YouTube video by JREG

Videos that help you understand your city better. Currently based out of Vancouver, BC. Website: https://www.abouthere.ca/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere/ Instagram: https://www.i...

YouTube video by About Here

YouTube video by About Here

Videos that help you understand your city better. Currently based out of Vancouver, BC. Website: https://www.abouthere.ca/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere/ Instagram: https://www.i...

YouTube video by About Here

Thanks to Urbanarium for partnering with me to produce this video! Check out their Decoding Density competition at https://urbanarium.org/decoding-density About Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/aboutherevideos IG: https://www.instagram.com/aboutherevideos/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere Urbanarium Twitter: https://twitter.com/urbanarium IG: https://www.instagram.com/urbanariumvan/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UrbanariumVancouver Website: https://urbanarium.org/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3uAd4S76yWpYJxmQXoFWyg

What could apartments look like if we eliminated some of the rules they are subject to? Urbanarium held a design competition to find out. Thanks to Urbanarium for partnering with me on this video! Check out all the entries from the competition at http://decodingdensity.com/ About Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/aboutherevideos IG: https://www.instagram.com/aboutherevideos/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere Urbanarium IG: https://www.instagram.com/urbanariumvan/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbanarium/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UrbanariumVancouver/ Website: https://urbanarium.org/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@urbanariumvancouver4133?si=nnPi7oftmZxmdQOL

YouTube video by About Here

What could apartments look like if we eliminated some of the rules they are subject to? Urbanarium held a design competition to find out. Thanks to Urbanarium for partnering with me on this video! Check out all the entries from the competition at http://decodingdensity.com/ About Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/aboutherevideos IG: https://www.instagram.com/aboutherevideos/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere Urbanarium IG: https://www.instagram.com/urbanariumvan/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbanarium/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UrbanariumVancouver/ Website: https://urbanarium.org/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@urbanariumvancouver4133?si=nnPi7oftmZxmdQOL

SUPPORT THE NTH REVIEW ON PATREON, GET EXCLUSIVE DISCORD ACCESS AND PERKS: https://www.patreon.com/thenthreview This might be a little out of the ordinary, but I had to get it off my chest. Featuring @NotJustBikes @CityNerd @CityBeautiful @OhTheUrbanity @AboutHere @YetAnotherUrbanist @strongtowns @alanthefisher and more! Discord: https://discord.gg/F7qBusT Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/NthReview/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/NthReview Facebook: https://facebook.com/NthReview Instagram: https://instagram.com/TheNthReview Buy Me a Coffee tip jar: https://buymeacoffee.com/NthReview Ko-Fi tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/nthreview

_A technical note to readers: I have been banned from Facebook and Messenger–hopefully temporarily, as I am not guilty of espionage or whatever the issue is. If you are one of the more than 500 readers who use Facebook to get your news from A Pilgrim in Narnia, I would encourage you to sign up for Pilgrim Posts in your email box–at least until this is resolved. I’m always reachable at junkola[at]gmail[dot]com–though quite behind in correspondence, as I’ve talked abouthere and here._ I have been doing a series of writing projects and teaching units on what I’m calling “Authentic Intelligence.” See what I did there? Authentic Intelligence … AI. Anyway, Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. While I don’t believe that we have AI–or, indeed, that it is possible–as folks in my world–writers, artists, teachers, content providers, designers, and the like–continue to process vocational crises, some more fundamental questions are starting to emerge. I have confessed that as a science fiction nerd, I find little of this “sudden technological leap” we are experiencing surprising. I am frequently impatient with how slow our technologies are moving, but that might simply be my vice of impatience. And the implications are hardly new. Honestly, we have been reading and writing about the possibilities and implications of human-machine hybridity for generations. The loss of one’s humanity in one’s human activity is a theme that goes back to the ancients, including the Bible. Even culture-watchers who are not SF nerds should see the signs: In North America, we have bred functionalism into the DNA of our children; is it any surprise that when given the chance, students, politicians, and business people are apt to choose function over art, ethics, or identity? We left the path of wisdom some time ago when we decided that the heart of man was composed merely of walls, cavities, atriums, and valves. I get why people are curious and afraid, I really do. I’m rereading Octavia Butler‘s _Parable of the Sower_ (1993) right now, and it reads at points like a decades-old roadmap for our 2025 dystopia. As I feel like I have been living through a series of technocultural, mediatized phallocracies, I find myself drawing away from culture. I use the phrase “Authentic Intelligence” because rethinking “AI” from different angles helps me get to the fundamental human questions of science fiction. Also, I continue to use the term “ _hnau_ ” when envisioning our human _being_ and _doing_ in the future. Before WWII, Lewis coined _hnau_ to describe sapient, sentient, spiritually capacious, art- and artisan-making, storytelling, beings of whatever form. I don’t know if Terrans are the only _hnau_ created in the image of God, but we will, sooner or later, create beings in our own image. The way we relate to them will say a lot about what we think is fundamental to our society and race. Thus, I am looking to extend my understanding of hnauology in order to shape our evolving consciousness as a species. While rereading Harry Potter this past winter, I began to wonder if fantasy could contribute in some ways to my hnauological enquiry. Because I live with non-human animals, I know what to do with Fawkes the Phoenix in the series; but what do we do with the Fat Lady and Phineas Nigellus Black–who exist only in living portraits–or the Weasleys’ Ford Anglia–a machine with developing sentience and emotion–or the Goblet of Fire–a magical item manipulated in the way that we program computer technology. While one of the tensions in the series is the degree to which Goblins, Centaurs, and Merfolk are truly _hnau_ , does the Ministry of Magic’s standardized testing make Trolls an intelligence baseline for sharing humanity? Perhaps the Owls and Cats of Hogwarts are merely superanimals, but what about Nigini, which inhabits the soul of Voldemort? Tom Riddle’s diary makes me wonder whether Voldemort’s flight from death is also a retreat from humanity. Does going beyond humanity make one superhuman or not a _hnau_ at all. I ended up sketching out so many questions and potential links that I decided I would take this inquiry public. Mythmoot XII is June 19-22, 2025, at the National Conference Centre in Leesburg, VA. The theme, “Drawn to the Edge,” invited me to reflect on the boundaries of my hnauological sketches, so I decided to pitch my Harry Potter project, “Being _Hnau_ in the Age of AI: A View from Hogwarts.” My accepted abstract is below with some links to relevant pieces, and I look forward to presenting some preliminary findings. Mythmoot is always an excellent conference. You can register here for on-site registration–and for those not in the neighbourhood, the online version is called “MootHub” and is only $75. **Being _Hnau_ in the Age of AI: A View from Hogwarts** by Brenton Dickieson The move from the Information Age to something like the Age of AI has, like all fundamental cultural changes, caused us to reflect on what it means to be human. This is old turf for science fiction readers. While it might be a bit premature to make a survival kit out of Charles Stross’s 2005 exponential apocalypse, _Accelerando_ , science fiction always asks fundamental human questions. Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ is a Promethean tale as much as it is an Edenic one, going to the core of what it means to be human. _Frankenstein_ is about stealing fire from the gods and the fire that burns in the human soul. Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” theory of science fiction argues that SF disturbs readers’ worldview, inviting them to turn a prophetic lens upon their own society. In the 1930s, three wise Malacandrian species cause C.S. Lewis’s hapless protagonist to face the folly of his Eurocentric colonial instincts and renegotiate his understanding of what it means to be human. Lewis coins the term _hnau_ to describe sapient, sentient, spiritually capacious, art- and artisan-making, story-telling, beings of whatever form. Though Suvin would resist the parallel, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “escape and recovery” in fairy stories has a similar effect. So, I turned to a fantasy world, Harry Potter, to think about the blurred edges of what it means to be _hnau_ in the Age of AI. Although we have not yet seen humanlike Artificial Intelligence, we have begun interacting with AI bots and other sentient-like tools as if they were people—an anthropomorphizing instinct I call the “Wall-E Effect.” Like Lewis’s Malacandria, the Potterverse has other races of _hnau_ , like centaurs or merpeople. But there is also a spectrum of magical _somethings_ that show human-like sentience, from mandrake root or The Weasleys’ Ford Anglia all the way to the Sorting Hat and the paintings on Hogwart’s walls. Read as a recovery of cognitive estrangement, the Harry Potter chronicles offer guidance, warnings, and wisdom for human interaction in the Age of AI. _Notes: This abstract is slightly adapted already (I keep reworking it). I made the “HNAU” banner and shield with Canva, with hilarious results, I think._ ### I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it. * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to print (Opens in new window) Print * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_

Why are many concerned about single staircase apartments, and what can we do to make them safer? Thanks to Urbanarium for partnering with me on this video! Check out all the entries from the competition at http://decodingdensity.com/ About Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/aboutherevideos IG: https://www.instagram.com/aboutherevideos/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere Urbanarium IG: https://www.instagram.com/urbanariumvan/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbanarium/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UrbanariumVancouver/ Website: https://urbanarium.org/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@urbanariumvancouver4133?si=nnPi7oftmZxmdQOL

From 2023-2026, the City is conducting a complete review and rewrite of the Land Use Bylaw. The Land Use Bylaw sets out the rules for what kind of building or activity can take place on private prope...

Videos that help you understand your city better. Currently based out of Vancouver, BC. Website: https://www.abouthere.ca/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/abouthere/ Instagram: https://www.i...