After watching the episode San Junipero and The entire history of you, I felt very nervous and uncomfortable. In these episodes, the technology seems like a disaster to me. For San Junipero, it is saying that we are capable of programming ourselves inside an imaginary world, where we can live forever. It sounds like a really good idea. However, as we know, every program has a limited memory, if everyone chooses to go to that imaginary world, that world will be overpopulated soon.  Also, what if people use that as a kind of weapon? Some people might “store” people they don’t like inside the world, that basically “kills” that person indirectly. Since if you are inside the program, you do not have conscious in the real world. On the other hand, San Junipero does portray a good relationship, even though I do not like the technology inside it. At the end, Kelly chooses to be pass over, so when she passes away, she can live with Yorkie afterlife. However, while in the story, Kelly states that she doesn’t want to be pass over, because she doesn’t want to live in a world without her daughter and her husband, but she still does it at the end. This makes me think that Kelly loves Yorkie a lot and Yorkie makes her know and accept that she loves women as well as men. It is a very good ending. Those two people finally accept themselves as a homosexual person and live as a homosexual person. I feel proud about them.

For the entire history of you, I have actually no positive feelings towards it (it’s a good episode don’t get me wrong) I can’t really accept the story or the technology inside it. I just can’t imagine a world where people can rewind their memories and store them permanently. While it might be a good thing for test takers or someone who is bad at memories, it is awful. People’s brain is designed in a way, so we can forget things- usually those unhappy events.  However, this technology stores every details, which means you can’t really get over when a really bad things happen on you. Just like in the story, Liam keeps thinking about his wife is having an affair with another man and he keeps focusing on that to a point that it is affecting his life or almost makes him a criminal because he threatens Jonas to delete his memory with Ffion. However, I do feel lucky for Liam that at the end he finally finds out the relationship between Ffion and Jonas, otherwise Ffion and Jonas might keep doing their things in the future. I feel both Ffion and Jonas are piece of garbage since they know doing so will destroy a family, they still do it. Poor Liam. Overall, I do not like this technology. It makes possible that people can read your memories at anytime. This is terrible, since we want to keep some of our memories as secret.  

Technology is a good way to boost the communication of people. Both technology in both episodes boost the relationship.  Because of the program, dead people or elderly people can communicate with each other. Because of the permanent memory, people are likely to have more topic to talk about while they are on a party since they can just recall their memory.  However, too much of that might cause troubles. Liam became crazy because of that program because he paid too much attention on everything and people in San Junipero basically is having sex with each other, they don’t really have a good relationship with each other.

After watching Black Mirror Season 3 episode 1, it makes me feel very unfortunate for Lacie. She was a great, enthusiastic girl with a 4.2 grade.( from my understanding the grade is scale from 1 to 5, meaning her grade was pretty high)  Then because she wants to join a program that require a grade of 4.5, she tries every possible thing to increase her grade, so she decides to go to her friend’s wedding and make a speech and hope that she can increase her grade. At the end, her grade drops dramatically and she ended up in the jail.

I feel this is relatable to me.  When I post something online, I always hope that more people will like my post.  I feel bad if only a few people liked my post. I feel like this is an unhealthy behavior since it is just a post, an online post. Why do I have to care so much? However, even if I tell myself about that, I still care about the likes. I still care about the impression that other people are having on me. Same thing happen with other people. When I watch videos on youtube, those youtubers always want more likes for their videos. If they get enough likes, they will make more videos. On the other hand, if they get little or no likes, they will not keep doing it.  Those likes or “grades” online is just like the money that we use in the real world. We need them to work harder. Even though I think likes are important because it encourages people to work harder and produce work with great quality, too much of it will be terrible. It will take over your soul and controls you to do something you don’t agree.

Social media is a powerful tool. Some candidates use social media to convince people to vote for them. Also, it gives people a chance to know about other people’s daily life. People can also use this to share their own life. All of these are benefits of social media.  However, if people become too serious about this, it might have the opposite effect. There’s a famous quote from Albert Einstein-”I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” Don’t let social media controls you. You should be the one controlling it.

This week’s Star Trek is very shocking to me. It is mainly about Data creates another android named Lal and he treated her as his daughter. And he teaches her every aspects in human life.  This actually surprise me because because it is really hard to create a robot that knows how to think and act like a human because it requires a lot of knowledge in computer science. I am a computer science major  and I know how difficult it is to code a very simple program. Coding a robot with definitely take tremendous amount of time and experience in order to do that since you want the robot to act as a human, you will need a lot of complicated codes in order to do so.  This frightens me because Lal is not created by humans, she is created by another robot. This means that Data is smarter than majority of his crew mates. I have watched a lot of movies and shows about how robots start to fight against human beings because they believe they are smarter and they don’t want to be controlled by humans. And currently, even though the robots/technology do not have their own conscious yet, they are slowly substituting with humans. There is a supermarket near my high school and the supermarket didn’t hire any cashier, they use technology instead. The technology has improved so much recently, and I am not saying it is a bad thing. Since technology also helps humans in many ways especially in medical field

This week’s Star Trek also makes me feel emotional too. Even though both Data and Lal are robots, they behave very similar like a regular human. Especially when Lal are starting to pick up those lessons. She learns that the world is not as good as what she thought, she got bullied by her classmates, the captain of another star ship tries to take her away from her father. All of those are things that humans will go through when they are growing up. At the end, Lal can finally feel emotion, but this takes her life as well. She is no longer there.  Even though I do not support creating a lot of robot because I am afraid they will take over the world, I do want Lal to stay alive since she just begins to feel like a human. However, this can foreshadows that a robot is a robot, no matter how smart they are, they are not going to be humans because humans have emotions- one of the strongest weapon that a human has, while robots don’t. Therefore, I think that is the reason why the director decides to let Lal died. The directors doesn’t want there is a robot who is similar to a human while it is not considering as a human. Therefore, I started to worry about Data, because from this episode, Data behaves exactly like a human. He wants to protect his child. He wants his child to learn. All of those characteristics are very similar to humans. As a result, I made a prediction that Data will not be alive at the end of the Star Trek. Hopefully that is not true, but this is my thought. Robot is  robot. Human is human.

After watching the movie “Ex Machina”, I feel really really impressed.  It is about an AI name Ava uses her intelligence to escape the laboratory.  At first I thought, Ava is just a regular AI or at least better than regular AI since she can communicate with Caleb. Also, even though I don’t think she has any emotions since she doesn’t really show how she feels, she feels Caleb’s emotion.  Also, when Ava tells Caleb that he should not trust Nathan because Nathan is lying about everything, I even thought Nathan will be the big boss in the movie. However, at the end, Ava escapes, kills Nathan and even locks Caleb inside the laboratory.  This proves my point that she didn’t have any emotions, in other words, she doesn’t have a heart. That’s why she locks Caleb inside even though Caleb tries to save her. One thing that frightens me is that she uses the sympathy inside a human to help her to escape.  She pretends that she fall in love with Caleb and acts like she is curious about the outside world. Because of that Caleb begins to have pity on her. Because of that Caleb decides to help her to escape. It is really scary when an AI knows the weakness of most humans, and she planned everything by herself, which means she might be smarter than a human being. Also, I observe one thing in the movie. Everytime when a new test begins, there will be something written on the screen says stage 1, etc. Even though it is talking about the process of turing test, I interpreted that in different ways.  I feel like it is more like Ava’s plan step 1. And at the end, when Ava kills Nathan and locks Caleb, the screen also prints that for one last time. I think this basically means Ava’s plan is successful.

This movie makes me rethink about AI. Before watching this movie, I feel like why not just have AI, they are great.  They can do everything for us. Right now, I feel like AI might be more dangerous than human beings. What makes human being so dangerous is that they have the intelligence to dominate other species. However, humans will not do anything they want because they have emotion and sympathy.  They sympathy the weak, they help the people who used to help them. Emotion/feelings and sympathy are the greatest weapon to restrict human beings. However, AI don’t have that and in fact they might be smarter than humans. Therefore, they become unstoppable without humans’ control. Also, fun fact. Usually in the terror movie, those monsters are very similar to a human, such as zombie etc. The reason why it is make like that is because humans naturally resist something that looks like themselves, but at the same time not a human being. Therefore, if AI are made to be look like a human being, it will cause a lot of terror, and if AI is able to think by themselves, they might start to resist humans and even try to overthrow them.