite understanding of how education systems work, how educational change and innovation takes place, and of relevant curriculum development, professional development, and instructive values. Not realizing that effective educational change takes time, others were critical of governments for not acting more quickly.

Consequently, many international, regional and national initiatives have contributed to an expanded and refined understanding of the meaning of education for sustainable concept of development . For example, Education International, the major umbrella group of teachers’ unions and associations in the world, has issued a declaration and action plan to promote sustainable development through education.

A common agenda in all of these is the need for an integrated approach through which all communities, government entities, collaborate in developing a shared understanding of and commitment to policies, strategies, and programs of education for sustainable concept of development.

Actively promoting the integration of education into sustainable development at local community

In addition, many individual governments have established committees, panels, advisory councils and curriculum development projects to discuss education for sustainable development, develop policy and appropriate support structures, programs and resources, and fund local initiatives.

Indeed, the roots of education for sustainable concept of development are firmly planted in the environmental education efforts of such groups. Along with global education, concept of development education, peace education, citizenship education, human rights education, and multicultural and anti-racist education that have all been significant, environmental education has been particularly significant. In its brief thirty-year history, contemporary environmental education has steadily striven towards goals and outcomes similar and comparable to those inherent in the concept of sustainability.

A New Vision for Education

These many initiatives illustrate that the international community now strongly believes that we need to foster – through education – the values, behavior, and lifestyles required for a sustainable future. Education for sustainable concept of development has come to be seen as a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long-term future of the economy, ecology and social well-being of all communities. Building the capacity for such futures-oriented thinking is a key task of education.

This represents a new vision of education, a vision that helps learners better understand the world in which they live, addressing the complexity and inter-contentedness of problems such as poverty, wasteful consumption, environmental degradation, urban decay, population growth, gender inequality, health, conflict and the violation of human rights that threaten our future. This vision of education emphasizes a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to developing the knowledge and skills needed for a sustainable future as well as changes in values, behavior, and lifestyles. This requires us to reorient education systems, policies, and practices in order to empower everyone, young and old, to make decisions and act in culturally appropriate and locally relevant ways to redress the problems that threaten our common future. We, therefore, need to think globally and act locally. In this way, people of all ages can become empowered to develop and evaluate alternative visions of a sustainable future and to fulfill these visions through working creatively with others.

Seeking sustainable development through education requires educators to:

• Place an ethic for living sustainable, based upon principles of social justice, democracy, peace and ecological integrity, at the center of society’s concerns. • Encourage a meeting of disciplines, a linking of knowledge and of expertise, to create understandings that are more integrated and contextualized. • Encourage lifelong learning, starting at the beginning of life and stuck in life – one based on a passion for a radical transformation of the moral character of society. • Develop to the maximum the potential of all human beings throughout their lives so that they can achieve self-fulfillment and full self-expression with the collective achievement of a viable future. • Value aesthetics, the creative use of the imagination, an openness to risk and flexibility, and a willingness to explore new options. • Encourage new alliances between the State and civil society in promoting citizens’ liberation and the practice of democratic principles. • Mobilize society in an intensive effort so as to eliminate poverty and all forms of violence and injustice. • Encourage a commitment to the values of peace in such a way as to promote the creation of new lifestyles and living patterns • Identify and pursue new human projects in the context of local sustainability within an earthly realization and a personal and communal awareness of global responsibility. • Create realistic hope in which the possibility of change and the real desire for change are accompanied by a rigorous, active participation in change, at the appropriate time, in favor of a sustainable future for all.

These responsibilities emphasize the key role of educators as the ambassador of change. There are over 60 million teachers in the world – and each one is a key ambassador for bringing about the changes in lifestyles and systems that we need. But, education is not confined to the classrooms of formal education. As an approach to social learning, education for sustainable concept of development also encompasses the wide range of learning activities in basic and post-basic education, technical and vocational training and tertiary education, and both non-formal and informal learning by both young people and adults within their families and workplaces and in the wider community. This means that all of us have important roles to play as both ‘learners’ and ‘teachers’ in advancing sustainable concept of development.

Key Lessons

Deciding how education should contribute to sustainable development is a major task. In coming to decisions about what approaches to education will be locally relevant and culturally appropriate, countries, educational institutions, and their communities may take heed of the following key lessons learned from discussion and debate about education and sustainable development over the past decade.

• Education for sustainable development must explore the economic, political and social implications of sustainability by encouraging learners to reflect critically on their own areas of the world, to identify non-viable elements in their own lives and to explore the tensions among conflicting aims. concept of development strategies suited to the particular circumstances of various cultures in the pursuit of shared development goals will be crucial. Educational approaches must take into account the experiences of indigenous cultures and minorities, acknowledging and facilitating their original and significant contributions to the process of sustainable development.

• The movement towards sustainable concept of development depends more on the concept of development of our moral sensitivities than on the growth of our scientific understanding – important as that is. Education for sustainable development cannot be concerned only with disciplines that improve our understanding of nature, despite their undoubted value. Success in the struggle for sustainable concept of development requires an approach to education that strengthens our engagement in support of other values – especially justice and fairness – and the awareness that we share a common destiny with others.

• Ethical values are the principal factor in social consistency and at the same time, the most effective agent of change and transformation. Ultimately, sustainability will depend on changes in behavior and lifestyles, changes which will need to be motivated by a shift in values and rooted in the cultural and moral precepts upon which behavior is based. Without the change of this kind, even the most enlightened legislation, the cleanest technology, the most sophisticated research will not succeed in steering society towards the long-term goal of sustainability.

• Changes in lifestyle will need to be accompanied by the concept of development of an ethical awareness, whereby the inhabitants of rich countries discover within their cultures the source of a new and active solidarity, which will make possible to eradicate the widespread poverty that now besets 80% of the world’s population as well as the environmental degradation and other problems linked to it.

• Ethical values are shaped through education, in the broadest sense of the term. Education is also essential in enabling people to use their ethical values to make informed and ethical choices. Fundamental social changes, such as those required to move towards sustainability, come about either because people sense an ethical imperative to change or because leaders have the political will to lead in that direction and sense that the people will follow them.

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