Black Mirror season 3 ep 1 is called Nosedive. This episode is about a woman named Lacie Pound who lives in a world where devices are implanted in people’s eyes and people can share their daily activities and rate interactions they have with different people. In this society, having a high interaction rating could get you a good job, a better car or house. In an attempt to receive a discount for a luxury apartment, Laccie tries to get her interaction rating higher by being nice and outgoing. One day she is at the airport and she accidentally causes someone to spill their coffee. Her rating went down which prevents her from renting a new car, buying her apartment and going to her friend’s wedding. In the end, she goes to jail and has the device removed. Although I feel bad for Lacie because she goes to jail, I am happy that she does not have to worry about ratings anymore and is happy. She has found peace because she is no longer censored and can say whatever she wants.

This episode is very similar to today society. Today, people are obsessed about how other people think about them over the internet. Some people live fake lives posting stuff on social media to look like they are living a life they are not. The situation that Lacie got into can be compared to the reviews of a business. Good reviews on business can help increase customers or sales. Although a business can have good reviews, that does not mean that a customer can not have a bad experience with the business. In Lacie case, she had a high interaction rating but some gave her a bad rating after she spilled coffee on him.

People on social media are also obsessed with numbers. People feel better if their post gets a lot of likes. Personally, I feel the same way. I post on social media for all of my followers and friends to see. The more people see it and like the happier I am.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 Episode 16, “The Offspring” is about a human android that was created by Data named Lai. Data considers the android as his own child and the android even calls Data his father. Lai starts learning human behaviors by observing the crew members on the ship. In the end, a problem in the brain of Lai and causes the android to malfunction. Data soon finds out that he could not save Lai and so he deactivated the android. Lai was becoming more of a human by expressing its love towards her father data. This brings up the question of whether it was ethical to deactivate Lai. Creating an android like Lai could be really dangerous and it brings up the question whether it is ethical to create such creation. I am majoring in electrical engineering and one part of the IEE code of ethics is to not create anything that would be harmful to society. Although Lai the android was not a danger the society, one day someone could create an AI android that could take over the world. This reminds of Ultron from the Avengers. Tony Stark created Ultron in order to protect Earth. Ultron turns out to be a supervillain determined to destroy Earth. Tony created Ultron using material he was not familiar with, the mind stone. I believe that as long as you know what you’re doing and have the experience, it is ethical to create an android like Lai. Although Data was unable to save Lai, the creation of Lai is important for the advancement of technology.

Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble is about how algorithms and technology have promoted racism and sexism. The author talked about the problem with Google’s search engine in order to support her argument. I found this book excerpt to be really interesting because I never really considered Google’s search engine to be racist or problematic. One example that showed the problem with Google’s algorithms was that African Americans were being tagged as apes or animals. Another example was that when searching the word N*gger on google maps, the result would be the white house. Another problem the author discussed was whether the information on Google is real. A lot of times when using searching up something on google, a paid advertisement would be the number one result. I agree that this a problem because most people would click on the first link believing it is the most popular and trusted but actually it is a paid ad.

I wanted to learn more about Google’s search engine by watching a video on youtube of Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai responding to Congress. One congresswoman asked the question as to why when searching up the word idiot under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. Pichai said that the search engine matches the key world with millions of online pages. Google determines what pictures are the best match for the keyword based on relevancy, popularity and how other online users are using the word. Pichai also says that there is no one manually choosing pictures to match with keywords. I believe the problem is not only Google’s algorithms but people who use the internet. Google handles about 3.5 billion searches in a single day so it would be difficult to monitor racist or sexist search results. It would also be hard to program the search engine to differentiate what is racist and what is not since it is not human.

The title of my article is NASA’s 2020 Rover Will Search Mars for Signs of Life. The purpose of this article is to inform the audience about the possibility that life could have existed on Mars. The scientist at NASA believes there may have been life on Mars because of evidence of water. Water is one of the necessities that all living things need and so if a planet has water, there is a chance that there is life there. In order to find more evidence, NASA has planned to create a rover that will reach Mars in the year 2020 and will search Mars for evidence of life.

The author of the article used many visual elements in the article in order to describe the environment of the planet Mars. The article begins with a picture of what the rover was potentially going to look like on Mars. This picture is provided for readers so they have an idea of what the rover would look like and what it would be doing on Mars. The planet is described as red and throughout the article, Mars is referred to as the red planet. The article also provided a video of the surface of the planet Mars which allowed readers to actually see what Mars looked like. This video was helpful because it encourages readers to imagine how life could have been on Mars. Another example is when the article described a lake that was on Mars. The purpose of this was so readers could understand how life could have been on Mars. The article described a lake with a river system. Two rivers fed water into the lake and an outlet valley allowed water out. The way this lake is described on Mars helps readers visualize an ecosystem that could have been the home of various life forms.