You guessed it the one who introduced Audiobooks to Steemit is starting a Decentralised Audible platform. We are in need of a logo designed by you.
Submission, Judging, and Contest Prize
- Submit your designs in the comment before the end of post-payout.
- You may submit as many designs as you like.
- Top 5 designs by the number of votes (not comment payout value) will be selected.
- Bots cannot be used for above numbers.
- @daudible will deliberate 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place based on the selected designs.
- 1st place: 100% of a vote from @chronocrypto.
- 2nd and 3rd place: 65% of a vote from @chronocrypto.
Disclaimer
- Designs must be original of course.
- Submissions that are later found to be used by website common logos will be disqualified.
- Logos which are only available in low-res raster or non-editable format will be disqualified.
Make Sure to resteem, to get more votes.
some background on the proposed platform.
The platform will be much like Amazon's platform but with a way for content curators to create their short stories or novels and be able to narrate themselves or have the community narrate their work.
This platform will be purely for audible books only, no other content.
I have been creating a dystopian novel on steemit called Chronometrics it is essentially a mixture of my current short stories posted on here. With the help of @voraces, we have transformed my work into great Audible books but have only been limited to SoundCloud and or youtube to distribute.
Below is my current Novel I am creating. Feel free to have a read and or listen to some of the completed AudibleBooks.
Dr. Chrono had stopped paying attention to faces.
He saw so many of them, day in and day out, that committing them all to memory was a strain on his mind. These days, if he recognized someone by their face, it was largely a coincidence. It was much more important to know someone’s position by their clothes and ID information, and by their voice. If they were capable of speaking, and they were speaking to him, that meant that they merited attention from him (most of the time, anyway).
The clones in the pods didn’t speak. They weren’t awake, and so they couldn’t. They were all in various states of generation, so some didn’t even have faces or anything recognizable about them. The ones that were far enough along to have faces, however, were the ones that Dr. Chrono had to be the most concerned about. If a clone died while they were indistinct, disposal was a lot easier than it was when features had begun to surface. A distinct clone required disposal like that of an actual cadaver; some of the more sentimental scientists insisted on holding brief funerals for the ones that “didn’t make it.” Furthermore, the farther along a dead clone was, the more resources there were that had been wasted in its failed creation.
For Dr. Chrono, not bothering with the faces of the clones he was generating was not so much a matter of not getting attached. Instead, it was a matter of not thinking too hard of the fates those faces might meet. Rarely was a clone made without some kind of purpose; there were plenty of naturally-born humans without purposes. Some of them were intended as specially-tailored adoptee children, either from someone unrelated to the commissioner or intended as a replacement for someone who was related to them. Dr. Chrono considered those the lucky ones, for at least they could approach a normal life. There were no guarantees about their families, but at least they would have one.
Others were intended as engineered elites in some field or another. There were the super soldiers and the born scientists who were intended to either further humanity’s runaway technological development or enforce the government’s runaway grip on the law. Certain parameters were adjusted in these clones so that the sting of not having a normal upbringing was lessened, but a few always somehow managed to feel the absence of normalcy in their lives. That feeling that something was missing was always detrimental to the clone’s performance, to the point that an entire discipline of psychology had evolved around addressing it.
The least fortunate of the clones were the born servants. The ones intended as drone bodies for people rich enough to afford new body uploads didn’t count, as they were never intended to have their own consciousnesses. There was indeed a class of people in the world who wanted servants for various purposes but did not want to have to deal with the specific red tape of hiring a “natural” person (or were doing thing that could never be done to a “natural”). Instead, they exchanged a significantly higher price tag for shady, loosely-enforced laws that were often ignored in favor of letting the privileged do as they please.
Dr. Chrono had heard the stories. Clones could be subjected to all manner of abuse under the table; looking too deeply into a clone’s fate was an easy way to permanently lose any remaining faith in humanity. That was something he knew about firsthand. There was even a not-so-secret ring of “clone hackers” that knew how to upload minds into conscious clones, effectively trapping them in their own bodies.
Thinking about the endless but often grim possibilities for each clone made Dr. Chrono sigh heavily and scratch near his whitened, fluffy mustache. His colleagues often asked why he didn’t just upload into a younger body instead of staying middle-aged, and his answers changed every time. Said answers were always cryptic and sounded vaguely like excuses, but his refusal to elaborate generally shut the curious ones up quickly. Then again, people mostly knew better than to cross one of the world’s top clone engineers.
Climbing to the top of this field took Dr. Chrono years of hard work, and if he thought that if he didn’t show it at least a little, people would forget his service to the field. It probably did border on an abuse of clout at times, but everyone abused something these days. If shoving his position in people’s faces was the worst thing he did, that put him quite a bit ahead of most people. Not that it particularly mattered; it took more than a supposed moral high ground to be ahead of anyone in this day and age.
Humming an aimless tune to himself, Dr. Chrono browsed the rows of clone pods via his computer. So far, everything seemed to be in order. All the clones were properly arranged by purpose, and no one parameter seemed to stand out as abnormal. Though a passerby might have thought that he was breezing through the readouts rather quickly, he was just that fast at assessing the information from each clone pod. It helped that major changes rarely happened from day to day, and if they did, they stuck out obviously enough to get caught and addressed.
At one point, Dr. Chrono stopped his browsing and clicked back, because he finally managed to detect something that stood out. Located somewhere in the middle of a drone clone row was a certain clone that, for some reason, was slated to have higher than average intelligence. The old scientist squinted at the computer screen and confirmed that his eyes were not deceiving him. While not the strangest or most dangerous error, it merited filling out a report at the very least. It could be a computer error making a projection that didn’t exist, or something was indeed off in the clone’s chemistry that he could adjust.
Alternately, one other explanation remained: this clone was intended to be a new body for someone struggling with a brain issue. The interface between mind and brain had yet to be fully cut; if the brain wasn’t adequate, that could slow someone with even the most radiant personality. The mind could be uploaded, and with the proper brain tissue, it would function completely again. Granted, the upload had to be done quickly after the issue was detected to avoid the erosion of memories, but if caught in time, someone would be able to move on in a new body like nothing had ever happened. The mind and body separation was a strange and arbitrary distinction, but in the age of brain uploads, it existed.
Shaking his head and changing the tune he was humming, Dr. Chrono filled out the report, then proceeded on to reviewing the other clone pods.
Elsewhere, a female Dr. Chrono was rifling through a swath of papers scattered across her desk.
The West Regional Uplifting Center had tons of data and paperwork that needed to be stored by virtue of the work being done there. Bringing apes and robots to not just sentience, but sapience created a lot of data that needed to be filed away. Even in this computerized day and age, Dr. Chrono swore that some work just had to be on paper out of spite. Something about tracking the acquisition of written language, or so she had been told. She preferred spite as the reasoning for the papers cluttering her desk right now.
With a disgruntled grunt, Dr. Chrono set the papers to the sides of the desk and booted up her laptop to begin transferring the paper records to the database. If she had her way, these records would have been put right into the database in the first place so that she wouldn’t have to do some grunt’s work. Then again, everyone had to do grunt work at some point, even esteemed scientists in the field of uplifting.
Uplifting was the official term given to enabling apes, robots, and other “less evolved” beings to achieve sapience. Dr. Chrono was unsure of how she felt about the term; uplifting sounded too light and happy to her, considering what often had to be done to these beings to grant them sapience, but she couldn’t think of a better term to replace it. The uplifting process involved a lot of genetic engineering and chemicals for the organics, not all of which was painless, or even consistently successful. She had a feeling that the papers on the sides of the desk contained at least one case of “failure” where some poor creature either had a bad reaction to the chemicals or was otherwise unlikely to “awaken” to sapience. Alas, receiving such bad news was part of the job.
Working with the AIs and robots was easier, though a bit less directly under Dr. Chrono’s purview. The best coders and AI specialists in the region had been recruited to write original code and patches for uplifting robots and less tangible AIs, and generally, this process went smoothly. In the case of “raw” uplifts where an AI was created as sapient, the process could be as simple as downloading the code into the robot “shell,” or activating the internal AI process (in the case of “virtual assistants” without bodies). If everything had been done correctly, a sapient robot or program would “awaken” and begin learning about the world.
Patching existing AIs could be a bit trickier, as it meant formatting the code around the pre-existing format. Often, the sapience-granting code wouldn’t even be compatible with the original format, resulting in the completely new code has to be written anyway. From there, the specialists would have to recover the memories and reformat them if possible, though this would occasionally be impossible due to compatibility issues as well. In fact, it seemed that more previous AIs were entirely remade than ever truly upgraded. This fact created something of a moral quandary: if a robot was sentient without being sapient before being uplifted, was it really okay to just discard those memories in the name of gaining true reason?
While there were people arguing for either side of the question, the official stance was somewhere in the middle. While there were some sectors attempting research on ways to encourage compatibility between the new programming and the old, nothing noteworthy had come of the research yet, and so the complete rewrites continued.
As Dr. Chrono mused over the various uplifting processes, she entered the various data into the system. Her ability to divide her attention and still get things done (and done well, and done accurately) was something she was quite proud of. When she was just a rookie some decades ago and her hair was still blonde instead of that odd greying off-yellow, her data entry was described as “fiendishly accurate” by a superior. In her mind, that just made it all the clearer that someone a bit lower on the corporate ladder should be doing the work she was currently stuck with. Data entry was something she could do (and, if an old roommate was to be believed, had done) in her sleep.
Soon, however, something happened that required Dr. Chrono’s full attention. Her door swung open, and a small ape child charged in with a child-sized, blue-plated android in hot pursuit. “Karina, just because you can take my limbs off doesn’t mean you should!” The android wailed as he chased the ape girl around Dr. Chrono’s office.
Karina looked back only to give the android a prolonged raspberry. Her energy seemed to be nearly endless as she zipped around the room. “Too bad! I wanna see this up close!”
Dr. Chrono’s irritation hit first before her amusement. “Both of you, stop right there!” she yelled, her voice sharp enough to halt them both and send the android skidding into the ape, which caused him to fall on his behind. That finally drew a wry chuckle out of Dr. Chrono. “Karina, give Alan his arm back.”
“Fine.” With a whine, Karina handed Alan his arm back, and the android child plugged it back in like it had never been detached in the first place.
“I don’t take your arm off to see how it works, do I?” Alan quipped, his childish voice bitingly sarcastic.
“That’s different! If you did it to me, it’d be attempted murder. In your case, it’s just maintenance.” Karina folded her arms and gave a huff.
“I see the double standards are already being drilled into our heads,” Alan mumbled.
Dr. Chrono couldn’t help but smile. Alan was becoming a bit like her with the tendency towards sharpness. She wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing, and she hoped she could find someone to help him lighten up a little bit before it was too late. After all, it was a matter of handling code that was constantly updating itself; surely, he could update himself to be a bit happier someday.
Finished AudioBooks