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.