Month: April 2017

In class on Tuesday, Professor Perrone presented a scenario in which an individual must create a physical reminder for himself to make sure that he does his homework. The individual suffers from short term memory loss, so he will not remember if he has homework to turn in or not. Additionally, he does not have a pen or paper to make note of his homework, he only has a bucket and some water. The class was then opened to discussion to think of ways that the individual could use the bucket and water to remind himself that he has homework. Professor Perrone suggested that the individual could draw a line on the inside of the bucket, and he could fill the bucket with water above the line if he had homework, and fill it below the line if he did not have homework. But what if the bucket had a hole in the bottom that caused the water to leak out of the bucket? He would have no idea whether or not he has homework, and his bucket technique would fail him.

This scenario, centered around memory, caused me to think about an episode of Black Mirror that I watched. The episode is titled “The Entire History of You”, and nearly all of the characters in the show have a chip implanted in their heads that enable them to record and replay every single memory from their entire lives. As enticing as this sounds, the chip can become harmful in relationships with others, whether they be amicable or sexual.

In today’s times, a person’s memory is something that they can hold onto and can never be taken from them. Additionally, people have selective memories; they grasp onto their happiest memories, while also try to block out the worst memories from their pasts. Going back to the original scenario presented in class, if the individual had a memory chip implanted in himself, then he would be able to go back and watch what happened in class and see whether or not he was assigned homework. Although this would be helpful for him in this situation, the memory chip would also enable him to review, replay, and relive every single bad memory that he has from his past. All the times his parents yelled at him, all the times he was bullied at school, and all the times he failed athletically or academically. I believe that memories are meant to be cherished, not relived or replayed. I think that people should try to live their lives in the present because we cannot change the past, we can only prepare for the future.

In class on Thursday, we discussed the idea that companies may start selling people’s private browsing history to advertisers and other companies, and if that would be morally wrong. Internet service providers are what people have to go through to obtain Internet access. Personally, I think that the ISP should give people the choice of opting out or very blatantly notify their costumers that their searches are being shared.

I did a quick Google search and learned a few days ago the senate voted to remove what is called the broadband privacy rules. These rules require the ISP to require their user’s consent before sharing the user’s private browsing data. Now we are just waiting to hear what the House and President decide. Depending on the outcome, the ISP may be able to share their user’s search history without obtain their users consent.

We also spent a lot of time discussing our poster projects. I am looking forward to working with my classmates and hearing their perspectives on the topic we chose. Our plan at the moment is to look at self-driving cars, the moral dilemmas, how they will reduce work, and how autonomous cars relate to memory. With the addition of self-driving cars, driving jobs, such as truck drivers, uber drivers, and pizza delivery drivers will loose their jobs.

I think the bill that was just recently passed by the senate that allows ISP’s to give away our browsing history to 3rd parties without consent should be of grave concern to everyone. The internet is like GI from Stars or the Multivac Asimov wrote about. What you search on the internet isn’t just what you’re doing in your free time, its information that tells everything about you. This act does have potentially good implications, as we saw in Stars, when everyone knows about everyone it can lead to more understanding and less being scared of the unknown. However, I don’t think our world is ready for that. Your search history isn’t going to be shared for the purpose of understanding, it is going to be shared for the purpose of monetization. I could see big company’s start buying potential job applicants search histories or even sports fans buying there favorite players search histories. This isn’t going to lead to understanding and compassion, this is going to lead to the death of privacy.

While finishing Stars in My Pocket, I was initially quite confused about the overall meaning of the novel, as it is very ambiguous and fails in delivering any concrete conclusions. Even though it is understood that a sequel was meant to follow, I think that there is strong meaning in the lack of a finite conclusion.  The opaque nature in this novel presents the social progressivism that he is trying to convey.

The way that Delaney only uses the “she” pronouns evokes an uncomfortable nature in the text and switches the societal gendered stigma where males have an unequally powerful role. By making all characters, even those with male personas, Delaney braces the reader to transform their perspective of how a society is structured. Similarly the cultural fugue furthers the perception of ambiguityo n what is acceptable. In doing so the reader is pushed to accept progressive cultural notions and make sense of what was once obscure.

Just as the reader is forced into an uncomfortable situations by the content, the way the novel ends puts the reader in one as well. The reader must formulate a conclusion upon themselves. Without the novel telling explicitly what to understand you must accept the content for what was conveyed in order to form a conclusion yourself. Through this acceptance of the novel, the reader becomes inherently accepting to the social progressivism that Delaney proposes.

ournal 7

This week was a very interesting one. I had been pondering the project without any real guideline presented after I agreed to work with Ashton and Jubal. I began to think about the general themes of the class, those of theories of ethics, machine ethics, robotics, and work. Initially, unsure about the design of the project altogether, I began to think about last semester. Last semester, I took a philosophy 100 class. This class entitled God, Humans, and Animals, is one that I have talked about before and forms the basis of my general knowledge of some ethical theories. My professor, Gary Steiner, is an expert in the field on animal rights and animal ethics. This class focused on an overview of religious theory, an exploration of human rights theories, and lastly focused on exploring animal ethics.
Although, not a direct correlation, one of my ideas for the project was to dive back into the world of animal ethics, connecting it to robotics, radical anxiety termination, and the labor class. This would allow us to connect the ideas of Asimov and Delaney with the current place of animals in our society. Are the RATs used the same as animals are in our current society? Do they fill similar roles? How is this similar or different from the institution of slavery in the 1800s? These questions fluttered through my mind.
In the end, we decided upon the project topic of Brain-to-brain interfaces, a topic that is extremely interesting and seems almost magical. The idea that two or maybe even more people perceive what each other is thinking is one that I thought was only a notion of science fiction. I am very excited to dive into this topic and connect it in turn to ethics and memory.