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.
Did you know that even Steve Jobs, when he introduced i-pods to the world, limited the use of technology for his children at home? yet we still allow ourselves to fall into this trap of phone addiction! but why? phones are not drugs so why can’t we put them down? because addition is not about pleasure, it is about soothing psychological distress. It’s using something to cope with a problem in life.
Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU and author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked”, says in his book
“You only develop an addiction when there is some psychological motive that hasn’t been fulfilled for you: loneliness, that you’ve been bullied, or you can’t make good things happen in your life. It doesn’t actually matter what you use to soothe that addiction, whether it’s playing a particular game that lulls you into a distracted state or whether it’s taking a drug. In terms of soothing those psychological ills, behavior and substance addictions are very, very similar”.
To demonstrate just how attached people are to their phones, he conducted an survey where he asks young adults whether they prefer to have a bone broken or their phone broken. and the results were truly shocking, he says “Forty-six percent of people would prefer to have a broken bone than a broken phone. But even for the 54 percent of people who say they’d prefer to have a broken phone, it wasn’t a snap decision. They agonized over it.”
We live in an age of anxiety. And YES phones can soothe that anxiety. But they can also add to that anxiety. and the device we use to sooth our cranky or boring days could turn into something that keeps us from living life fully. The really concerning aspect is that we see people who are not even aware they are addicted to their phone, they truly believe they are just enjoying their time. yet, these are the same people we find them complain about how little time in the day to do the things they love or how they have no time for going to the gym or to even study.
Recently, a group of Virtual Reality experts, psychologists and former engineers at Google and Facebook teamed up to use the VR technology to tackle phobias that humans have struggled with for centuries; including social and anxiety and fear of public speaking.
The Idea is that it builds on traditional exposure therapy, a common and effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias. but the only difference is with this technology, the patient can get as close as possible to the real life without actually being in Real-life.
VR has great potentials in helping people overcome mental health problem and it’s getting more and more accessible everyday! According to Forbes magazine, Until recently VR systems were expensive, clunky, and wired to a desktop PC. Today a therapist can buy a mobile Google Daydream headset for about $70.
What is really interesting is how they can program the virtual audience into giving different reactions according to the patients fear. as you can see in the video bellow where they control the experience into becoming as close to the patient’s biggest fears as possible. The experience is very realistic in which the audience is real characters not animated and they even have a version of your PowerPoint presentation in front of you. The variety of audience reaction range from the casual audience which is least distressing to a disengaged audience of people fidgeting, yawning, or staring at their cellphones and computer screens.
By controlling the dose of the anxiety-provoking situation in a VR environment, a trained therapist can help patients manage or overcome their anxiety.
Cybernetics is not AI, Bio-mechatronics, nor Robotics! Watch this very interesting talk by Paul Pangaro about cybernetics; its cycle, foundations, and future. There’re also interesting examples of creations causing “conversations” between humans and machines and machines with other machines. P.s.: Cybernetics is more about purpose and feedback.
Thomas Malcolm (1993) explains how being an “anti-machinery” was associated with being a ‘Luddite’; he uses many theories and interpretations that suggest the causes of Luddism. He found that there was a common interpretation that Luddism was related to the rise of lassez-faire, yet he mentioned other theories about the causes of Luddism such as a theory by a man named Gravener Henson which proposed that Luddism was created by the government for military power. Malcolm explained that the rise of the ‘Luddites’ was mostly during the year 1812, which was a year of social tensions and distress. He found that during the year 1812 there were low wages and high prices to necessities like food and that during that period unemployment and labor-saving machines were increasing, which led to poverty and starvation. One of the workmen at that time Malcom mentioned was Peter Marsland of Stockport; he had negative responses from people including having his factory fired due to his improvements to machinery for “steam weaving” which would result in the unemployment of thousands of people. Malcolm explained that all what people wanted at that time was work due to the unfavorable economic conditions they faced; the Luddites didn’t dislike certain machines it was because of the effects of the use of machines at that time. All the crisis points mentioned by Malcolm that happened during the industrial revolution shared the presence of the “cut-up manufacturer” and finishing work by machinery affecting the traditional ways of work people had. Malcom highlights that the Luddites breaking machines due to distress they faced out of blind hatred towards them suggesting that if there was a sort of agreement between the employers and those inserting technology (the workmen), the violence and illegal actions that took place wouldn’t be needed back then. “It can be said that all workmen involved in Luddism had specific grievances in their own industrial context which other forms of actions had failed to remove” (Malcolm).
As I read in “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology.” by Adrienne Mayor, one example that caught my attention was the myth where Daedalus created artificial wings, which was used to imitate the power of birds, I came to the realization that such example opened doors for inventions that were later created. In fact, it was suggested by Mayor that many inventors illustrated ancient myths while creating machines or automata; turning what’s considered to be science fiction about animated (self-moving) devices or artificial life to innovations that “replicated” natural forms. The artificial wings in my opinion could have led to airplanes today. People have been wanting to have the ability to fly from one place to the other from early ages. Their desire made airplane creation possible. The plane also has “two wings” similar to the idea of Daedalus artificial wings.
Here’s a fun short 5 min video that explains the myth of Daedalus:
I found this video is very interesting and funny. Also this video shows how robots can interact exactly like humans. Even Sophia friend zoned Will Smith when he tried to kiss and told him “I think we can be friends”. Even her artificial intelligence guided her what to do in this situation is a very good way, exactly like human beings.
“It is a small device the is placed in the chest to help control abnormal heart rhythms”, the fact that there is a device or actually a machine that is placed inside a person’s body is so weird and it may make the person feel not feel normal. Maybe a pacemaker maybe a benefit because it regulates the heartbeats of the people but yet i think it may turn them into cyborgs, but not an obvious cyborgs because the pacemakers are hidden inside their bodies. The idea for me maybe scary because I don’t know if this machine may develop and turn into something dangerous and harm this person in the end instead of benefiting him or her.
Who knows you more than you do? No, it’s not your parents nor your siblings, it’s most probably a multi- million dollar tech company. As technology advanced and became so easily available and readily accessible, people started sharing more than they think they do without noticing with a lot of the tech giants. In fact, now it is much harder to erase your online traces than it is to create them. The simplest example can be found in your own email’s inbox, it’s very common to see loads of emails from companies that you may not even remember how they got your email address. But your email address is the least of what they have, while most companies try to seek your information for their own benefits, some companies are actually information dealers, they job is to gather as much information as they can about people and group it, come out with relevant data and sell it to those who need it.
An example of such companies would be the British consulting firm “Cambridge Analytica”, they specialise in data mining and analysis, specifically for elections purposes. They have assisted political parties in India, Kenya, Malta, Mexico, UK and the US to reach their goal by telling them all about you. So how was all of this possible? By your own agreement, Before the latest US elections they released an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” which they used to collect data not only about you but by requesting access to your facebook friends’ data as well. The data would then be analysed in order to build detailed personality profiles for millions of users, the kind of data which is every politicians dream. Using such data they were able to send tailored targeted ads for each person depending on his personality profile and indirectly influence the user to vote for their political partner, which in that case was Donald Trump. The power of tailors advertisements that is sent at the right moment was able to earn Donald Trump a considerable number of votes that may have not been acquired if it wasn’t for “Cambridge Analytica”.
But the question remains, how can you protect yourself from such spying companies? Some illegally acquire your information while others do it with borderline legal methods. In fact, I believe that you you can never be fully incognito on the internet, you can only be cautious, for example, google goes to great lengths to track your location, they offer a bait setting that makes you think you turned off their tracking but there is other hidden settings buried deep into the options tree that gives them legal access to your location. As such one should always be extra vigilant of his online presence if he wishes to have a chance of avoiding the continuous surveillance attempts by the tech giants.
Violent actions directed toward machines is not a new phenomenon. However, they have been on the rise lately. According to an article in the New York Time, multiple cases of humans attacking robots have been documented lately. In June 2015, a hitchhiking robot was assaulted and dismembered in Philadelphia brutally, then a sex robot called Samantha was attacked and destroyed at an electric show, then a man in Russia attacked a teaching robot with a baseball hat. In 2018, it started getting even worse as a man waved a gun at a self-driving van called Waymo as it just passed through.
Even though Luddites have done it before and demonstrated their fear of machines taking over their jobs and all of that, this now emerging phenomenon seems to be more and more popular with humanoid machines especially; which makes us wonder whether this violent hatred has an economical aspect as well or is that more cultural?
In the New York Times article “Why Do We Hurt Robots?”, it’s suggested that the violence may be caused by economic anxiety. In other words, there’s a deep fear that the machines could collect their jobs in the future. While i agree that this fear is justifiable and maybe true, i can’t help but feel there’s a more social aspect to our behavior. could it be that humans beat robots up because they simply look at them as outsiders? and we are just afraid of them because not only they are unfamiliar and unknown to us but they also look similar to humans?
To investigate this, they did a social experiment in a Japanese mall after an incident of three boys beating a humanoid robot. in this experiment a robot is patrolling in a shopping mall and is attracting the attraction of mostly children, eventually he comes across someone and asks to open the way. Some children complied; however, some refused and persistently hindered the robot (as you can see in the video linked below). this happened more often when children were grouped together and parents were not on sight, and it occasionally lead to violent behavior.
74% of the kids described the robot as “human-like,” and 50 percent of the children believed that their action was “stressful or painful” to the robot. In other words, the children hurt the robot even though they perceived it as life-like.
so we may keep blaming our fear of robots taking over or robot uprising for our lack of empathy and violent actions. however, it seems like we ourselves have a social tendency to become violent toward anything that we consider ‘outsider’.
1099 Cyborgs, Avatars, and Everyday life 2019 