Author: Emma Irwin

Overall course reflection: Overall I think this course taught me a lot about our society and technology and where it is going. If we are being honest,I am not quite sure exactly what this course was supposed to be about, just with the combination of different books and movies being really different, they somehow interconnected but I had trouble understanding all of the comparisons and how it all tied together. The books were very interesting but also hard to read at times, making it difficult to keep up with the course reading. I thought for the most part the in class discussions and activities and videos were enthralling and very relatable, making the rest of the course worth it to keep up with. My only complaint would have to be that every time I tried to write my paper I felt as though all my connections were very far fetched, as well as I felt like the grading was harsh. I know it’s a writing class, but I felt like I was being graded on how well of a lit paper I wrote and not how well I expressed the prompt through the paper. All in all..interesting class.

Poster Project

I enjoyed the poster projects and I found that many people found very interesting topics to present, I just felt that we weren’t given enough of a heads up about the project and we did not start thinking about it soon enough. If we had started a little earlier I think the groups would have really dived into the projects and been able to put in their best effort. Even still, however I thought the projects came out really well and the presentations from the comp sci class were very interesting as well. Many people focused on the same topic my group did, which was technology is taking away all of our privacy. My wonder about this, since it is starting to come to the surface now a lot more than it has just in the past few years, is are people going to try and make a change in the opposite direction, where we take a few steps back and try to get our privacy back and try to make ourselves not turn into crazy iPhone addicts, or will be just keep moving forward and falling into the trap technology is creating. Social media, our iPhones, the internet, these coding companies are all designing their products to make us addicted to them- they are creating a black hole and it is only getting bigger. It is not long until we all fall into it and cannot escape.

Ex Machina!

This movie was very interesting to say the least. I was very caught off guard because I too found myself being tricked by the AI, Ava. You start to think they are real people because of their voice and their personable ways of speaking and that is the scariest part. That technology can actually start teaching itself to be smarter, that movie essentially made me feel like robots were going to take over the world. My question is why are people building AI’s, like what is the point of having these robots and so on if they are not benefiting anyone- having a human robot maid is so unnecessary, and there are not enough people in the world who can afford it. I feel like all I hear is my parents friends are being let go from their jobs and so many people are having trouble finding jobs because technology is making it so that less people are needed for their labor. And that is on a smaller scale- I am referring to stock market traders and brokers whose jobs can be done by a computer. On a larger scale, the lower class who needs these jobs available such as factories and other sites that require many bodies for manual labor are also inventing machines and basically robots to replace the workers so that they can make more money…but with no one working anymore than no one has any money to spend on the products that these companies are making for cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The world seems like it’s going to s*** and this class only made me more scared!!!

Black Mirror episode:

To put the episode of black mirror we watched in class into a word: frightening. The reason I felt that this episode was so frightening was due to the fact that it seems all too possible for the future. We already are photographing and videotaping so much of our lives because of iPhones and GoPros and all these other camera and methods of recording and posting things on social media. Our lives are so publicized and its possible that one day every part of our life is recorded. Snapchat just came out with ‘spectacles’ and it records what you see—essentially what happens in black mirror. Without the benefit of choosing what we do and do not want to remember our lives would be drastically different- and black mirror shows us that that is not for the better. If we let our world get to that level of crazy just because that business is monopolizing everything than we are doomed. I watched a 60 minutes clip (I highly recommend it) about “brain hacking” , it featured a guy who quit working at google because he noticed that apps and web browsers are coding social media and websites to function so that we will stay on the app/website for longer- they do this by using notifications that trigger our dopamine. Very interesting stuff– basically said that this is a race to the bottom of our brain stem and it’s making us our most primitive selves: depressed, insecure, and anxious.

Humans-

This movie I found very intriguing and interesting, but also hard to fathom. Everything that occurred in the movie the idea of the robots teaching themselves to feel and have consciousness- it is something I struggle to wrap my head around. For my journal entry I want to ask a couple questions and go into depth as to why these questions are so striking to me.

1. Is it possible for a computer to teach itself how to feel?

This is a very broad question, but in class we have dived deep into artificial intelligence and it’s possibilities. I find this question so intense and interesting because these movies and articles we are reading are carefully thought into, so I find it confusing if the producers of the movie Humans did enough research to see the extent to technological possibilities that far into the future-or if they are just writing fiction just to write it.

2. Have scientists and technicians and the people that study and invent machines with artificial intelligence- do they predict something like robot humans to exist in the future, and would they be allowed?

The robots in Humans are so real, that it does not seem like something people would ever get to a point to allowing it to be real. But then again, I think about how much humans used to have to do that they now do not because of technology, so why would that not further into something such as a robot servant or something of the sort.

3. Is there a point where humans will stop letting technology replace the daily troubles and work we have in our daily lives?

Just in the same way that computers have replaced millions of jobs as it is, if it continues how will there be any jobs left? Technology, at the rate it’s progressing will eventually be able to replace majority of the jobs that people work at every single day, and if there are no jobs because of robots what will the world turn into? If so few people have jobs left than the world cannot revolve the way it does today. Will the lives of humans completely take a turn and will people stop working? What about currency then? It’s intriguing how far this question could go…