Proposal for a LEGO memorial for the Christchurch Mosque Shooting victims.
On Friday March 15th 2019 New Zealand experienced its biggest terrorist attack in Christchurch that took the lives of 50 people. The loss to their families and their community is indescribable. It is our responsibility to pay respect to the victims, their families and their communities. Moreover, we must take action to prevent that such an event will ever happen again.
For this purpose we propose to build a memorial exhibit for the Christchurch Brick Show. The exhibit will consist of two parts.
Matt Matt Groening’s new show Disenchantment is entertaining and one of my favourite characters is Luci, Princess Bean’s personal demon spoken by Eric Andre. So I created a little t-shirt for you to enjoy. You can order it over at Threadless.
I started to play Detroit – Becoming Human and the start of the game introduces us to a world in which most of the work is done by androids. The designers paid attention to portraying every day life with androids. They show androids in the roles of care taker, cleaner, construction worker, but also as a companion. Many humans are without a job but still enjoy an android cleaning their mess. Of course this whole setup is a typical in-out-group setup. But if this is the future we are working towards then we will also have to address these questions. What if there is no more work left for humans? What if we like interacting with androids more than with other humans? Here are some of my highlights of everyday life in the game so far:
Android Parking
Android compartment in the back of the bus
The androids have to enter the public bus at the rear and are standing in a segregated compartment that is divided by a glass wall. This is of course a reference to Rosa Park who refused to give put her seat in the colored section of a bus for a white person in 1955.
An article on how autonomous cars make life and death decisions
The game features an article on how autonomous vehicles make life and death decisions by considering a wealth of background information to calculate the value of a person.
When a driverless vehicle foresees an accident, the car’s computer makes life and death decisions – for example deciding which of two pedestrians to hit. But the exact process by which cars make these decisions is not very well understood.
Martin Forlong, of CrowneCars, tries to clarify: “In these situations, the car’s imaging system gathers data to determine, the pedestrian’s age, gender, life Expectancy, etc, in the blink of an eye.” Thisdata is parsed through the public I record “to determine marital status, employment record, life expectancy and whether they have children.” The car then assigns a ‘value’ to each possible victim based on criteria like their contribution to society: “we put a premium on lives that will save other lives, like doctors and nurses.”
All this may sound very reasonable. But Felix Gamble, head of Anti-Automation League (AAL) says the system has no rights to make such judgements: “Somebody with a criminal record is not necessarily less I valuable to society than a doctor. That kind of information is irrelevant to the sanctity of human life.”
But Forlong dismisses such claims: “We want our cars to make the best possible i choices, and that means acting on the basis of all the information they can gather. The more, the better.”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is arguably the most widely read philosophy book of all times. Since its first release in 1974 it has been printed by many publishers. Here is a list of all the editions that I could find. Rest in peace, Robert.
With great sadness I became aware today that Robert M. Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals” died today. He was and always will be a personal hero for me. His work inspired some of my own articles. Robert, you will be greatly missed and I wished you had written more.