Tag: ethics

Ethics of waste; and Stable Diffusion

Today was the start of a new ethics topic for my online lesson: Waste. I wrote my lesson plan this morning, and did the first three classes tonight. It runs through a series of questions for the kids on: how we handle our waste, is it ever okay to litter, is it okay that some people make a living by waste picking, what can or should governments do to encourage/force people to produce less waste, and whether the global waste trade is okay or not. Towards the end we talk about whose responsibility it is to ensure that toxic waste (including domestic toxic waste such as batteries) is handled correctly, and then talk about nuclear waste. I leave them to think about the problem of designing effective long-term nuclear waste warning messages for future civilisations.

Also today I signed up for another AI art generation application: Stable Diffusion. I spent a bunch of my free credits experimenting with it, and I think I’m of the opinion that it’s not as good as DALL-E, at least for generating the sort of medieval fantasy scenes that I’ve been trying to produce these past few days. No matter what prompt I tried, I simply could not get Stable Diffusion to generate a picture of a castle drawbridge.

New content today:

Another exhausting Wednesday

Wednesday starts early with getting up in time to have breakfast and be ready to head to the school for my Primary Ethics lesson. There was heavier than normal traffic today getting there, because of combined train and bus strikes – but fortunately I was going against most of the traffic. The road going the other direction was chockablock with cars.

Today we discussed various rules in sports and whether changing some of them would be fair or unfair, or make the sport unsafe. This leads into next week when we start talking about cheating in sports. Then this evening I had three more online classes about bionics.

On the way home from the school I popped into a bulk foods shop to get some more rye flour, for use in baking sourdough. The woman at the checkout actually asked me if I was making sourdough with it, and I said, “Yes!”

Much of the rest of the day I struggled with writer’s block while trying to write a new Darths & Droids comic. And that… yeah… that consumed several hours. I got there in the end, thankfully.

New content today:

Six Million Dollar ethics lesson

Today I worked on the lesson for my new week’s ethics topic: Bionics. I decided to open by telling the kids about this “old” TV show from the 1970s: The Six Million Dollar Man. After all these years, and the fact that I only ever watched the show as a young kid, I still remember the words of that opening sequence. Hopefully I can pass some knowledge of it on to another generation!

We talk about the idea of giving people artificial limbs if they lose their natural ones in an accident or to disease. I mention that historically prosthetic limbs were fairly crude replacements, but now we can make some that are potentially better than natural limbs. I give the example of Oscar Pistorius who, after a legal battle to be allowed to compete, qualified for the 2012 London Olympics, and ran on his prosthetic legs against able-bodied athletes in the 400 metres. In the first three classes this evening, the students have been split on whether he should have been allowed or not, worried that his carbon fibre running legs might give him an unfair advantage.

Pistorius of course later became notorious for murdering his wife, but I don’t mention that. One of the kids in my last class was South African, and when I showed a photo of Pistorius he said, “Oh, he’s from my country!” I asked him if he knew about Oscar Pistorius, but he said no, he just recognised the athletics uniform. So I presume he didn’t know about the murder part.

We conclude by discussing whether it would be okay to give people prosthetic limbs or other parts that are better, stronger than natural human body parts. And if so, would it be okay for people to have healthy body parts removed in order to have stronger prosthetics attached? This question really split the kids! In my final class tonight two of them were adamant that this should not be allowed, while two thought it was fine if that’s what the person wanted.

In other news today, I took Scully for a lunchtime walk down to a waterside park, picking up some fish & chips on the way. I didn’t go to my normal lookout spot, because it was rather warm today – 24°C – and there’s little shade there. This other park has a lovely shaded bench looking out over the water.

New content today:

Drugs in sport Wednesday

This morning was Primary Ethics at the school. I started a new topic this week: Drugs in Sport. This is one of my favourite topics, because it really gets the kids thinking. They all start with the simple idea that performance-enhancing drugs in sport are bad, but then we very carefully pick that apart and examine where that opinion comes from, and why, and how well supported it is by rational thought in the context of all the other things that athletes do and the technology they use to gain advantages. By the end of it (the topic is 4 weeks long!), the kids have a much better appreciation for the nuances around the whole area of fair play and cheating in sport.

I dragged myself out for some sport myself, doing a 2.5k run after lunch. It was tough because it was very cold today. The storm and cold front that hit yesterday brought a real Antarctic blast from the south. We had snow on the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. Even a dusting is a rare event, but this was heavy enough to close both of the roads across the mountains.

Here in Sydney the temperature sank to 7°C and stayed there until a couple of hours after sunrise, with the wind chill bringing the apparent temperature as low as -0.3°C.

Tonight I made soup for dinner: pumpkin, potato, and bunya nut.

Pumpkin, potato, bunya nut soup

Nice and warming! (Served with a blob of sour cream.)

New content today:

Surprise twins

Wednesday is face-to-face ethics class at the local school. I learnt something about my class today: two of the kids in it are twins!

Yes, I hadn’t noticed that before. They’re fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, which is why I didn’t even suspect it before. They have the same surname on the class roll, but I pay very little attention to the surnames when I’m learning the names of a new class full of kids. It’s enough of a job to remember all their first names. So, that was a surprising discovery!

It may have been the most notable thing I did all day, though. I did a 2.5k run, and I wrote and made a new Darths & Droids comic, and this evening I did three online classes on the topic of weather. The third class only one of the two enrolled students turned up. Normally this is bad, because with only one kid giving answers I can run out of material. But fortunately the kid I had was talkative, and I could let her run on for a few minutes before asking another question. So it was actually a little easier than an average class.

New content today:

Ethics of weather

Tuesday – new topic for online ethics classes. This week we’re discussing the weather. I wrote the lesson this morning, and it turned out to be a lot of material about potentially controlling the weather. There are a lot of cases to go through, and situations to discuss where the boundaries are between what would be an acceptable use of weather manipulation versus unacceptable. We also go into a bit of climate change and the consequences, and responsibilities for it. The first three classes tonight went well enough, but I may need to add a few more questions to fill time if I get a class with just 1 or 2 students in it.

For lunch today I went for a drive. I took Scully out to a new pie shop that I wanted to try, at Allambie Heights, about 25 minutes drive away. I tried a Thai chicken pie and a sausage roll, and also got a custard tart for afters. They were all pretty good! Then I let Scully run around on the nearby soccer field for a while to burn off some energy before we headed home.

This afternoon I put together a few more comics from the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! that I photographed last week. Hmm… and that’s about it.

New content today:

A day of photographing comics

This morning, after picking up groceries form the supermarket, I spent time photographing the batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I’d written yesterday. That took me past lunch time.

Then this afternoon I had another two classes of the Art topic. At the beginning of one, when I said today’s topic was art, a kid asked if we were going to talk about comics. I had to say no, but I’d put it on my topic planning list and see if I can come up with a lesson about comics. I’m not sure off the top of my head if I can fill a lesson with that, but maybe…

Tonight is face-to-face board games night. I have time to write this before I go because we’re starting an hour later than usual at the request of tonight’s host. So I don’t have any reports on what games we played yet. I’m planning on going to the Thai place near where I used to work to pick up some dinner on the way, since it’s only a couple of blocks away from the host’s house. I’ll be taking Scully tonight too, so everyone can see her.

New content today:

Ethics of teasing

In this morning’s face-to-face volunteer ethics class at the local school we started a new topic: Teasing. A few of the students were away at a rugby event, so there were only 10 kids in the class. The material goes through some scenarios to look at the questions of what exactly is teasing, and whether teasing is ever okay or not.

With that number of kids, it was easy enough to let the conversation progress organically, with kids speaking one after another, without me having to enforce hands up before speaking. It was a good discussion, and the kids generally converged on the idea that teasing between friends who are peers is okay if it’s done in a friendly, joking manner, but in other cases it’s bad – such as when done to deliberately hurt someone, or when done by a person in authority, or by someone who’s not a good friend.

I managed to fit in another 2.5k run today – my first since last Friday. I was a bit hesitant early because the weather was cold and showery, but it cleared up mid-afternoon so I could go out in the sun, though it was still a bit chilly.

Spring is on the way in the foliage though. Magnolias have been blooming for a few weeks already, but now cherry blossoms are popping up everywhere, and azaleas too.

New content today:

Thinking critically about art

I spent much of today writing the new week’s lesson for my online ethics & critical thinking classes. This is more on the critical thinking side – the topic being Art.

I start by showing the kids a picture that “I made”, and I ask them if they would call it “art”. In the three classes I ran tonight, everyone said yes. Then I reveal that I made it by using the online AI art generation program Craiyon. I share the web page live and type in a prompt and show them how it generates pictures. Then I re-ask the question – now that they know the picture was produced by an AI system, is it still “art” or not? Can a computer program produce something that we’re happy to call art”?

Then we talk for a while about the meaning of art. I show a Picasso painting from the Spanish Civil War period, when he produced a lot of artwork with sad imagery. I ask them what feeling they get from it, and many of the kids so far have said sadness. Then I explain why Picasso painted such images, because of his reactions to the war. And ask if knowing that makes them appreciate the art any more. Most of them agreed that it does.

Then I go back and ask is there any possible meaning behind the AI-generated art? If not, does that automatically make it inferior to human-produced art, or not? What if you can’t tell the difference? Does it matter?

And then I go into some possible uses for AI-generated art. And ask the kids what they think it means for the future of human artists.

There’s more to the lesson, diverging into a few other different themes, about destroying art, and whether famous/historical/significant art should be free for the public to view or not. I think it’s a good lesson, and it’s more fun and less stressful for me to teach than last week’s topic on cloning.

New content today:

Cloning pets

I finished up the last lessons of the week’s cloning topic today. In the very last class I raised the same question I’d asked in all the others: Would it be okay to clone dogs or cats if people wanted a new pet that was like their old one? And then I mentioned that the company Viagen exists and has been doing this for 7 years.

And one girl in this class erupted: “Oh my god! I have to clone my dog! I didn’t know they could do this! I’m going to tell my parents! I don’t care how much it costs!”

…

Okay… I hope her parents will be able to deal with this!

And this evening was lecture 2 of the image processing course at university. We covered image and video formats and then some basic image preprocessing operations. This is the easy stuff before we get stuck into full-on image filtering next week.

For dinner before the lecture I had ramen at a nearby Japanese place, which is fairly good. I had a bad ramen at a different place near the university earlier this year, so I went to the place that I know is good.

New content today: