Humanities & Cultures

‘Fredbot’ is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko’s voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list goes on.

These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters and popularity of large language models increase and as personal data expands into the seeming permanence of the cloud. To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these representations? How do we understand chatbots that seem to misrepresent the past? But for us, the deepest concerns relate to how these bots might affect our relationship to the dead. Are they artificial replacements that merely paper over our grief? Or is there something distinctively valuable about chatting with a simulation of the dead?

Although chatbots have been around for a long time, chatbots of the dead are a relatively new innovation made possible by recent advances in programming techniques and the proliferation of personal data. On a basic level, these chatbots are created by combining machine learning with personal writing, such as text messages, emails, letters and journals, which reflect a person’s distinctive diction, syntax, attitudes and quirks. There are various ways this combination can be achieved. One resource-intensive method involves creating a new chatbot by training a language model on someone’s personal writing. A technically simpler method involves instructing a pretrained chatbot, like ChatGPT, to utilise personal data that is inserted into the context window of a conversation. Both methods enable a chatbot to speak in ways that resemble a dead person by ‘selectively’ outputting statements the person actually wrote, ‘generatively’ producing novel statements that bear some resemblance to statements the person actually wrote, or some combination of both.

Chatbots can be used on their own or combined with other forms of AI, such as voice cloning and deepfakes, to create interactive representations of the dead. When provided with the right data, many companies and platforms now have the technical capacity to generate a conversational AI version of your deceased loved one. In the future, these chatbots will likely become more common and sophisticated, involving much more than just text. Like human mediums and Ouija boards, these bots appear to meet one of our deepest desires: to speak with the dead once again.

Many critics view this technological endeavour as an especially abject form of death denial. A common objection to these bots is that emotionally vulnerable users may become so invested in their interactions that they will conflate their chatbot with the deceased person, or lose sight of the fact that the person is gone. As the philosopher Patrick Stokes puts it in Digital Souls (2021), we may ‘become so used to avatars of the dead that we accept and treat them as if they’re the dead themselves.’ This sort of worry suggests, as Weizenbaum feared, that the salutary potential of chatbots is based in delusional thinking.

Another worry relates to chatbots’ lack of inner lives. Critics, like the philosopher Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror (2024), argue that there is something defective about emotional bonds with entities that cannot reciprocate affection or interest, about love that is kept alive by ‘the economic rationality of exchange’ rather than a more precarious ‘union of loving feeling and action’. And these emotionally one-sided relationships create a risk of over-reliance, social isolation and exploitation. This risk is especially stark given that chatbots of the dead may be produced by companies with a financial incentive to manipulate users and maximise engagement. A chatbot of the dead that is highly monetised (unlock your chatbot’s ‘caring’ traits for a small fee!) or gamified (chat every day to level up!) could be a dangerous tool in the hands of an unscrupulous corporation.'

A discerning user should view chatbots similarly. Depending on how they are designed, chatbots can represent a person in many ways. The assumption that a chatbot delivers – or seeks to deliver – an authoritative replication of a deceased person makes as much sense as the assumption that an actor’s portrayal of a historical figure in a drama represents the sole faithful depiction of that figure. Just as the inspiration for a historical character may come from various sources, our personal data flows from different aspects of our identities. People do not really speak in a single voice: most people are different on social media than they are in text messages, for example. There is no one way to design a chatbot ‘actor’ because there is no best or definitive perspective on a person, no best or definitive fictional world in which to encounter someone’s legacy. There are countless useful, informative, intriguing, funny, strange, beautiful perspectives that a chatbot ‘actor’ might stage, just as there are countless ways a human actor can play a role, a writer compose a memoir, or a portraitist paint a picture.

Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future, or that the future moves only in the direction of greater destruction, then we are still imagining something, even if it is a dark picture, one that shows no signs of hope. If we are imagining a fatal conclusion, we are still imagining.

When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world, or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself. That is surely something difficult, if not impossible for the imagination to do. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one is tracking. Tracking fatality is still anticipating, and that assumes a form, whether a picture, a sequence of associations, a cluster of images, a story yet to be narrated about history unfolding, or the new landscapes now lay before us.

If we have an image or story to communicate or we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak. No one is predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us most concerned.

And so, we find that what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to an everyday form of conjecturing, one that informs the fear we feel and the imagining we do. All this happens not only inside the mind, but in the modalities and objects through which fearing and imagining take place: specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media. These are not simply vehicles for preformed thought, but formative powers in themselves.

A large mural of a teacup decorated with a green flower bursts off the white wall on the ground floor of a tall apartment building in the Kebun Baru area of Singapore. A bowl with a rooster adorns another building nearby. Up the street, another tower features a candy with a white rabbit on the wrapper.

The paintings are more than street art. These 10 murals — each depicting a distinctive Singaporean food-related item — are helping residents with dementia find their way home.

More than 80 percent of Singapore residents over the age of 65 live in public housing blocks like these. But, as the social service agency Dementia Singapore heard from locals in Kebun Baru, the uniform, whitewashed design of the ground floors made it difficult for residents with dementia to get around. Dementia — a family of conditions that impact cognitive function, including Alzheimer’s disease — changes how people are able to navigate even familiar areas, and can impair their ability to read information like numbers.

There's a reason I'm networking instead of job searching.

[...]As I've written before, it's becoming more and more clear that schools must become beacons of resiliency in every community in the midst of a climate disaster. And that includes everyday climate disasters, too. It's why our schoolyards need cisterns for capturing stormwater and bioswales to remediate urban runoff and microforests to protect neighborhoods from extreme heat.

Although public schools are chronically underfunded, we do actually have money to make these changes now. The two school bond measures that voters approved in November — one for the state, one for LAUSD — will funnel billions into facility upgrades. This week, LAUSD announced funding for new climate adaptation projects, including updates to emergency procedures. Hopefully that means throwing away the outdated manual and writing a new one. Parents near burn areas aren't getting good answers about how schools are being cleaned and tested for reopening. I spoke with one parent at Paul Revere Middle School, which is about a half-mile from the Palisades Fire perimeter. Upon returning to a school they were assured was safe, students found ash in their lockers. I'm also getting questions about how soils, sand, and garden beds should be cleaned and tested in schoolyards and playgrounds. Providing this guidance immediately should have been a priority for school board members.

What does better preparedness look like? Diagnostic tests ready on day one. Universal healthcare (perhaps at state or local levels). Vaccine innovations and new drugs against the families of viruses that pose pandemic threats. In its final days, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded $590 million to mRNA biotech company Moderna to fast-track bird flu vaccines.

The thing about outbreak response policies is that they look somewhat like prevention when executed well. Aside from vaccines, it looks like paid sick leave for everyone, especially people who work with wild animals, livestock, and labs surveilling disease outbreaks; government access to farms and protections for whistleblowers.

Factory farming drives disease outbreaks by intensely confining animals that have a greater tendency to become infected, combined with incentives for farmers to keep sick and vulnerable animals alive with drugs. Researchers have called this “the infectious disease trap” and it applies to pandemic pathogens, too, according to Carlson.

“The majority of biomass, the majority of animal biomass on this planet is not wildlife anymore — it's livestock,” Carlson said. While it is possible to reduce meat consumption, factory farming likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

To this end, labor unions are an underrecognized avenue for pandemic preparedness. After COVID-19 decimated meatpacking plants in 2020, unions negotiated protections with employers that continue today. By union protections, meat workers should have access to personal protective equipment like boots, sleeves, masks, and goggles as fears of bird flu plague farms, plants, and “live hangs,” according to Mark Lauritsen, international VP and director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing division. (However, dairy workers have become infected by bird flu on farms where employers do not provide P.P.E., according to reporting by Amy Maxmen.)

Today, several major meatpacking companies offer up to 20 hours of paid sick leave — more than they did pre-COVID-19, thanks to union negotiations. Those negotiations provide 4 hours for every 400 hours worked in states without more required leave; the union “would like it to be more hours,” Lauritsen added.

When I was studying Spanish in middle school, it was odd to me that a language could just, you know, drop subjects via conjugation. But I find myself increasingly dropping them, as they're understood.

A lot of communication these days is looking more imperative without necessarily being so.

Descriptivism is fun!

Although Mondays at the Margaret Walker Alexander Library in Jackson, Miss., are usually reserved for story time, these students were in for a special treat: a music lesson and performance by the longtime librarian and cellist.

On this December day, the librarian sat atop a wooden chair with her hair tucked away and wrapped in black cloth. She held her large string instrument upright by her side, and a book of sheet music sat fixed upon a black, tripod stand.

As the children’s murmuring faded, Olugbala’s lesson began.

After obtaining her degree from USM, she started a full-time position in the school’s library and worked her way to a supervisory role. “I’ve gone from periodicals to circulation, which is mainly just checking out books,” she said.

About six years ago, she found her way to the Jackson-Hinds Library System. Every week, through story times, sewing classes or chess club, she pours into Jackson’s youth and hopes to spark their own love of music and literature. Libraries, she explained, are “an integral part of education and culture.”

“The library is a repository of the hopes, dreams and understandings of a people,” she added.

A global ban on chewing it was implemented through the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1964, leaving coca under such a restrictive drug control regime that researchers even today often find it impossible to source the understudied leaves.

Similar paternalistic calls would attempt to justify the later global drug war. But 75 years on from the UN’s first diktats on coca, the organization’s health authority is set to publish its “critical” health review of the evidence underpinning the Schedule I status of the mildly stimulating, medicinal plant—rich in calcium and iron—after requests from Bolivia and Colombia to end its international prohibition.

Indigenous advocates have been prominent in building momentum for those countries—coca is already legal in Bolivia; in Colombia, consumption is only permitted within Indigenous communities—to make that request. “This is a David and Goliath battle against colonialism,” David Curtidor, director of indigenous-owned coca beer company Coca Nasa, told the Times of London in September. “We’re saying enough is enough.”

But change may be on the horizon. The WHO review could potentially lead the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to recommend a reduction in the classification of coca, from which both cocaine and Coca-Cola derive key ingredients, under drug control treaties—or even decriminalization.

Tourism numbers are sky-high in Japan. The country saw record numbers of travelers throughout 2024, and government officials are hoping to see the numbers double by 2030. But workers are in short supply. So, to adapt to the tourism boom, Japan is turning to everything from robot hotel receptionists to contactless restaurants.

These robots and screens aren’t meant to be a gimmick, or to show off the country’s tech niche. Rather, they’re a symptom of Japan’s unique economic situation. The country is facing a declining birth rate and an aging population, with the latest government figures showing that people 65 years or older account for nearly 30% of Japan’s population. To fill the consumption gap, the country is working to lure in tourists. And with fewer workers, the country is turning to more automated systems for backup.

“Japanese society, in the long term, is shrinking,” said Masamichi Ishikura, a deputy director at the Japan Tourism Agency. “So, we need to bring in more tourism to revitalize the local economies.”

To do so, the country is partnering with content creators on social media platforms like TikTok, with videos about experiences you can only get in Japan. And the push is working.

A new policy from the D66 liberal democrats proposes giving all children in the Dutch capital access to outdoor play areas to climb, play with water and fire, sword-fight with sticks, build with hammers, rope or knives, wrestle and fall. “Rufty-tufty playing means that children might get a bump or a cut,” according to the policy – but it’s an acceptable risk, they say.

“The inspiration, and it really is a huge problem, is that children are hardly moving,” said Rob Hofland, head of the local D66 and proud uncle of tree-climbing children. “All kinds of problems stem from just sitting behind a screen. We see increasing numbers of burnouts and we are learning ever more about how unhealthy it is that the Dutch – the sitting champions of Europe – are so sedentary. Things need to change, and it starts young.”

Although the number of overweight children is relatively stable in the Netherlands, at 17%, the figure rises to a 25% for 18- to 24-year-olds. There has been an “alarming” increase in childhood diabetes, according to the Diabetes Fonds, while motor skills have declined so much that many children can no longer catch a ball.

A survey last year from Jantje Beton, which campaigns for outdoor play space, suggested the number of Dutch children playing alone outside without adult supervision plummeted from 25% in 2022 to 13% last year. Almost half play more indoors, compared with a third before the Covid pandemic.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18167942

Archived

For the past few decades, China has boasted about its population as its defining strength for economic advancement and consolidating its global influence. But now the tides are turning.

[...]

China is grappling with a rapidly aging population that poses serious social and economic challenges. By 2050, the elderly (60 and above) will make up 33% of the population, up from 12% in 2010, making it the oldest population in the world. This shift drives healthcare costs and dependency ratios while creating labor shortages. These shortages are raising wages, which undermines the country’s economic competitiveness. Compounding the issue, China is aging relatively lowly, complicating its transition to a high-income economy.

The One-Child Policy has played a significant role in this crisis, leaving China with a “top-heavy" population pyramid where older generations outnumber younger ones. Fewer young people mean fewer caregivers for the elderly, both within families and the healthcare sector, and a shrinking workforce to sustain the economy. Gender imbalance is another consequence. Decades of sex-selective abortions and infanticide have led to 35 million more men than women, making it difficult for many men to marry and have children. Studies also indicate that the generation of only-child boys often faces behavioral issues, showing less trust, competitiveness, and conscientiousness compared to peers.

The economic implications are severe. A shrinking workforce slows growth and reduces tax revenues, while an expanding elderly population drives up pension costs. To manage this, China has increased the retirement age—from 60 to 63 for men, 55 to 58 for white-collar women, and 50 to 55 for blue-collar women. These changes aim to ease the strain on pensions but don’t fully resolve the challenges posed by a rapidly aging and shrinking population.

[...]

Colonialists did what colonialists do. They came, they claimed, they took what they wanted and they moved on. They left behind pieces of their sunken ships, and the new names they gave these old places — the same places Hawaiians had frequented for hundreds of years before Westerners arrived, places for which they had their own names, preserved in chants passed down through generations.

But the times are changing with a movement to restore the original names of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which since 2006 have been protected as part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

It began from the ground up, according to Randy Kosaki, the monument’s deputy superintendent for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A handful of Native Hawaiian scientists started using the original Hawaiian names for these islands in their research papers, and it’s caught on.

Now, federal agencies like NOAA print maps with both Hawaiian and Western names. Pearl and Hermes Atoll is also labeled as Manawai, French Frigate Shoals as Lalo, Necker as Mokumanamana.

On NOAA’s most recent research expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the mix of scientists from Hawaiʻi and the mainland almost exclusively used the Hawaiian names when discussing where they were diving and surveying the reefs. That wasn’t the case on trips even a few years earlier.

The nonprofit organization now overseeing global Little Free Libraries finds the nonbook knockoffs “fun and flattering,” communications director Margret Aldrich says in an email. (She also notes “Little Free Library” is a trademarked name, requiring permission if used for money or “in an organized way.”)

Some libraries stress fundamental needs: A recently established Little Free Failure of Capitalism in South Seattle provides feminine products, soap, chargers, even Narcan. A Columbia City Little Free Pantry established by personal chef Molly Harmon grew into a statewide network for neighbors supporting neighbors.

Others are about the little things: Yarn. Jigsaw puzzles and children’s toys. Keychains (one keychain library in Hillman City has a TikTok account delighting 8,000+ followers). A Little Free Nerd Library holds Rubik’s Cubes and comic books.

Regardless of where each library falls on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they stand on common ground. “There’s a line from [Khalil] Gibran: ‘Work is love made visible,’ ” Little Library Guy says in a phone call. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re showing that they love the community by doing something for them.”

This gets a bit into the linguistic weeds, and if you're familiar with Dutch or High German, the errors are somewhat comical, especially with SVO vs. SOV. But overall an interesting exploration and distraction.

[...]coyote time makes me think of teaching and learning. It makes me think of all the times we demand precision from students – both in terms of timing and performance. It makes me think of how it would feel for students to have grace windows and large error bars in acceptable performance. It makes me think of the many students who, when they try to run and jump, instead fall into a pit of spikes because they were just a little off.

Celeste is still a very challenging game, but by adding in coyote time (and many other forgiveness mechanics like it), the developers keep it from feeling frustrating and punishing. This is what I hope our courses strive for: stretching students and challenging them without arbitrarily punishing them for not being perfect.

This is a delicate balance to achieve. In moments of tension between challenge and forgiveness, I tend to prefer forgiveness. After all, tolerance for error is one of the key tenets of Universal Design. However, I think games can teach us a lot about how to design experiences that are challenging and yet still work to minimize the consequences of errors, mistakes, and imperfections.

In this post, I’ll explore a few other forgiveness-adjacent game mechanics similar to coyote time. I won’t be suggesting specific teaching practices. Rather, I’ll discuss what I think these mechanics illuminate about the experience of playing a challenging yet forgiving game. By looking outside the world of teaching and learning for inspiration, I hope that we can think creatively about how to create the best possible experience for students. While I may mention a few teaching practices that come to mind, I will mostly be leaving the connections to you, dear reader.

Let’s dive in.

Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.

First, this seemed to be the best community to place this. Second, this is an older article [February 2024] but it is very interesting nonetheless.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, cultural life in Russia has endured a new wave of censorship. The government bans not only works of art — films, plays, songs — but also the artists themselves. Literature, of course, is no exception. The Russian authorities have designated writers as “foreign agents” and “terrorists,” charging them with felonies and ordering their books pulled from the shelves in stores and libraries. Many have been forced to leave the country or cease public activities.

Abroad, this has led to the revival of tamizdat: several new publishing houses [...] are releasing books that cannot be printed in Russia. Despite these challenges, work that tackles today’s reality is still being written and sold in Russia. This includes books about what has upended Russian society in recent years: the war in Ukraine. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova explores how this remains possible.

[...]

Officially, there’s no censorship in Russia. However, there are prohibited subjects designated in a growing body of laws adopted by the federal government.

• “You can’t talk about war — no matter which war it is,” says Z., the editor-in-chief of a publishing house. “Even with the Great Patriotic War [the Soviet fronts of the Second World War], you can’t say anything unless it’s praising the heroic deeds of Russian and Soviet soldiers.”
• “Anything at all can be labeled as [LGBTQ+] propaganda,” says E., an editor at a publishing house, explaining that an entire print run can be pulled because of a secondary character who “acts flamboyantly” or says something like, “My parents will never accept my choice.”
• “If characters smoke weed and don’t shout about how disgusting it is and all die before the page ends, you risk getting flagged for [drug] propaganda,” adds editor I.

[...]

Doctors said for Kilmartin to qualify for a kidney transplant, he’d have to lose 100 pounds, and obey a strict diet, one with hard-to-understand restrictions about components like phosphates and phosphorus. Too drained to cook, too overwhelmed by the cost of relying exclusively on takeout, and feeling guilty about burdening his worried wife, he turned to MANNA, the 35-year-old nonprofit that provides free, medically-tailored meals (MTMs) and education about how nutrition affects health conditions to Philadelphians who need it.

MANNA’s positive impact is more than anecdotal. Last month, the journal BMC Nutrition released research by The MANNA Institute, the research arm of MANNA, showing that its clients achieved a “significant decrease in malnutrition risk” and meaningful changes in conditions like diabetes and hypertension. ​​”This is the first of its kind,” explains Jule Anne Henstenburg, PhD, director of The MANNA Institute. “There has never been research involving an in-depth evaluation of a functioning medically tailored meal program.”

Among other compelling findings: Of the clients at risk for malnutrition when starting the program, 56 percent experienced a clinically significant reduction in malnutrition risk by program finish; 62 percent of clients with hypertension reduced their blood pressure by five or more units; among clients with diabetes, median hemoglobin A1C dropped from 8.3 percent to 7.7 percent, indicating improved blood sugar control. Body mass index (BMI) remained stable or decreased for 88 percent of clients who started the program with obesity.

The documentary and its accompanying book, New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora (2024), rewrites the narrative of Vietnamese Americans after the war in advance of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Western popular culture has historically represented the Vietnamese people as either victims (refugees from the South) or enemies (communists from the North), gangsters or model minorities, leaving little room for nuance in depicting the experience of the over 45 million people who were forced to flee their home country. For refugees born in Vietnam who came to the United States between the ages of five and 12, or the so-called “1.5 Generation,” music allowed an escape from the binary between home and school, where they were pressured to uphold Vietnamese traditions and assimilate into American culture simultaneously.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.