Category: Uncategorized

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.

One of the things that interested me about our discussion this week was in the memory section, when the idea of neural implants was brought up. I found this particularly interesting, because the subject of the ethics of neural implants was something that was heavily discussed in one of my classes last semester. While some people may joke that their memories are so bad that if there was ever a neural implant available to improve memory they would be among the first to sign up, however such an implant, even such a simple one, has the potential to cause a great deal of conflict. First of all, the implants would likely be expensive, and only those who could afford them could have them, thus creating an even greater disparity between classes, or different models or upgrades could be purchased at an additional cost, again separating those who could afford it from those who could not. Additionally, many parents, wishing the best for their children, would inevitably wish to get one for their children, particularly those who have a particularly difficult time remembering things, to give them an edge in the classroom and on standardised tests, however this would create an unfair advantage for the students with implants, which would most likely lead to them being shunned and even eventually segregated from the implant-free students.

In addition to the divisions such an implant would create, there would be even more problems, such as the fact that there would likely be people performing illegal upgrades to people’s implants to give them a secret edge or some other ability/advantage. What’s more, this could likely lead to upgrades having bugs or even the ability to be hijacked to strip people of their free will. Another ethical concern with implants is that weaponised implants would most likely be developed. This is not only a dilemma by altering the brains of soldiers in battle, but also due to the fact that they would have a great deal of difficulty reassimilating to society. This is a particular issue given that currently many veterans end up being homeless or suffering from other extreme issues related to not being able to come back to society after what they had experienced, which would only be made worse if their brains had been drastically altered or weaponised due to an implant. One other problem with the idea of neural implants is that in order for them to properly assimilate to the brain, they would not be able to be removed, therefore if parents gave a child an implant without discussing it with them, the child would be required to live with that implant for the rest of their lives, and the same rings true for soldiers of anyone else. Thinking about implants as being like mind-altering tattoos, since many people get tattoos and later regret them, I can only imagine how people would react to such implants, regardless of whether or not they were supposed to just provide a little boost to their memory.

After finishing Stars this week I was very unhappy and confused about the ending of the novel. As it came to a close I felt like I had so many unanswered questions about what was going on. I understood that Marq was trying to convey that his life would never be the same again without Rat, but I was confused on what he was going to do next with his life. For him, I hope he is able to find some sort of joy but it is still very unclear if that can ever be obtained.

Although this novel is extremely abstract and mythical, I found some of the themes applicable to real life situations. When Rat left we saw many of the same emotions and feelings that we see when a spouse dies in a relationship in our world. I know that when my Grandfather died, that my Grandmother was a completely different person for a while. It was so sudden and unexpected and she did not know how to carry on with every day life. There were things that he would do that she wouldn’t even realize and now she had to do everything. I think when the book ends we are getting a glimpse of the sorrow and grief that Marq is about to endure in these next months or even years. He grew such an attachment and liking for Rat that he does not see hope for the future. He knows that he had already found the best thing that can ever happen to him and when nothing else will compare, how does one go on. This is an extremely painful and difficult situation to be in and one that was not a choice of his own.

Overall I feel like I did kind of being to gain that acceptance for the general culture of this book. As Professor Drexler pointed out, by the end you realize that it is ok to be accepting of this weird and twisted made up world. In the end it is about two creatures that really and truly feel that they should be together and there is nothing wrong with that no matter the situation. People deserve to be happy and to be with someone who makes them happy.

Moving into next week I am really excited to begin working on our poster projects. My group has decided to work on the possible colonization of Mars and all of the ethical issues that come along with that. First we want to see if it is even possible, and then if so, is it ethical. Should people be put in such a secluded environment and will they be able to survive psychologically? What will happen to them when they are stuck there with the same people for an incredibly large amount of time. We are really excited to be exploring this idea and all the sub topics that come with it.