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.

On Thursday during our class discussion, the question of whether evil is part of our human nature popped up.In the state of nature,during the absence of laws, humans’ only aim was self-preservation. Scarcity of resources at that time sparked off competition between individuals. Since each individual was only interested in preserving his own life, people were ready to kill each other because they feared getting killed first.Vengeance can now be described as “an animal desire that operates in the service of self-preservation” (Michael Schefczyk, 2018) . This simply states that vengeance is a drive that we’ve developed many years ago in order to simply survive.

I would like to go a bit off topic and discuss an argument about how humans developed a sense of justice. According to a philosopher named John Mill, people developed a sense of justice after they were able to socialize and form groups. Basically, he states that humans are born with two natural drives; sympathy and vengeance.I assume that we all agree on the idea that sympathy is in our nature. Our main aim at first was self-preservation, then we had to socialize in order to survive. We formed groups, and because of sympathy, our main aim became the preservation of our community. So what made us stop killing each other? A sense of justice developed because we wanted to protect our society and this wouldn’t happen unless we stop initiating attacks on others who then attack back and the cycle continues because they want to avenge their group members as well. To conclude, vengeance must have been prevalent in order to finally achieve peace and develop a sense of justice.

This is the link of the TED Talk I used for my elevator pitch for anyone who is interested to watch it.

The first five minutes he talks about how people in our days fear of technology and have the belief of machines replacing humans. He discusses the real reasons behind this in his own opinion. Then in the rest of the talk he talks about how people should be their real selves which I think will help people stop being isolated from the real world and will prove their uniqueness in the society and prove that they cannot be replaceable by artificial intelligence. That is why we should not fear technology we should fear ourselves.

The movie for me was not interesting at all, and a bit vague; i would have never watched such movie except if it was an assignment or in class like this time. The first thought that came to my mind after watching the movie is why do we create robots or machines in the very first place? And i believed that people create machines for many reasons, but the most clear reason is to fulfill a need like in the movie when hannah created the golem for protection and later on felt so attached to it as her son died. Thus, we create machines mainly to fulfill a need. In the movie the golem was dangerous and kept killing people before hannah realized it should be killed. It reminded me of the prometheus story were the golem was created and kept getting bigger until his man commanded him to kneel to write on his head death, and after he died he just changed to mud and fell on his master and killed him. So, both the movie and this story made it clear how our own creations (human creations in general) could harm us, others and the society as a whole.

I found this chapter to be very mind-opening, as I never classified people with implanted pacemakers or cardioverter-defibrillators as “cyborgs” or “hybrids”. Nonetheless, perhaps my perception of them as “regular” humans relates to my lack of knowledge about the function of these devices, and the effects they have on their “bearers”.  The aforementioned introduces the newly developed concept of ontology, which states that bodies and technology are co-producing one another.  Therefore, once one becomes a cyborg, there is no return to their old body state. This is further clarified by Pollock, who stated that, “There is no self that is independent of the device; the patients and defibrillators are one”.  However, to properly classify patients with these devices, one must analyse their embodied sensory experience. Once inserted inside the body, the patient cannot independently control the function of the device, as the electric pulses and shocks take over the rhythm of the heart. The only person capable of changing the machine’s current is the technician through the use of a programmed computer. This in turn affects the way the patient carries on with their lives, as many of them complained about how the ICD or pacemaker does not necessarily correspond to the way they live, hence demonstrating how these people are less able to get a hold of their bodies. For instance, some patients expressed how the inappropriate adjustment of the pacemaker leads to feelings of tiredness, especially during physical activity. As well, other patient expressed how they needed to pay close attention to the beeping sound made by the machine as an indication of its malfunction. The aforementioned illustrates how the hybrid needs to become more intimate with their hybrid materiality to carry out a successful life. The patient needs to be aware that it is not only their heart that is dependent on the machine, but it is their life itself.  Consequently, the bearers of these machines grasp that they are no longer in total control of their body, but the machine is, hence the establishment of the resemblance between cyborgs. This idea seems fascinating to me, as the use of technology has always been defined and finite for human beings. Nonetheless, this is not currently the case, as internal technological devices are what decide how the body will be utilised.

After the documentary that we watched and how children were being enslaved and forced to work in unhealthy conditions that later cause them to have health conditions and have a life expectancy of 32 years. I asked myself is this humane and this made me realize the gigantic effect that money plays in our lives. Money and profit actually blinded people to the extent that they were too blind to see that they were living in a wicked society where big fish eat and small ones. Whose fault is it, is capitalism to be blamed or is this the human nature? I really don’t know, but what I know is that this enslavement occurs nowadays but in a different light. I can’t find the difference between working for no wage and working so hard for so little. We are now slaves to contracts that we sign with factories, businesses, schools, sports clubs, and the list goes on. These contracts bind us to business owners and turn us into slaves to a certain extent.

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.

The movie we watched the last class showed how a woman wanted to create a Golem to protect her village but then it appears that her creating a Golem was to fulfill her son’s emptiness. She did not want to give birth to another child as she was afraid of losing him too, that’s why she was really happy after realizing that the Golem she created cannot die which gave her feeling of relief that he will not leave her like her child(man) did.

During watching the movie, there was a point that I observed and wondered about. It was clear how the woman was controlled by the golem in the second half of the movie and that they were connected to each other and that they feel the some physical pain. However, then I realized that the Golem felt feelings other than the physical feelings for her. When The woman saw her husband at her neighbor’s house, she became very upset that she was thinking of killing her but then she gave up this thought. But we then see that the Golem felt her heart pain and goes and kill the woman for revenge to the woman who created him. Also we see this repeating when the woman and her husband are having dinner, while Golem was giving the uncomfortable looks which seemed to me like jealousy. That raised a question in my mind which is if Golem actually had human feelings and emotions like us rather than being just a creature or a machine for protection.

We saw how the old woman advised her to kill the Golem by pulling the paper from his mouth and at last after the Golem got out of control and the woman saw what a monster he had become, she decides to pull the paper and kill him no matter how much she loved him. Which shows how the creator was the only one who had control and ability to destroy his own creation. This situation somehow supported my own belief, as I personally believe that there is no creation of man which cannot be killed and if the creation no longer benefit the creator, the creator can easily stop it. That’s why I think that the thought of machines or robots conquering the world is some kind of myth.

What particularly interested me about the movie is how strong the thirst of power in humans is and how well that was displayed in the film. The woman initially created this golem to fill the void of losing her son. She then noticed that this golem helps protect her and whoever she holds close to her, which would be the villagers. That protection he provided gave them power, more so her than the rest. She was supposed to kill him as the old woman had told her, but when she actually created the golem, she couldn’t because she was attached, and I think that a big part of the attachment was her sense of power; that with that golem, she could do as she wishes, get rid of whoever she wants to. Killing him would get rid of that immense power she held, and I feel like that played a huge part in her resistance of his destruction. Not only this, but that she actually succeeded in creating a whole other creature also made her feel very powerful, because the actual success in creating the golem is not always promised or can happen every time. The idea of how people value power in this movie was what I was most interested in.

Ever since watching the movie there were a lot of thoughts in my mind about the origin of this story. The idea of the Golem itself revolves around overcoming human beings’ insecurities, for instance, the movie mainly focused on giving life to a pile mud and create a young boy with supernatural power in order to protect the villagers from outsiders. The creation of what we call today an automata did not have defensive purposes only, however, it had an emotional effect on Hana who lost her child seven years ago and it created this unrealistic bond between her and the boy. After critically analyzing this movie i could only relate the Golem with what we have now the destructive nuclear weapons that are used mainly for protection rather than attack, this could be the only relation between the movie and reality. on the contrary, the fact that the Golem and Hana were somehow physically attached together was not that convincing to reflect the tight bond between the child and Hana because there is no such thing that existed or will exist in our today’s modern world. Overall, it is actually interesting to know that even in ancient myths people tend to give life to objects for the sake of fulfilling their difficult needs and wants in an imaginary way regardless how the idea of creating life would clash with common religious basis.