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Colin Randles

Journal Entry #10

As I have been working on studying for finals, projects, and papers, I have been wondering what the future students will be doing finals week in 50 years, if that will even exist.

Will we be having class in a brick and mortar building, or will it all be virtual? If Elon Musk comes through with his technology, we will all be able to add additional memory to our brain, so maybe if I listen to a lecture then I will never need to study again, and just be able to recall it in my backup memory bank.

One of the poster groups talked about using a device that could facilitate modern telepathy. This would make class time very easy. We could link our minds with the some of the greatest minds in the world, and we could have access to that knowledge in seconds. Imagine Stephen Hawking or Einstein telepathically transmitting brain waves to yours. This would obviously increase knowledge no matter your socioeconomic status and could be a large benefit to society. Im sure out capitalist society will figure out a way to be able to charge millions of dollars for the brain waves of Bill Gates or Elon Musk, but it is still an exciting new technology to think about.

Colin Randles

Journal Entry 9

I watched Ex Machina again the other day, and saw it from a different perspective. After going through this entire course, and formulating opinions on work, memory, ethics, and technology in all different time periods, I am able to critically think about the implications of the movie.

Reading Stars in my Pocket like a Grain of Sand told the tale of clashing cultures. We are seeing that in America on a smaller scale with anti-Muslim sentiments, and racial profiling. It is seen in the airports, movies, and speeding tickets. Now that we are creating automated vehicles, where we need to implement recognition technology into the vehicles, and program an ethical framework into the system. The car needs to be able to recognize faces, and make driving decisions based on what it sees and calculates. As you can imagine this will cause problems, because there is no chance that everyone will agree on a “correct” system.

Delaney also talks about multiple genders being present in the society. Many characters are racially/sexually ambiguous, and homosexuality is not an issue at all. With the introduction of robots, there is a good chance that some people will fall in love with these machines and want to mate/be with them. Considering that gay marriage was just legalized a few years ago, and the fact that many Americans are still against gay/interracial marriage, I do not think society is ready for robot/human marriage. It is unnatural, and if somehow babies were to come out of it, would they be considered humans or robots? Once we create conscious beings, we unleash an unimaginable amount of social and ethical problems that our world is not ready for. Many people see robots as helpful slaves to the human race, making our lives easier. While it may do this in the short run, the long run implications are far worse than any benefit we will receive. They will be more intelligent than us, which will displace jobs, create ethical issues, and uproot our social system. Is Earth in for a cultural fugue in the coming centuries?

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!!!