Hi everyone! Here's a link to the Google Drive folder that contains the photos of our blackboard notes from today's group discussion on the various Week 13 readings. Anyone with a @newschool.edu email address should be able to open this folder. I am trying to upload these photos directly to the AfterlifeArt blog, but the photo upload is [...]
Danielle Duemesi A City Without Us, a piece by Alan Weisman, details the deterioration of New York when it becomes absent of human life. I will admit that on reading this piece, there were some bits about New York I didn’t know about. There’s a lot of maintenance to retain a city structure. What shocked [...]
“Life Boat’ claims itself to be a "nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity”. While first exploring its website, I was struck as to how similar it looked to websites pertaining to [...]
Our first question that we asked Eric was concerning the social sciences. We asked what role the social sciences should have in surviving and preventing existential risks of destruction. Are we doing enough right now? What could be different? What Eric said was that we should be publishing more studies and publicizing more studies about [...]
Eric Klien Interview write-up: Group 6: Ousmane, Armando, and Oscar -- Our group asked two questions of Eric Klien. The first was whether he thought that the Lifeboat Foundation was constructing problems that aren’t yet real. In other words, we wondered if making disaster plans for an imagined problem works to create the problem in [...]
November 13th, 2018 Dani D, Dani G, Elsie, and Meredith In today’s class, speaker Eric Klien spoke about Bioterrorism through the lens of the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza Pandemic and the ability to reproduce the H1N1 virus in order to enact biological terrorism on a population, as well as potential government involvement. In order to [...]
Erik Klien, Chairman and Founder of Lifeboat Foundation thinks that the key to developing ideal, responsible AI is empathy, and creating empathetic robots. Such an emphasis on empathy is perhaps ironic, as the organization's emphasis on "existential risks" may be understood as disregarding the many local-terminal risks that have been and continue to be realized [...]
Group Post November 7, 2018 Elsie, Danielle G., Danielle D., Meredith In what ways can indigenous knowledge systems be utilized in “climate justice” and environmental restoration efforts? Professor Helland provided our class with an excellent resource, an online publication called Alaska Native Knowledge Network — http://ankn.uaf.edu/index.html. This website provides a compilation of materials [...]
Responding to a line of Kyle Whyte thinking, which frames contemporary environmental collapse as an experience of déjà vu for many Indigenous peoples who have endured centuries of colonial violence, Dr. Leonardo Figueroa Helland asserted, “it’s already been the end of times.” 500 years of the end of times. Such a framing begins to convey [...]
11/6/18 Charlie Magun Sintra Martins Milagros Hadad Daryl Pazer (Absent) Our beginning questions that we would like to ask Leonardo Figueroa Helland: Have there been any efforts (specifically in New York) to reform agriculture with indigenous knowledge or practices? Is Helland optimistic? What are his takeaways from his research? Could the United States incentivize [...]
