Concerts and Snapchat

While I was in Mexico during Spring Break this past week, I met some new friends who were from Oklahoma.  We all got to talking and somehow ended up talking about the best concerts we had gone to.  Being an avid concert goer, I listed several I had gone to and the ones I especially enjoyed.  But then I thought about all the videos and pictures I had taken on my phone, but were no longer on it because they were taking up too much room.  I had downloaded them all to my computer and deleted them off my phone fairly soon after each concert.  So that got me thinking of why I took them to start with.  This situation would have been the perfect opportunity to show them to other people, but I didn’t have access to them at the time when I needed them.  When else was I actually going to use them?  I haven’t personally ever gone back to re-watch them ever, and even if I did, they were taken on my phone while we were all singing along in seats that were not front row, so the quality of the videos isn’t even all that great.

This goes back to the discussions we had earlier this semester about how we can either live in the moment, or record it for a later time.  Without a doubt, if you are taking a Snapchat video or picture at any event, you are missing the experience that is right in front of you.  Watching something through a small screen in front of you is simply not the same as whatever event you are attending.  Yet, even knowing this, I and many others, continue to do it constantly.  And it can become exhausting, because you’re always holding your phone up to hopefully get the best view and best video you can.  But instead, we should really be trying to enjoy the current environment.  This is all easier said than done, but as technology continues to improve and social media becomes an even bigger part of everybody’s lives, it will continue to get worse.

Thinking back on all the concerts I’ve gone to, there is not one that I didn’t pull my phone out to take pictures or videos.  Of course everyone wants to “remember the event” and pictures and videos are a great way of doing that.  But sometimes it becomes excessive, and I know I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else.  But reflecting back on all these times, I kind of wish I hadn’t been watching it through my little screen.  I probably missed lots of details that I would have seen if I had been watching the performance directly.  So going forward, I hope to enjoy things in the moment, and not always through a camera lens.  It won’t be easy, but I think it will be a good goal to work towards.  I got a little taste of it while I was in Mexico.  I only had a wifi connection, and even that wasn’t very strong or good.  So none of my social media would load and Snapchat was so slow.  So I decided to not worry about social media for most of the trip and I felt so much more relaxed because I didn’t feel the need to respond to everyone right away.

Would You Become an Immortal Machine?

As I found myself scrolling through my timeline on Twitter today as I usually do, a tweet from NPR caught my eye saying "If, at death, your body was instead preserved for some future revival, would the thing that lives forever  be *you*?". This tweet then led to an article titled "Would You Become an Immortal Machine?". Before clicking it, I found myself nervous wondering if the technology we have discussed over the course of this semester was finally happening. Upon further reading of the article I came to realize it was a promotion of Journalist Mark O'Connell's new book on "transhumanism" titled To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborg's, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, but it got me thinking about the fact that this type of technology may be closer than we think.
Interestingly enough, O'Connell doesn't consider himself to be a "transhumanist", but simply someone interested in this type of progression in science and technology. His fascination led to the discovery of an underground group of biohackers that want to continue advancement into making humans "immortal", as well as the scientists who want to protect humans from the future of Artificial Intelligence. It is obvious that Artificial Intelligence is becoming more prominent in our society with the rise of systems such as Amazon's Alexa or Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg's "Jarvis". Whenever I come across advertisements for these systems I'm always amazed by how we have progressed so quickly from simply having the world at our fingertips (through our phones, computers, etc.) to now being able to essentially access the world through our voices. However, this progression is also unnerving given that we may be very quickly moving towards a society completely controlled by technology. 
As stated previously, the biohackers O'Connell talks about are motivated by the idea that scientific progression can one day beat death and humans can be immortal. This would essentially make everyone "god-like" and while that sounds like a good thing, isn't the idea of "living" influenced by having a finite beginning and end? As O'Connell says in the NPR article, "What makes us human is precisely our fallibility, our connection to our bodies, the existential threat of death. Remove that and we are a huge question mark, something we can't even contemplate". The Biohackers he meets with have the idea of transferring the human "essence" into a machine that way we can live forever. However, that doesn't sound like truly "living". Like the other reproductions we have explored the last few months, it seems like this machine would be missing the human aura. In class we have talked about the relationship between accessibility and aura. Particularly how when something becomes more accessible, that leads to the diminishment of the aura. With immortality life would become infinitely accessible, but our lack of imperfections given that we would be a machine and not human, would also lead to lack of human aura.
To Be a Machine also brings forth the problems we already have regarding technological devices. For example, the attachment to our phones. Many of us (myself included), would feel completely lost without our devices because we have become so reliant on them. As technology continues to progress, it seems that our addiction and reliance will only become stronger. It will be interesting to not only see how as AI systems and robotics progress and become more prominent in our everyday lives, but also how these more advanced systems may potentially overtake our lives the way in a stronger way than our phones have. 
As wonderful as technology is, it is still unnerving to think that our world may one day be controlled by machines and not real living things. So although I love my devices and everything technology has brought us thus far, similar to O'Connell I personally don't think I would ever want to become an "immortal machine". With that, I leave one last quote from the article that I found particularly intriguing about the future of transhumanism, "Is transhumanism the essence of the Resurrection, bodiless souls basking under the eternal light of the Singularity? Or is it the nightmarish dystopia of a machine-dominated future, our humanity lost, our struggles forgotten, our creations left behind as irrelevant?" Only time will tell where technology will take us, but it will definitely be interesting to find out if progress will create a better life for us or if it will eventually lead us further away from truly "living".

This is the link for the NPR article which also leads to Marc O'Connell's page where you can read an excerpt of the book mentioned above: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/22/521059752/would-you-become-an-immortal-machine

GATTACA

After taking the final, the essay question I wrote about caused me to recall my memories of watching GATTACA. The question relating to biological and technological reproduction is extremely relevant to the plot of GATTACA. The movie takes place in a futuristic world, where there are two types of people: normal people and genetically enhanced people. In this world, parents are able to choose the traits that they want their children to inherit, essentially creating perfect human beings. The movie sort of blurs the line between these two types of reproduction. The children being born are most certainly not robots, but the way in which they are born is not natural. That brings about the question of how to qualify these people. They are human in one sense, but not really human in another. Flaws are part of what makes us human, but in GATTACA many people do not have flaws. The creation of these flawless human beings creates segregation in the population. This relates to the overall conversation we have been having in class and the main question I’ve been asking myself: Is it worth it to pursue advancements in technology/genetics that may pose catastrophic potential dangers? Obviously there are benefits, which can be seen in GATTACA. When parents are able to pick the genes of their descendants, there is no risk of disease. Eradicating disease is the main goal of the entire medical research field. GATTACA also exposes the risks of these kind of advancements. If you could choose the genetic makeup of your children, why wouldn’t you make them smarter and more athletically gifted? This would create a divide between those who are genetically enhanced and those who are genetically inferior. There would be no societal purpose for those who are not genetically superior, because their productivity would not be maximized. Regular humans would be no more useful than animals, which may ultimately lead to their extinction. The implementation of this new technology would completely wipe out the process of natural selection, because there is nothing natural about it. Still, this might be less risky than creating robots to do our jobs for us, because at least there is no chance of a non-human takeover, even though the argument could be made that an enhanced human is not necessarily human. The movie is just science fiction, but at the rate we are progressing, the day where this kind of science is possible may be in the very near future.

Replacing Jobs with Robots

                After reading R.U.R. the idea of robots replacing normal human jobs popped into my head. I decided to look further into this idea, and it turns out that I am not the only one who has this fear. There’s an article I found on the Science Daily that contains research conducted by Baylor University on “Technophobia.” A technophobe is a person who fears robots, artificial intelligence and new technology that they do not fully understand.

                In the study, they found that those who had this fear of robots taking over their jobs suffered from anxiety-related mental health issues. Previous research has shown that employees with little job security and issues with unemployment had poorer mental health and that these factors were often linked to heart disease and mortality rates.

                Billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban believes that automation is going to cause unemployment. Society is advancing at an extremely rapid rate. This advancement or evolution in technology is an exponential change in society, so we will be advancing more and more rapidly. Eventually, we will reach a point where we will have the capability to produce a very high-functioning and almost life like android that will be able to complete any task that a human can complete in a fraction of the time. This will increase efficiency of the work and cause an increase in demand for these robots. Soon, most companies and businesses will invest in these androids, so they can increase their profits greatly. Eventually all the jobs that were once completed by humans will be taken over by these diligent, non-fatiguing androids. Then, there will be robots to replace and repair the other working robots. Essentially, humans will no longer have jobs, and there will be a divide created between the rich and the poor. Where the poor will have no money to survive, while the rich will have more than enough to support themselves and their children for generations to come.

                Many are aware of robots having the potential to replace their jobs, and some take an active stance against creating them. The article mentions that in England, 19^th Century textiles workers destroyed new machines to protest employers who utilized new inventions that allowed faster and cheaper labor by workers who were not as skilled. This has already been seen with many engineering companies where the parts to a car are made by machine or how many basic items such as brushes and push brooms. This idea has been around for a long period of time, however it did not have as much momentum as it does today.

                With the new additions like Siri, highly realistic robots made by China, Da Vinci machines, Roombas, etc. These are all a small start to a very huge problem. Da Vinci machines are used for surgery and need to be powered by the surgeon, however one day they could be completely independent of a user. This is just a basic example of how society is on its path to making work more efficient, but replacing much-needed jobs at the same time.

Article link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170321125007.htm

Harry Potter World

Over spring break I visited Harry Potter World in California's Universal Studios.  As an avid Harry Potter fan I have always wanted to go there, and looking back on the trip I can't help but relate it to this class.
We've discussed the ways in which people don't necessarily experience concerts or other events because they're busy snapchatting the entire thing, and I actually thought about that when I made my decisions about what and when to photograph.  The first time I walked around Hogsmeade I opted to not take any pictures and simply enjoy looking around and seeing all there was to see.  I think this enhanced my experience because I was actually taking it all in rather than documenting the fact that I was there.  Later on in the day I took many pictures and videos so I could look back on it, but I'm happy I waited to do so until later on.
This trip also reminded me of the aura and copies.  The main attraction of Harry Potter World is recreating parts of the book's universe so we can experience it in real life.  The books have a different aura from the movies, just as both do from the physical place in California.  However, Universal Studios still manages to capture some of Harry Potter's aura, thus attracting so many people.  Buying souvenirs there was a necessity because it's Harry Potter World and why would you not buy a souvenir?  Many people have that attitude, as the park very well knows, and therefore can overcharge on everything because people are willing to pay more at the park.  I ended up getting the resurrection stone horcrux, and I probably could have found it for much cheaper online, but I didn't want it from online.  Somehow it being from Harry Potter World instead of the internet makes it seem more real, I guess giving it a different aura than from Amazon, even though they would probably be almost identical.  It just seemed more real to me if it came from a shop in a recreation of Hogsmeade, and I realized that a huge part of an object's aura is where it's from; I had thought about that before, but not to the extent that I did after leaving Harry Potter World.  Overall Harry Potter World is a magical place with a magical aura and I 10/10 would recommend.

Spring Break Thoughts

As I was driving home for spring break, the song Gasoline by Halsey came on, and some of the lyrics made me this of the class. The lyrics go, “And all the people say you can’t wake up, this is not a dream. You’re part of a machine, you are not a human being. With your face all made up, living on a screen low on self-esteem, so you run on gasoline. I think there’s a flaw in my code. These voices won’t leave me alone…”. These lyrics made me think of a few different things we have discussed in class. The first is Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto. In this, she said that we are all so close to technology that we are all becoming cyborgs. This made me think the song was about how close we all are to technology and how it has become a barrier between actual human interaction.

Another way I related it to the class was in the part where she mentions living on a screen. Although this probably isn’t what she had in mind, I thought of an episode from Black Mirror where all the people lived in this place where they all had sims. Their sims would interact and go places and do things, but the actual people would either stay in their tiny room, on their stationary bike to earn currency or clean. Their life was completely virtual. The only actual physical thing they had was food. Everything else was like a Wii game.

I was curious as to what her meaning behind it was so I looked it up. As it turns out Halsey suffers from bipolar disorder. A lot of the lyrics pertain to her struggle with that. She has probably been referred to as insane throughout her life. She probably tries to cope with it through humor while also asking if anyone else suffers like her. These points become obvious when reading or listening to the lyrics of the song. The contents of the class gave the song a completely different meaning, which I thought was interesting. When I heard it I figured it was about people acting or feeling like machines. I don’t think I ever would have guessed it was about a bipolar disorder even though it makes sense now.