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In thinking about what my group wanted to research about for our poster presentation, we decided to focus on price discrimination. Paige and I are in the same Marketing class this semester. Our professor just recently taught us about price discrimination and tactics companies use to charge their customers as much as possible. During market research, a company might discover that some groups of people might be willing to spend 30$ on something while others are willing to spend 50$. If they charge the price of 50$, they lose the customers who were only willing to be 30$. If they charge 30$ they are losing the potential profit of the customer who are willing to pay more, or of the customers who assume the lower price means a decrease in quality. Over the past decade, retail stores have begun using a new pricing tactic that allows them to charge both 50$ and 30$ for the same product to attract both types of consumers. This pricing tactic is called promotional pricing. Promotions? You might be thinking that this is common and they aren’t fooling you. But in fact they are. The only offer the promotions in areas where they know the people aren’t willing to spend more. For the people who are willing to spend more, they don’t see the lower price in other stores as being unfair because they just think it is the store giving a sale.

Companies like Amazon are also employing price discrimination techniques based upon their customer’s web searches. People who shop more, or have recently looked up certain items will see more expensive products returned in their amazon search. Amazon’s access to our web searches questions the privacy and security of every consumer. The price discrimination and privacy is bringing about new ethical discussions that are currently being disputed. I personally think that it is unfair for companies to take advantage of the resources they have access to against us. Additionally, I think the American people have become too complacent in thinking our privacy isn’t important or sacred anymore. Our project will hopefully bring the issue to peoples attention so they can formulate their own opinions on the topic and hopefully find a voice to speak out against it.

One of the interesting things about this week’s classes, specifically Thursday’s was the ideas of privacy, survivorship and self. The graph used to describe the path of our lives and how it oscillates as we reach our desired selves was very interesting. It makes sense that our path to what we desire is not straight, and I do believe that removing things like privacy takes away from what makes us, us. By removing privacy and inputting our information into a common network like GI in “Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand” makes us like a unit that can be computed or slotted. Dating sites are an example of this; we input all the information we are willing into a website and let an algorithm compute compatibility for the best possible mate, which also occurs in “Stars” with Rat Korga and Marq Dyeth. We don’t learn anything by being perfectly matched with anyone, we learn through failures with other partners, and through those failures we grow, we become who we really are. By inputting all of one’s information into a database, the line to what we truly desire becomes straight, and almost meaningless if we can predict everything about ourselves.

The different types of categories for the questions we would ask survivors was also very interesting. We discussed ethnographic, ontological and philosophical questions. One of the questions I would have asked a survivor was “do you believe there is a reason that you survived?”, which I believe would have yielded a very interesting answer, especially if the survivor believed preservation of him and what made him was very significant. Everyone on Velm was fascinated by Rat Korga’s survival and it would have been very interesting to see what his answer may have been had he been asked this question.

One of the major theme’s in this week’s classes is the future and robotics. In the first episode of “Humans”, we see common problems that may arise with the integration of human-like robots in a futuristic society. A family experiences tension over a robot’s influence over the children. In another scenario, a man is attached to a robot resembling a father-son relationship based on memories. Consciousness among robots is seen as a sort of a “disease” needed to be eradicated by roboticists. What’s very interesting to me is that Asimov’s three laws for robots could easily be grounds for creating advanced robots in the future; science fiction no longer becomes fiction as depicted by the first episode of “Humans”. The topic of specieism also comes into play when thinking about the potential relationships humans and robots may share in the distant future. Is it right to grant a life form the ability to fathom freedom without ever granting it freedom? Why would we create robots similar to us when we fear greatly if they become too similar? Similar to The Bicentennial Man, “Humans” also shares the idea that man is uncomfortable with it not being the top species on Earth. Robots and androids can be made to come close, but the minute they cross over us and become indistinguishable, or equal, we suddenly become afraid. Perhaps it is a pride issue, that we are experiencing somewhat of an identity crisis, as if our entire existence, who we are, our happiness and memories, can be crafted out of metals and circuits. It almost seems selfish that the human characters in these stories seem like they believe that sentience and true consciousness should only belong to humans, as if we were born with that right.

Asimov’s other story “That Last Question” was also one of my favorite reads from this week. Upon reading this short story, one can really experience the extent of Asimov stretching his imagination to trillions of year in the future. “The Last Question” breaks down the universe’s relationship with man and man’s constant pursuit of energy. Once, it was coal and fossil fuels. Fastforward billions of years in the future and man has learned to harness energy of the stars, however they are harnessing energy faster than the universe is expanding. What is so strange and incredibly fascinating about this story is the last words uttered by the Multivac: “Let there be light!”. For someone who is viewed as one of the greatest science fiction writers in history, I would never have expected a religious theme or element to be the backbone of one of Asimov’s stories. It seems as though the Multivac created something similar to the Big Bang after man had ceased to exist.

The story also reminds me of a potential theory I have come to somewhat believe may be true: the heat death of the universe theory. As we know, energy cannot disappear, only be converted into different forms. If one were to sit in a room with logs, paper and some matches and create a fire, all the energy stored in the logs and paper would be converted into heat. After some time, however, the heat will fade and the energy be converted into an almost irretrievable, useless form. Trillions and trillions of years into the future our universe’s stars will dwarf and run out, as Asimov describes in “The Last Question”. All energy will be converted into somewhat of the irretrievable form aforementioned. Another aspect of the heat death universe I have thought about may be that the Big Bang is caused by gravity alone. Gravity in our universe is thought to be alien, something not from our dimension. It is like tendrils moving through all possible objects in space at once as it bends space and time. Every single object in space has a gravitational pull, from the largest plane to the smallest rock. Gravity does not need energy to move forces. So, when the heat death of the universe comes, gravity will take affect and over an unfathomable amount of time, all mass present in space will pull together into one mass. In this one mass lies all the energy lost into useless forms, and maybe, if we put aside some logic, this big lump of mass compresses into something like the big bang and the massive amalgamation of energy expels the mass of matter in all directions, creating a new universe. This of course seems like an improbable explanation for the birth of universes but is one I have been thinking about for quite some time, especially now after having read Asimov’s “The Last Question”.

This past week we watched Christopher Nolan’s film, Memento in class. This film is based on the concept of an individual’s memory and how memories can be formulated, shaped, and distorted. This is similar to what I mentioned in my previous journal entry about humans having “selective memory.” The main character in Memento, Leonard, is not able to create new memories since his “incident”, which was when his wife was murdered and his head was slammed against a wall. At the end of the movie, Leonard says that at times he chooses to lie to himself because it easier to do that than to face the reality of his actions. Other characters in the film, such as Natalie and Teddy, take advantage of Leonard’s condition and manipulate him into doing what they want. Through this process, Leonard becomes a murderer, but he chooses to lie to himself and say that he is only avenging the assault and murder of his wife.

     Memento is an extremely difficult film to follow because Christopher Nolan does not present the events in a chronological order. I believe that Nolan is able to hide plot-holes in the film because the viewers are so preoccupied with trying to understand what is going on, that they fail to recognize the reality of certain events occurring. For example, Leonard’s head is slammed against a wall, which causes him to not be able to remember anything more than 10-15 minutes into the past. Even though he cannot remember anything from the accident, he is able to remember the limitations of his memory condition and also that he is on a manhunt for the man that murdered his wife. Memory is a dangerous thing. If we are unable to remember anything that has happened to us, then it is difficult to trust those around us because we would have no prior knowledge of who they are or what their relationship to us is.

Journal 9

Memento was a very interesting movie. It’s HAPAX, the way in which it had two concurrent plot lines that functioned in opposite directions was very hard to grasp initially, but in the end worked to function much like the main character’s condition. As I mentioned in class on Thursday, ever since we entered elementary school and even kindergarten, we have been taught to think of stories in an arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. In between the beginning, middle, and end lies the rising action and climax of the plot. However, Memento seems to disregard this traditional story arc, as the two opposite faces story lines meet in the middle. This was very disorienting and left me feeling unsettled.
Thinking back on the movie, and connecting it to Professor Perrone’s thoughts on computers, I have come to the conclusion that Leonard’s life does work much like a function, where he is given a state, it is processed by means of the algorithmic function, and a new state is generated. This state is made clear by his tattoos and the mementos that he carries around, but he is unable to know any previous states. As Professor Drexler pointed out, this makes him walk the line between a human and a robot, where his life is determined by the mementos, but he is able to take them and make his own decisions after processing them. He is, however, able to remember the emotions behind the mementos, which makes him more human then robot and is the main caveat in his condition. It makes me wonder whether, then, like Sammy Jankis, whether the condition is more constructed then reality and a true coping technique for dealing with the death of his wife.