How Millennials Will Talk About Love

            In today’s society, technology has become a part of each person’s daily life. Majority of people have a smartphone and other devices such as tablets and laptops. Technology has provided many advantages and made many tasks in life easier. For example, technology makes it easier to look up directions, general information, and it quickens the amount of time it takes to get into contact with someone. However, there are some concerns with the increasing rate of dependency on technology.
            For my show and tell, I decided to show a video that I found while on Facebook. The video depicts a relationship from start to end that is based on social media and the technology that is commonly used today. The video makes fun of the way that people today utilize technology and social media. While this video is meant to be a joke, the basis of the video is very much real. As social media and technology usage has increased, people have become more dependent on technology to communicate to one another rather than having face-to-face interactions. In many ways, technology has allowed for people to communicate much more efficiently. People who live in other states or even other countries can have contact to others through calling, texting, and social media websites. Social media has allowed people that would not necessarily communicate with each other normally to have easier access to one another. On the other hand, social media and technology has made it much easier to decrease communication between people. While technology allows people to reach each other at any moment in time, it has decreased the amount of face-to-face interactions people have with one another. It can be argued that technology has allowed people to communicate digitally and avoid communicating while in the physical presence of one another. Because people have become more dependent on digital interactions, face-to-face interactions have become more “awkward” in a way. With social media, often times people become so consumed with their digital presence that they forget how to present themselves when in contact with a real person. While in many ways social media has increased communication, it has decreased the ability for some to communicate in person. Social media allows individuals to pick what they see as the best parts of themselves to show to the world. In texts, messaging, and emails, a person can take as much time as they desire editing their words. Also, emotions are not always conveyed clearly through messaging. While there are emojis, little faces on a screen cannot replicate a person’s raw emotion and reaction. When communicating over social media and technology, others only see what that individual wants them to see.

            People have become so reliant on technology as a form of communication that they forget how to have a normal conversation. However, maybe communication through technology is becoming the new “normal”. In each era, new ways of living arise that people in previous times would think is absurd. As time progresses, what was once thought of as “crazy” becomes normal. Technology as a primary communication device may be today’s new normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpuMuB4zL98&t=9s

Show and Tell - diminishing aura

Aura is concept that is, in terms, hard to conceptualize; yet everyone knows exactly what it means. People especially know what it means when people say, “the aura diminished.” So this entails the question, how is the aura diminished? Or how is aura different from the first time we experience something, to the repeated experience of it. I presented this question in my show and tell presentation forever ago based on the movie Swiss Army Man. Swiss Army Man is movie about a man, Hank, who becomes stranded on a dessert Island, and right when he is about to kill himself, he finds another man. Although this man is dead, he has some odd capabilities that allow Hank to get off the island and back home. While trying to get back home, the dead body, Manny, starts talking and Hank has to reteach him everything about life.

            At one point in the movie Manny comes across a magazine with a woman with minimal clothing. Hank proceeds to tell him about magazines and girls. At one point he says, “Before the internet every girl was a lot more special.” This correlates to what we were talking about with Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Due to the Internet and advances in technology, pictures of girls have been more and more easily accessible, which in turn diminishes their aura. This scene in the movie is able to physically show the concept of aura by making Manny’s heart beat again. This picture’s aura effects Manny in a way it doesn’t affect Hank anymore. So one could argue that aura can be closely related to innocence.

            Aura diminishing over time is a concept that can be seen in everyday life, for example, marriage and relationships. When first entering a new relationship with someone there are butterflies and excitement in everything you do. This is because it is basically unchartered territory for you. The whole experience is new to you and that excites you, and thus the aura is affecting you more. However, this aura diminishes after spending so much time with that person. After repeatedly experiencing something, the excitement, and therefore the aura, fades.  You come to an area of familiarity, and so the aura of this other person doesn’t effect you anymore. This is a common problem among relationships because they tend to just lose that excitement and tend to lose interest.

            We crave the feeling of excitement, and so we seek out new experiences to experience the sense of a “new” aura. This is a reason why we make things so easily accessible to everyone, because everyone wants these new experiences and wants to feel that excitement from the aura. By doing this, we are actually diminishing the aura even more and making it even harder to experience the aura in the ways we want.

1984 Show & Tell

On Tuesday April 11^th, 2017 I chose to share a video summary and analysis of 1984 by George Orwell. I hoped to draw comparison from both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and The Circle written by Dave Eggers. In class, we were given the opportunity to watch Blade Runner which is a 1982 film based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. All three books provide a glimpse into the future via the eyes of their author. Each story develops a dystopian society that has the possibility to become reality if current events were to continue at the time the stories were written. 

In year of 1968 when Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was first published and around that time, there was a rapid growth in technology. This was a period where one of the earliest computer games was created along with cassette tapes, and touch-tone telephones. Not to mention an increased popularity in television sets. Philip K. Dick lived in this era and was inspired to imagine the world if these technological advancements were to continue all the way into the year 2021. At this point in time with a large focus on technology to implement in war, who is to say that androids weren’t going to be the pinnacle of such advancements. Philip K. Dick was most likely influenced through both Word War II, Vietnam War, and the Cold War all taking place within his lifetime. Therefore, a world of nuclear fallout to exist within fifty years only seems appropriate. Similar to how the different crisis surrounding Philip K. Dick crafted his dystopia, George Orwell was also influenced by the world around him.

George Orwell writes about a dystopian society in which constant surveillance, manipulation of media, and mind control come together to create the future. He lived in a time when Hitler burned books that did not reflect the highest interest of their Government. Advancing a step further Stalin, rewrote books and manipulated images to correspond to his ideals and what he wanted his country to see. Such manipulation is what brought Stalin so much power. Within the book 1984 the main character Winston works in a job where he rewrites articles to match whatever the government wants.  George Orwell made this a focus by utilizing the main character to partake in one of the main causes of the dystopian society. Control of the media means control of control of the people consuming it. George Orwell saw this trend in 1949. In 2013 Dave Eggers saw this same trend, but it has shifted.

Instead of monitoring and controlling the media that is consumed by the members of the society, the control comes from the monitorization of media being produced. The more people who are creating content and sharing media, the more control the government or in this case a company has over those people. Not only are people unable to keep secretes, but all their data is being processed and analyzed for any use. Although originally the idea of having a world without secrets or lies seems productive, it actually causes a negative effect in which the story of The Circle further develops.

Blog Post 2

I have recently realized a very obvious connection between a reoccurring theme in The Circle and autonomous driving (my topic for the final project).  The common theme is the apparent desire for acceleration within each of the industries. In The Circle, we are introduced to the company at a time when it seemed to already be far more advanced than any other company in that world or in ours that we live in today. They have not only taken over several companies that we consider at the top of our social media craze like Facebook and SnapChat, but also have begun having control in other major realms of life like healthcare. This control only grows, and grows very quickly, throughout Mae’s short time at The Circle. At first, I got the vibe that they were doing this for the betterment of society by providing tools to make everyone’s life easier and basically perfect. But towards the middle and end of the book, I began to think of how crazy this monopoly is and that allowing everyone access to everything is actually pretty crazy and dangerous. I have not finished the book so they are still saying that “the circle is almost complete” and it has not taken very long at all for them to get close to this point of “completeness”. It seems as if the leaders of the company are rushing this status of having complete transparency, which what I think they mean by “completeness”. Why should the acceleration of the company to “complete” be so urgent? In my experience, rushing any kind of project usually leads to many small errors that take longer to find when it’s on a larger scale. This is how I see the book possibly ending, with the “completeness” causing chaos because it is not ready because of how accelerated the process was. This concept from The Circle connects very closely with Elon Musk and how he wants Tesla to be the first company to have a fully autonomous vehicle. Tesla has not been one of the primary faces in autonomous driving until recently and he is already pushing to complete this incredible feat by the end of the year. To put this in perspective, Google has been working towards a fully autonomous vehicle since 2009 and do not think they will have it figured out until 2021 at the earliest.  Tesla has shocked the world with its one-of-a-kind cars but this seems like this kind of project should not have a true deadline. There are so many things that have to be taken into consideration before these vehicles could actually be used in our society. First off, which I mentioned briefly in my other post, is how our infrastructure will not be ready for this car change. Part of the genius behind autonomous driving is that all the vehicles will be able to communicate with one another, which will make driving way more efficient because the cars will know when the other has to make a lane change or the exact distance that it has to begin braking before a red light. If autonomous cars are on the road with our standard ones, they won’t be able to communicate and that could potentially cause more accidents since everything won’t be connected in one day. I suppose Musk could still come out with the first autonomous vehicle but it would not have much use in today’s society so by the time our infrastructure is ready for this change, the technology will probably need to be different. Another thing to understand is that the economy might not be good enough for a ton of people to make the switch from regular cars to autonomous ones. I think companies attempting for autonomous driving should start trying to figure out how they can incorporate into the vehicles we drive today in order to make the transition faster and cheaper.

A Sentence is Worth a Thousand Pictures -- Image Synthesis from Text Show & Tell

              On the surface, perception doesn’t actually seem all that complicated. For humans, it comes so naturally that it’s one of the defining characteristics of life. After all, what is a human without the ability to see, hear, touch, feel, or taste? At a base level, perception is simply the ability to tell the difference between at least two things – what is sight without at least the contrast of light and dark? Intelligence, again at a basic level, then, comes from the ability to make decisions based on perception. Electronic computers have always had the ability to change their execution based on the internal state of the machine (i.e. make decisions) to the point that it is one of the key requirements for even mathematical formalizations of a computer to be able to compute everything that is computable (fun fact: referred to as Computable Functions). With this in mind, one of the biggest challenges in computing hasn’t been how to create a machine that makes decisions (my alarm clock already does that based on the time) but how to digitize perception so that computers can then make meaningful decisions based on their perception of the environment. It’s progress in this exact area that has essentially been the foundation of machine learning or, as it’s commonly called these days, “AI”.

In the pre-electronic computer era, the core mathematics involved in machine learning were mostly developed and scattered across the fields of statistics, linear algebra, and calculus/optimization, but when computers came onto the scene, entirely new venues of possibilities opened to researchers – venues that were so computationally intensive that, up until that point, they would have just been too tedious, time consuming, or boring for ordinary humans to do. With easy computation, though, it became possible to combine these subjects such that between the early 1950s and today, we’ve gone from using computers for basic regression “fit a trend line to my data” tasks all the way to being able to transfer artistic style between images or, as the subject of my show and tell discussed, synthesize new images just from a description of what is in it. Many of the key advancements in machine learning haven’t been to show that this is possible mathematically – the field of mathematics is generally broad enough that you can ask “is there a function that takes a set of sentences and maps each one to an image?” and it’ll go “sure! If you can represent them mathematically somehow, there’s a function (or at least a relation) that maps between them!” – they’ve been to create methods such that it suddenly becomes feasible to find or create these functions based on examples of how they behave.

In the context of new media, the capabilities offered by these techniques are somewhat unprecedented. As more media becomes digital, it is possible not only to duplicate effortlessly but even transform that media into a new form effortlessly. With this in mind, the line between what is original and what is copied grows ever thinner, and really, it’s going to be either interesting or scary, depending on who you ask, to watch media develop in the coming years. To a certain extent, we’re already getting to that point, and in my project, I’m going to explore what I see as the frontiers of machine-generated or machine-assisted-generation of media with the hope that looking at the state of things now will give us a viewport into how things will be in the future.

Photo Phone Project

Before I decide to blog about my final project, I wanted to talk about an experience that happened to me on Sunday. It made me think about how much I personally use my phone, and how I try not to be the person my friend was portraying me to be.

On Sunday, my friend came to me and my roommate to ask if she could use us as models for a project she was working on for class. I asked what the project was, and she told me it was about technology taking over our lives. She explained that her project specifically would focus on cell phones, and how they distracted us from connecting to other people. She had to take 30 different photos that showed this idea, in all different places, with all people unable to put their phones down.

She asked my roommate to pose on the couch, sitting next to each other but not talking, simply staring at our cell phones. Next, we shot pictures of us making food in the kitchen, again engrossed in the tiny screens in our hands. We also did a shoot of us eating our food at the kitchen table, but too busy with our portable devices to enjoy the company of friendship while we ate our meal.

I thought the idea for her project was a powerful one. She explained that she would also be shooting in scenery, such as on mountains or by a pond, where the people would be too involved with their phones to notice the beauty around them. She even had an idea of someone searching for images of beautiful scenery on their phones while they were surrounded by the scenery around them. Kind of ironic.

It is increasingly common to see this happen all around us. We see it in class, with students bored by the lecture, pulling out their phones to pass the time. In even more intimate settings, with friends, or on dates, people are still pulling out their phones, and disregarding the others around them. It has become a coping mechanism for anxiety and social situations we want to get out of. Bored? At a loss for words? Just pull out your phone and let all your problems melt away.

I try really hard not to be this person. I strive to make conversation, to find something to talk about, and to put my phone away when I’m in the presence of someone else. I know a lot of people do it, and I don’t like when people do it to me, but how can I tell them it’s rude if I’m doing the same thing? It is still something I am working on, as I constantly get chastised by my sister to put my phone away. She keeps me honest with myself, and she is my role model for being minimal with phone usage. She rarely has her phone out, and I don’t know how she survives without it, but she does, and I think it is all something we can practice doing. Slowly minimizing our phone usage to be more present in our current lives with the people we care about.

Piece of Final Project

            Technology is rapidly advancing, and there are more and more inventions and gadgets being created everyday. This advancement has its pros and cons. On the pros side of the argument, advancement in technology will allow humans to achieve feats we have only dreamed of, and it would allow some people to get new jobs, new education, and a new form of income. However, on the cons side there is the possibility of the genesis of a dichotomy between the “tech savvy” people and the “old-fashioned” people. Ultimately, there may be a huge economic gap between the “tech savvy” and the “old-fashioned” simply through natural selection.

            When technology starts to become more and more advanced we will possibly require more minds to think through creation and forming new products. This will cause a demand for extremely skilled computer or electrical engineers alongside computer science professionals. We will need these types of people to meet production demands for new types of machinery and gadgets. So, while these workers are supplied with jobs and a secure income what will become of other jobs?

            If society starts to move towards creating automated machinery that can take care of that plumbing issue quicker than a plumber can what would be the need for a plumber? The plumber would lose their job, be left without an income, and would have to fend for himself or herself. This would slowly start to take over the other jobs too because there is no limit to possible advancement that we have realized thus far. People are losing more jobs, yet those who are still employed because of their technological and computer knowledge will be continuing to get paid more because their demand will be steadily increasing. The gap between the top 10% in wealth will increase even more than it is today. According Matt Rocheleau from The Boston Globe, “The eight richest people in the world, all men, together own about $426 billion, according to the report from the charity Oxfam.”

            All this money only belongs to eight people who roam this earth out of the 7.3 billion people that inhabit it. This is flat out ridiculous. Not to mention, that when technology begins to advance, we will get an even greater separation because the rich will get richer by buying out people’s jobs with machines, and the poor will get poorer from being bought out of their jobs.

            This all works in terms of natural selection. Those who cannot fit society’s demanding needs for technological advancement and creation will not survive, while those who possess the necessary skillset for computer and electrical engineering will continue and thrive. Now, I am not sure if it can be as simple as this idea produced here, however this is foreshadowing that is based on Karel Capek’s R.U.R. In the play robots are starting to be created and there is a company who essentially begins to take over, and years later the robots have completely taken over the world. Let’s hope that this is just a play, and that it doesn’t become an actual reality.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/01/18/rich-people-own-much-money-half-world-report-says/y6az3Wtasd5TIf9Q6k3I4K/story.html