Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an ambitious social policy that aims to provide all citizens regardless of income with a monetary monthly grant with no strings attached. The grant would put the individuals just above the poverty line. This policy aims to eliminate economic insecurity so that people are able to use their free time to innovate, create, and improve themselves. A famous social experiment called the Mincome research was carried out in Manitoba, Canada, where UBI was implemented. The results concluded that only 1% of the recipients stopped working, mostly to take care of their kids On average people reduced their working hours by less than 10%. The extra time was used to achieve goals like going back to school or looking for better jobs.

I believe that this is the solution to machine replacements because an educated, multi-skilled individual is an individual that is difficult to replace. The vast majority of people seek self betterment and self actualization, therefore they would not be content with sitting at home and receiving a monthly check from the government. If these individuals cannot find jobs in the market dominated by robots, they would be able to become entrepreneurs with their newly acquired skills.

Call of duty is one of the most successful first person shooters in the market today. Activision, the company behind the development of the game, releases a game every year and sells millions of copies annually. In 2014 and 2015, they released Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3, there was a radical change in the gameplay. The player was no longer a normal soldier with a gun. They changed it so that the player is either an augmented cyborg or a robot, and the player has some super human abilities, such as super strength and high jump. However, these two installments were considered two of the worst games in the series, which prompted Activision to release Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 in the following year, where the setting is WW2 and the players are technologically limited. This installment has achieved better sales than the former.

The reduction in sales was attributed to the unrealistic gameplay which did not appeal to the target audience. i.e. teenagers. This implies that teenagers do not identify with futuristic warfare (or more accurately identify more with conventional warfare) and find greater pleasure in conventional warfare. One possible reason for teenagers not identifying with cyborgs is fear. Fear from a future where cyborgs eliminate humans (part of the campaign plot) and computers taking over the world.

Another possible reason is that teenagers do not understand the idea of a cyborg and therefore do not identify with it.

Roman and Eugenia were two software engineers from Russia who came to USA. Roman was extremely popular and had a large social circle and was loved by many people, but unfortunately he died in a car crash. Many of his friends wanted immortalize his memory so some created a web archive and others wrote a book about his life.

However Eugenia had a different idea on how to keep his memory alive. She decided to finish a project they were working on. A program that you can input your text messages to and it learns your style of texting and your interests so you can then chat with it. When Eugenia showed the app to their friends, they were astonished by the applications accuracy in mimicking Roman. But some people thought that this was an insult to Roman’s memory and they refused to use the app. However, for some people (including Roman’s mom) the app was therapeutic as it allowed people (among other reasons) who regretted not spending enough time Roman to say their final good byes.

Eugenia released the app for public use. It’s called “Replika”.
https://replika.ai/

Parallel could be drawn from how people reacted to the app and how people would react to robots being integrated in the society. Perhaps those against the robots would be a minority like those against the application. Nevertheless, we could safely assume that no matter the public consensus on robots, people who want to create robots companions will find a way even if they were not properly funded.

Edit: Link for the full story:
https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot

The Pixar movie WALL-E is set in a distant dystopian future where earth is entirely covered in garbage which has driven humanity to escape the planet and live on space ships for 700 years. A robot called WALL-E is the protagonist of the story. It’s purpose was to collect garbage and allocate it somewhere else. WALL-E is the last robot on earth and has started to develop a personality and get a little bit lonely. That is when another robot called EVE descends to Earth from the spaceships with a mission to find evidence for plant life which WALL-E happens to have. When WALL-E sees EVE it falls in love instantly.

When I re-watched the movie sometime ago I noticed how some gender stereotypes are used to infer gender to the robots, but also how some other stereotypes are broken, and I believe that the latter is more prominent. WALL-E is cubic in shape and is covered with stains, while EVE is sleek in design and looks brand new with a shiny white color. Also EVE has a somewhat feminine voice while WALL-E leans a little bit to the masculine side (but not the stereotypical macho man). This is the first evidence we get that WALL-E is a boy while EVE is a girl, however this evidence are not strong enough to definitively assume gender and I believe that this was an active decision that Pixar took (to make them slightly gender neutral).

For the purposes of this essay let’s assume that WALL-E is a boy and EVE is a girl. EVE is the tough military and technologically advanced bot with a mission to save the entire planet while WALL-E is portrayed as musical loving homebody who cares for and supports the character with the mission to save the entire planet. This is clearly a switch in gender roles and turned out to be very successful among critics and movie goers.

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The article talks about how the use of unmanned drones in military situations breaks the gender stereotypes of war as well as dehumanizes the conduct of combat. The stereotype being that in most cases men are the protectors (active) while women are the protected (passive). However since autonomous drones distance men from the physical battlefield then men are also a passive member in the war and thus could be considered a female. The war in Iraq is given as an example. The Iraqi soldiers surrendering to a drone were seen as weaker than those surrendering to humans (because they are surrendering to an inanimate object), but also the soldiers “hiding behind” the drones are seen as cowards. Both traits lead to the same conclusion that the use of drones has weakened the assumptions often attributed to war-fighting soldiers.

Major General Stephen J. Miller says that a new dimension to warfare has been created. In addition to land, water, and airspace, nations must now fight on a new front called cyberspace, i.e. the internet. However soldiers in the cyberspace are not the conventional masculine soldier. These “cyber soldiers” are more inclined to be gender neutral as they require technical skill rather than physical ability .

The article then gives examples on how the US military plans to use biotechnology and prosthetic to enhance soldiers, or in other words creating a cyborg. Which as discusses in Donna Haraway’s manifesto (and also mentioned in the article) would help bridge the gap between both genders. However the article then goes to suggest that enhanced soldiers would not necessarily merge with technology but rather subdue it to their command, and hence creating not a cyborg but a super soldier, which is just an amplified version of the traditional masculine soldier.

I believe that the integration of autonomous drones and cybernetic enhancements to the military would help blur the difference between both genders as women would be able to play a more active role in warfare.

Last class I was reminded by something Richard Feynman said in his biography. Richard Feynman is a theoretical physicist who was a friend of Einstein and worked with him on the atomic bomb. He was also very critical of some research practices carried out by psychoanalysts of his time.

In his biography “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!“, Feynman says that there’s a fundamental difference between how psychoanalysts develop theories and how someone like Einstein or Oppenheimer develops theories. He says that
psychoanalysts sometimes would come up with the same explanation for two very different scenarios. For example, (I can’t remember the example he gave but it’s similar) he says that psychoanalysts could look at someone who is abusive and say that this is because he wasn’t given much attention or was beaten when he/she was young, but also the could look at another abusive person and attribute that behavior to being given excessive attention and being spoiled children. On the other hand, the scientific method says that for something to be considered true you first have to make a prediction , then run tests to see whether your prediction is true of false, not observe some phenomenon and come up with a “logical” reason for it.

To take this back to our course I have decided that in my ethnography I’ll carry out at least two interviews with each interviewee. The first interview will be the one where I’ll ask questions about my topic of choice and investigate their reasons and “norms and values”. Then before the second interview I would develop my “theory”. In the second interview I would ask questions that I have predicted the answer to based on my theory. If my predictions were true then I would take my theory to also be true

Garry Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, and is considered to be one the greatest chess players of all time. In the 1990s, IBM created a chess playing computer and challenged Kasparov in a classical match which Kasparov lost. Many people then said that machine intelligence has finally reached human intelligence and could defeat humanity’s greatest intellectual minds.

Last year, Kasparov has came out and talked about AI in many interviews. In summary he holds the the following views in the subject. Currently the best chess player in the world is not a human nor a machine, but a combination of both. Taking human intuition and ingenuity with a computer brute force method of calculation has proved to be able to beat any human or machine. Kasparov has said that he sees a future where man and machine work hand in hand to create a better world.

The movie follows a small Jewish community in Lithuania in the 1600s. A time when the plague is ravaging through the continent however this small community is unaffected by it, which warrants attention from foreign invaders. To protect her village Hannah defies the orders of the rabbi and conjured up a spirit to fend off the invaders. The golem has the shape of a small child and Hannah uses it to fill the hole left by the death of her son Joseph and becomes extremely attached to the spirit.

Near the end of the movie Hannah’s husband implores her to get rid of the evil spirit but Hannah refuses to do so. She has become blinded to the fact that this is not her son Joseph, much like the story of the Greek woman who constructed a bronze statue of her husband and starting treating it as if it was really her husband. The difference here is, eventually, Hannah managed to beat her inner demons an get over the death of her son, and she put an end to the golem (which was very uncomfortable to watch).

We said during last class that humans started seeking efficiency in production in the enlightenment period. We asked “Why do humans seek this efficiency”. I believe that the answer lies in human curiosity.

Humans are curious by nature. Curiosity has an evolutionary purpose as people had to be curious about their surroundings or else they wouldn’t survive. However, nowadays the vast majority of people do not worry about any immediate threat to their lives in the same way early humans did, therefore the curiosity “trait” has somehow changed to become our hunger for understanding laws of nature and the world around us. This hunger for knowledge in turn has made us more efficient in satisfying our wants and needs. So the more we discover about the world the more we want to discover more.

A scientist called Kardashev defined three levels of civilizations based on the magnitude of power available to them. This video will explain the Kardashev scale better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc

We are now a type I civilization. and judging by our current trajectory, humans aim to advance to become type II and type III civilizations. Supposedly, this will allows us to create a utopia. All because we are curious by nature.