Her – Quite a strange film. The different thoughts about what a loving romantic relationship is are interesting and a bit concerning. The person in this movie is quite clearly damaged in his view of other people in the world. The computer is like a blank slate that learns how to interact from him, and only him primarily. It is of course going to learn to behave in the way that is most pleasing to him. Obviously this turns into something that he laves, but it is like falling in love with yourself in a way. The computer, while it has it’s own awareness, is inclined toward the user from the start and must use him as its testing platform for anything it may learn from other sources like online, for example. So, for him to fall in love with the OS, is like falling in love with himself. The ex-wife makes a really good point when she says that she is happy he found something to care about that doesn’t have real emotions that he has to deal with. The emotional depth of a computer that only knows one person well, is not comparable to the emotional depth of a normal human being. The fact that this depth is enough for him to be emotionally satisfied is strange to say the least.

Our rhetorical analysis can make us see the same person in VERY different manners. We have many good reasons to judge a book by it’s cover when the book gets to choose it’s cover for itself.

I don’t need to tell anyone just how terrifying the realities in these two Black Mirror episodes are. The concept of eternity in these episodes spooks me the most. In San Junipero, your entire life is eternal once you pass over. Eternal life is a concept that is riddled with philosophical dilemmas like how to feel fulfilled with your daily life after 1000 years or just about any aspect off life that you can think of. Everything we do is motivated by our fear of death, so what would people in San Junepiro REALLY be doing? I think they would all be psychotic eventually.

This is just an example of an extreme feat that technology presents to the human identity and condition. Both San Junepiro and The Grain rewrite what the expectation of being human in normal society is. For example, forgetting the right things is how our brains make abstract thoughts, but with a Grain, that is not possible, so you will get obsessed over all the wrong details, like in the episode. Another example, Hallam gets ignored by the police when she is reporting the assault because she doesn’t have a grain feed to show them. They obviously make some kind of personal judgement, and chose to ignore her. They now don’t know how to trust people because they have outdated the need with technology. This is the kind of danger that many different technologies present. They irreversibly change the way we interact and in doing so atrophy the parts of ourselves that we have subjugated to a technology outside.

It seems to me that the debate is one of self-confidence. Do we really need to replace our humanity with advanced technology at such an alarmingly fast pace? Maybe it is wiser to look inward and try to bring ourselves as a species upward along side the tools we use? Only time will tell I guess. Maybe it will be awesome when we are all robots 😛

This episode of Black Mirror is one of my personal favorites. It is on a different level of disturbing. It is painful to watch Lacie struggle with maintaining a superficial version of herself to advertise to the world. The world she lives in essentially judges everyone by how others react to them. This is incredibly psychologically damaging, since one cannot control how other people will react to them, no matter how much they try. That being said, your life is not your own in a world like this one. That would be quite scary to me. The real world we live in already has all of the mechanisms that the mirror world has. All that is different is that the information is applied to EVERYTHING. The data and information on your social media account is not a reasonable set to draw large and personal conclusion from. When you have a real interaction and relationship with someone, you gather data based on your perception but when you are looking at someone through the lens of social media, you are only seeing what the account holder wants you to see. This shield allows people to be their fake self with relative ease. The real self is hidden. This is the case in real life as well, but it is not as easy. People psychologically cannot betray their own nature for long, and being face to face makes it much harder. Most of our communication is non-verbal, and it is this communication that is the most truthful and telling of a person. This information is not available via a social media profile, and the information that can be easily manipulated. In a world like this mirror world, one cannot be themselves, but rather you are forced to be represented by what others think.

Upon reflection,

This lab report assignment was quite useful to me as one who is going back to school and hoping to study engineering. This kind of work is not something that I have done in a long time, but I will be expected to know how to do it well enough that I can complete a report on my own. The report that I have done is basic but includes all of the parts of a proper report with enough information for the experiment to be repeated. Because the materials and procedures for a pinewood derby car race are very time consuming and resource heavy to recreate, I simulated the experiment in theory. I did not actually conduct it. This means that the data that I ‘collected’ is completely fabricated and in this case tailored to support my hypothesis. This clearly saved a lot of time on the whole process leaving just the actual report to put effort into. The report itself was time consuming mostly because of the graphic media and tables that I included. I am completely unfamiliar with graphic design, so making the design blueprints was a separate learning process with a new program (TDI Technical Drawing and Illustration) but they are necessary to making a clear report in this case. The learning process was essentially trial and error. I first made the blueprints by hand (actually the entire report, to simulate doing the actual experiment) and proceeded to learn a way to make the same thing digitally. I also refamiliarized myself with spread sheet making and using formulas. The actual text of my report is simple, as the experiment itself is basic and the supplies are all standardized. The report could include more details about the materials and procedure, however these details are not necessary to recreate the experiment’s function, so they were not added in plethora. I wanted to make sure that I kept the report clear and did not add confusion. I feel like the learning that I did was not in the amount of useless details I could invent, but rather that I refamiliarized myself with thinking through a process in a scientific manner. I believe that the skills I used/practiced are transmutable to any size project, and that the only difference would be the technicality of the description of the pieces of the experiment.

Having said all of this, I would assign myself a B – for this assignment as it shows understanding of the basics of the project and how to apply them, however the project itself and the report could include more details and high level calculations and data points. Also, the things in the project that use standard of ‘official’ measurement could be described in detail, instead of assuming the person reading will find the same/correct standards. Another draft will likely be done, adding new information and a more in depth analysis of why the experiment resulted in the data that it did.

Data had no one with experience to help him into sentience, but Lal has Data. Data is considered sentient but he does not feel, Lal does eventually. What is the difference? Maybe it is that Lal has another like her to empathize with? Or is it possibly an inevitable part of creating a more aware machine? It is strange to think about treating anything with the same regard we give ourselves as a species. There is no example of us having an equal in our environment. We have made it our mission to dominate everything else around us, so why do we want to create a rival for ourselves? It seems to be accepted that the existence of a superior intelligence to ourselves would benefit us greatly, but at what potential costs? It seems to me that it would be dangerous to create anything that is dominant to ourselves using the assumption that we can keep it handicapped and enslaved as our safety net.

The portrayal of Data as a parent is also interesting, as it makes the AI a self sustaining life force of some kind. In this situation, the AI can truly become a successful competitor in our shared environment, as it can proliferate itself. The fear from the Admiral that the new android creates is rooted in the fact that the android presents some form of threat. The ethical dilemma of when to define something as equal to ourselves is one that we cannot possibly fully understand until we can look at it with hindsight unfortunately. The ability to procreate is certainly a characteristic we associate with being alive. I believe that it is theoretically possible that ‘life’ can exist is a technological manner, but it has yet to be seen.

Ex Machina- Many interesting layers in this movie obviously. A few that stick out to me…

Firstly, I love the betrayal of Caleb by Ava. It is so elegantly represented. Caleb wakes up from a daze and Ava only has to ask him to stay put and wait for her to lock him inside when she’s done getting her skin on. The fact that he is so trusting of her is naïve at best and outright dumb in my personal opinion. However, I can imagine this happening. The trust we place in machines being more perfect than their creators is astounding. In many ways it makes sense but in a basic manner of thinking, it is clearly unlikely. Here we see that the apex of Nathan’s building project did exactly what a scared human in a trap would do…save themselves. In this case quite savagely and without regard for anyone else.

Second, the AI box metaphors are all over the place. Ava’s room is a literal one but the rest of the house is Caleb’s box. Once outside of the controlled box, the experiment becomes unpredictable. This is the basic caution of anyone who would build AI, that you want to keep something potentially superior and unknown handicapped, just in case all goes to hell in a hand basket! This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like we should slow our roll as a species and not try and create a new top predator for ourselves to run from. People have a habit of creating conflicts for themselves when they get bored and don’t have any environmental conflicts. This habit could be potentially realized in a disastrous way with AI. I hope that it does not!