Dumb Dive

Radio shows by ants, how the inability to withstand the charge of a bison accelerated our development of tools and the spread of the digital meme - this week is an absolute doozy to kick off 2022.

Pranav and Arvind talk about evolution and the development of what we call consciousness. What is intelligence and how is it different from consciousness? Is self-awareness a requisite for being conscious or is that just because of our human-centric look at life and existence?

Reading List:

• Metazoa - Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
• Eusociality: Origin and consequence

Science Fiction is a mirror into a society at any point in time. How has colonialism and post-colonialist thought been manifested into popular works of fiction across the decades? We also talk about Indian science fiction and some of our favourite cartoons

• Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama (1992)
• Terra Nova
• Gameworld Trilogy

We discuss the maker movement, and how we can build communities and shared spaces for innovation.

Arvind explains what jailbreaking is and why users often want to 'root' their devices. Pranav compares the maker movement to other sub-cultures across gaming, car modification and more.

What resources can we leverage to build shared repositories of information that are curated by the community?

• Apple announces Self Service Repair
• Makers by Cory Doctorow
• Awesome Lists

In this episode, we make fun of an ill-conceived and alarming proposal for a college dorm, and in doing so, discuss what hostile architecture and hostile design really means.

On this episode, we look at why understanding consciousness is so interesting and understanding why we see and experience things the way we do, how mythology gave rise to a version of dualism, and how changing our theory of mind can affect our ethical stances.

Join us in this episode as we talk about accessible design in software, inclusive stairs, medical systems and the future of gaming.

Also, the game we talk about towards the end is blinddrivegame.com, available on Steam, Google Play Store, iOS and itch.io.

Based? On what?

Plants and insects, maybe. In this episode, we pontificate extemporaneously and at length on the ethical dilemmas surrounding food and its future. We talk a lot about food, basically.

P.S: based (slang) - godlike or "worthy of adulation"

This week we grab a brush to dust off the layers of soot from Pranav's college thesis and discuss some of the topics he wrote about.

Who takes moral responsibility when an AI inflicts harm on human lives on accident?

What would happen if we live in a society where robots are allowed to make the decision to harm people?

We discuss the new e-RUPI digital payment initiative in India, the value of money and the history of currency.

Things we mention:

• e-RUPI
• The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson

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