i have watched the gameplay of a game called Detroit: become human and i enjoyed it very much. it is a survival game based on decisions and it revolves around three main characters: Kara, who is an android who escapes her owner and takes his daughter to protect her from him and to raise her as her own. Marcus, who is a life auxiliary android who takes care of an old artist and he is framed for the murder of this artist by the artist’s son and he escapes and finds a rebel group who want freedom for androids. and Conor, who is a police issued android who helps track down deviant androids and shut them down. and it showed a lot of scenes with hidden meaning. for example, one of the deviants was a sex android and she killed a man because he was hitting her. and that hypothetically answers the question do robots have feelings? and that really had an impact towards my thoughts on robots and A.I. however, it was also shown in the revolution that Marcus leaded against humans that he had no hesitation when killing a human for his cause so that must be telling us that if we do invent functional androids we need to be careful with what we do next because we can make it very difficult for us to be back from a revolution on us.

In pop culture, A.I. has always been depicted as this evil thing that will destroy the world and lead to the extinction of the human race. purely because we don’t understand it and because nobody has even come close to figuring it out yet. perhaps people fear A.I. because we are afraid they will punish us for all the mistakes we have made like destroying the planet slowly or all the wars that were caused by humans. we are also afraid that it will be smarter than us and be superior to us. in 2017 Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk had a debate on whether A.I. should be pursued after or not, as the discussion continued, Musk stressed on the fact that A.I. could lead to an extinction of the human race, while Zuckerberg said that we need the A.I. because it will help us in so many fields. after the discussion, Facebook had to shut down one of their A.I. projects because they created their own language and started communicating with it. so Facebook had to shut it down. we all have to admit that this is something out of a sci-fi movie.

This video applies to so many things we have discussed in the course and it also applies to my project. First, it applies to the cyborg manifesto by Donna Haraway because her definition of a cyborg did not classify all humans as cyborgs because according to Amber Case, cyborgs are humans that use tools to enhance their lives so if we use mobile phones in any way we become cyborgs. while Harraway described cyborgs as a human with mechanical parts attached to him which might be the same thing because attached can mean various things such as being close to your body such as how close our mobiles are to us. it also applies to my project because according to Case all humans are cyborgs which makes my argument clear and proves my point. Case also highlighted Digital Humans which is a human that performs all his tasks digitally which is the case about almost every singe youngster out there so it also proves my point. Case also shed a light on the use of technology as it was originally intended to save time not waste it. while now most of our time is spent with technology as she mentioned a study conducted in a research institute called Xerox Park in which they had a theory that in the future technology would be cheap and attention will be expensive this is due to the fact that most of our attention nowadays is towards technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2gP1dst_Kc

My project is about the relationship between people and technology and how it can affect us psychologically. one of my sources for the project is “Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman.” (Du Gay, 1997). i used this source because it showed me the worry of the technological advancement back in the 1980s and the 1990s before the technological advancement we have now. another reason why i chose this article is to show my interviewees that this has been an issue for years and that it was a warning to what is happening now. also i wanted to show that people stopped talking about this as a problem and started treating it as a normality. it was also to show them one type of the relationship between human and a piece of technology as it was mentioned in the article that people would spend hours doing nothing but listening to music on their walkman and it became a huge part of their day as it with them everywhere. in addition, i wanted to show the effect of such a device on the relationships between people and their family and friends because this device can completely shut out the world to the person using it that includes shutting out your family and friends so it can destroy relationships and that was only a music player. a cheap smartphone has a music player in default and there are many more possibilities of people shutting out their loved ones. for example, many people experience the feeling of sitting among your friends and family with each of them on their phones. that is why i chose this article and this artifact.

I have just finished the first season of the show Westworld and i have enjoyed it very much. The show talks about a world created for the pleasure of man as it shows that humans have created functional humanoid robots which can perform multiple tasks and can be programmed to do everything. It is also shown in the show that rich people go there to have an adventure, have sex with a robot with or without consent and kill and harm all the robots if they wish to, which are called hosts.I enjoyed the show, not just because it is a good show, but because it reminded me of some of the discussions we have had in class. For example one of these discussions were whether robots should give consent before having sex with someone or not. because in the show most of the human characters would have sex with robots and choose to do it without consent just because they can. and in the show the robots rebelled against the humans to take their rights back and to have revenge against all humans who harmed them. the show was enjoyable because it related to the course and it related to certain discussions i enjoyed.

This is a picture i took in a famous and crowded plaza in Madrid, Spain called Plaza Mayor. It took me a while to figure out that almost everybody in the picture is either on their phone or holding their phone. Before anybody says that i’m on my phone too because i’m taking the picture, this is a camera not a phone. what surprised me the most is that most of the people in the photo are tourists, so they are not used to the view or the marvel of a city they are in. Also, this is something that i have noticed in many other places, be it at home, on an outing, or even at a hospital as i was visiting an old teacher of mine in the hospital and there were 9 people in the room on their phones. This is something that i have been discussing for years and nobody seems to care about it because it is what is normal nowadays. Not just for millennials like the elders say, but for all ages and recently it’s really manifested in the ages between 40 and 80. I still think this is unnatural and it should be stopped. I am not saying that we should all leave our phones and never use them again, i am saying that we need to stop living in a virtual reality and enjoy the actual life around us.

after reading the chapter titled “Remote Intimacy” in the book titled “Drone: Remote Control Warfare” (Gusterson, 2015), i felt surprised that some people enjoy watching people die that much, especially Americans when they enjoy innocent civilians of Afghanistan or Iraq. Almost two months ago, when the massacre of the New Zealand happened and someone sent me the video i felt disgusted and irritated. Not just because Muslims were dying but also because this was real life. Even though i enjoy playing video games including violence, i know that this is a game and i’m not hurting anyone. However, i do believe that a person really thinks that he is the one in the screen and instinctively try for survival which actually happens to me and a lot of my friends when we’re playing video games. Furthermore, as i mentioned many times in class before i think that our relationships with technology and especially our phones nowadays are unnatural. so, when i found out that drone operators feel that they have a connection with the people they are watching, it creeps me out. Mainly because this drone operator is sitting thousands of miles away in an office looking at a screen, while invading other people’s privacy without their permission to the extent that they would watch the civilians have sex with their wives. Which to me is a new level of invading privacy. In addition, i think the concept of voyeurism is sick and demented to be applied here in this context as watching someone die through a screen shouldn’t be fun or amusing, it should be horrifying and traumatizing. As for the remote narrativization, it is fully understandable and relate able because everybody tries to put a face on the unknown and a story to the stranger. We do it in movies, Youtube clips and pictures just to satisfy our curiosity. However, the stress results from killing all these people especially civilians who didn’t deserve to die. As far as i am concerned, these drone operators deserve the PTSD they suffer from.

i watched both blade runner movies and i liked them both. i particularly like the fact that they showed the consequences of having a replicant and treating it like a slave. which will ultimately lead to a rebellion from the replicants. i also liked when they introduced the replicant who didn’t know she was a replicant “Rachel” and that her creator “Tyrell” said that they make the replicants “more human than human”. and that relates to the discussion which we had in class about what is the difference between humans and machines and this movie defies all of what we established as it shows that these replicants have souls as well as rational thinking. but after all this is a science fiction story. of course after the discussion we had in class today i think that it’s safe to say that this could happen in the future. we don’t know when and we don’t know where. i just hope that if we do reach this level of scientific advancement, we have the right state of mind and the right motivation to give this all the precautions and not to miss all of the warnings we have had over the years, whether it be as movies, books or advice from an expert.