Month: April 2017

In the reading of The Buried Giant, I have only one real question and maybe it was answered but Does crossing to the island mean dying?

The boatman is one of the most ambiguous characters. At first he seems like a passing character but he, or at least a version of him, shows up at the very end.

The image of the boatman is a very common theme when looking at the death myths in culture. Greeks believed that there was a ferryman across the river Styx. It is in many hymns about “crossing Jordan” in the African Christian Spirituals.

Another reason that I think that the going to the island means dying is that we find out that Beatrice and Axl’s son is dead but at the very end she believes that they might catch a glimpse of him on the island.

We often create new technology just because we can not necessarily because there is a need for it. This course has made me look deeper into technology that seems to be inevitable.

On one hand some of these technologies can be unnerving. It’s almost easier to just to sit back and let technology develop unhindered but it gets to a point where it threatens our existence and challenges what it means to be human. We aren’t completely sure how the brain works yet but still we keep trying to create technology to give ourselves the perfect memory. Integrating humans with AI would further complicated our definition of human.

On the other hand these technologies could mean a more connected and equal world. People often disagree or are offended by someone else’s way of life because they can’t understand that person’s life experiences. If people were able to access all the available information at any given time like in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand then we might see our society become more understanding of other ideas and lifestyles.

Technology will continue to develop no matter what but we can still decide what kinds of technology we allow to come into existence. If we are careful we could bring people together and create a better future but if we don’t have discussions about the potential faults we may find ourselves in a world where we serve no purpose.     

Colin Randles

Journal Entry #8

We seem to be in a time of rapid development of technology. When I was a middle schooler, it was average for kids to get our flip phones in 6^th or 7^th grade. You couldn’t do much on them except for texting and calling. I also remember using a portable CD player and taking that to the pool as a child. The ipod/iphone changed everything, and now toddlers are listening to music and playing games on their parents phone, and getting one for them as soon as they can read and write. We are the last generation to have baby pictures that aren’t on iphones. The strides we have made in the evolution of pieces of technology such as computers, TV’s, music devices, appliances, etc.. is currently at an unprecedented rate. We are creating machines that are smarter than we are (the web – Delaney), and can compute/do things more efficiently than we can. Hopefully this technology will be limited to just enhancing our society, and not taking over, which is what Blackmore talks about in her memetics. This is a dangerous territory, as we are essentially removing ourselves as “the” apex predator and top of the food chain.

This development of technology has negative consequences that go along with the great things they have brought to society. Ewaste is becoming a huge issue in developing countries. Will talk about that more in the final paper, but did a project on it in environmental class. This stage of society reminds me of the late 19^th and early 20^th century when the worlds fair was held in Paris. This is the firm time people had seen artificial lighting, military technology exploded, people were introduced to new cultures etc… This new technology seemed great at first, but had negative consequences seen in the early 20^th century with an entire generation of young men wiped out in WW1.

This also reminds me of Connecticut Yankee, when Hank Morgan introduces new technology very quickly, attempting to bring 6^th century England up to 19^th century technology very quickly. Society ends up collapsing, because it is at such a fast and unnatural rate. Introducing things way over the heads of the people, or at such a fast rate can be detrimental, and as we are coming upon the third replicator, this could be what Blackmore was talking about that species wiped themselves out. This exact model played out in Connecticut Yankee.

Singularity is defined as the point at which a function reaches an infinite value. In humans this point is approaching for our information and technology. In the TED talk on Memes and “temes” Susan Blackmore talks about memetics and how information has an evolutionary algorithm the same way organic matter does. The pessimistic view of the future of humanity sheds an important light on how our technology isn’t always the positive that we think it is. While most people view technology as a way to improve our existence, it could actually cause the downfall of humans. It poses the question of whether or not we should be putting time and research into technology that could potentially cause us harm.

The idea of a perfect memory is an example of this. In class we talked about how no one wants perfect memory but it seems to be inevitable. Unfortunately most people don’t think critically about the development of technology beyond the immediate benefits. The idea of forgetting is viewed in a negative light most of the time but really it’s a necessary part of our existence. The personification of information helps understand how our development of new technology isn’t always positive. We need to keep thinking critically about new technology beyond just whether or not we can create something. Discussions need to be held in order to determine if we are willing to foot the costs.

Black Mirror’s episode The Entire History of You showed a possibility of a world with perfect memory using futuristic technology implanted into the brain. As the episode showed this could cause considerable problems with the way people interact with one another. No one could forget events unless they purposefully deleted the memory. People would be able to constantly look into one another’s past experiences and very little privacy would remain. Any mistake that you made could be held against you for the rest of your life even if you had changed considerably since then.

This not only could cause social problems but psychological problems as well. Being able to forget about traumatic or painful experiences is very important to a person’s mental wellbeing. The inability to forget a traumatic memory is one of the key components of PTSD. It could be beneficial for the person to be able to delete the memory mechanically when the brain refuses to forget it. However this would assume that the traumatic was not also stored in the organic brain. This brings up the issue of what is stored in the organic brain and what is stored on the electronic device. If everything is stored in the device and nothing is stored in the organic brain then the person would never be able to stop use of the device.  

This form of visual memory storage is actually very different from the way our brains store memories. Our brains do not actually store a memory as an image like this episode’s futuristic technology does but rather as a series of electrical signals. Not only that but different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Though we have a better understanding of how memory is stored it is not fully known exactly where different types of memories are stored. Without knowing exactly how the brain works this type of system could potentially cause problems in the function and development of the brain. If the device was implanted at birth like it seems to be in the episode of Black Mirror is could hinder the development of the brain further enhancing the inability to discontinue use of the device.

Our memories make us who we are. Each person has different experiences from one another and each one teaches us something different. Being able to delete a memory could change the way you look at the world and how you react. Though it may seem like a nice thing to be able to remember your 3rd birthday party the risks is poses would greatly outweigh the benefits.