Psychopass is an anime set in future Japan where everyone is continuously montired by cameras and other sensors. These sensors take biological readings which are fed into an advanced centralized system called Sybil system. Sybil is responsible for granting every person a psychopass score. If the score gets high enough, the system reports to the police and the target is paralyzed and taken into custody. If the score gets higher, the target is killed. In addition, the system assigns jobs to people , similar to many other fantasy movies and stories out there. Furthermore, everything is almost digital. For example, the cloths they wear are realistic holograms. Their house decorations, scenes, furniture and almost everything are almost not real. The main character, Akane, is a police detective, who is in pursuit of an outlier, someone the system cannot judge. During the pursuit, she discoveres the reality behind the Sybil system, a huge collection of human minds working together and “passing judgment” to the rest of the society making her question her ideals and morals and doubt the current structure of the society.

Such system, established peace and order in the society. However, people became used to such a stable environment of no crimes to the extent that they were was not able to recognize a crime happening in front of their eyes.

In an interesting, a cyborg debates that the term cyborg is somewhat relative. He argues that in the current society people cannot stop relying on technology in their everyday lives and due to their dependance they can relatively be considered cyborgs

The show attempts to show a state of the society when they are deprived of desires, choices and authenticity of life. I can relate that without choices, without real feel of things surrounding us, we as humans would suffer. I am not sure if it would be to the extent that we won’t recognize a crime, but it would suck the emotions out of a lot of activities that we participate in daily. And in my opinion, a single entity passing judgements in real life is extremely difficult to achieve using the current technology. It would take further improvement and a lot of time to consider the possibility of such an outcome.

 

 

If you watched love death and robots, you would understand many new ideas and themes in a wonderful animated series. The episode “Blindspot” tells a story around a dysfunctional gang of cyborg thieves who come together to rob a heavily armoured convoy vehicle.  The suicide mission goes as you’d expect, with a nice little twist at the end where we see the characters die and then one of them only survives. Just before he mourns them he sees them come out of a hologram as their memories were saved beforehand on a drive where they can be re-put to a robot body again.

Imagine if we can save our brains and live on with our personalities beyond death. Nonsense.

 

Imagine a world where we live by doing a job like cycling in order to gain point or scores that is replaced by food. Such a system can be valid in the near future as technology is doing everything for us and the only thing we can do is doing the donkey work.

Brooker puts the carnivorous culture of reality TV on trial in this diabolical hour, set in a world where lower-caste citizens pedal stationary bikes to power their surroundings and earn meager currency. One member of the underclass (Jessica Brown Findlay) strives for more by singing for her life on a live TV special, another (Daniel Kaluuya) bursts onto a broadcast to deliver a screed against his overlords.

 

People get crazy to be famous or to be the new icon in order to gain points and have more status. Such world will be no place for simple jobs.

 

If you ever watched the anime death parade, it shows people after death, they are sent to one of many mysterious bars run by bartenders serving as arbiters. There, they must participate in Death Games with their souls on the line, the results of which reveal what secrets led them to their situation and what their fate will be afterwards, with the arbiters judging if their souls will either be sent for reincarnation or banished into the void. The series follows Decim, the lone bartender of the bar where people who died at the same time are sent to, known as the Quindecim bar, whose role in judging these souls changes when he meets a curious black-haired woman.

It raises the idea of judgement and if it is based solely in good deeds only or can emotions be a variable in judging people. Decim becomes emotionally attached to the black haired woman and she makes him judge people differently based on their background and feelings and why they acted in a certain way based on what they actually feel.

 

Since the introduction of machines and the industry era, workers and people’s jobs have been replaced by these machines. When the workers knew that they broke the machines and made a mutiny over the factory holders. I thought of the idea and how can it be reproduced in our modern world. Looking into the AI and how technology replaces us nowadays, We can look into google duplex the digital assistant that makes appointments for you and make your life easier. Imagine a world with no secretaries or with no interactions between humans where we make our digital assistants make our calls for us.

 

This is a reflection on the movie golem that we watched. It was ver relevant to what we talked about in class. The idea of creating a being that is used as a servant or helper in certain tasks; Also, the use of religion and religious power to create this golem is represented in the movie by using the book of torah. However, the boy or so called “golem”, is treated by his “mother” as a real boy – as if he is her son. She gives him a bath, feeds him and also makes her husband play the violin for him. So, in a way, she sympathizes with him as her own son.

Also, the idea of the attackers raiding the village for the daughter of their chief to get cured represents the oppression over the village. It shows how class and possession of power can make people kill each other to get what they want. This lead the people to seek to uncanny ways like creating golem to protect them. The one thing that caught my attention was that in the end, they tried to kill him and at the same time he was the reason they were saved from the attackers on their village. So he is considered to be a double edged sword.