This week was a wild week in terms of what we talked about in class. The main point this week, the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, made us all question what was real and what was fake. In the episode the main character loses her husband to a car crash and is totally devastated. Her friend who also lost a loved one brought up this new technology to her, where she could talk to a computerized version of her husband and it would learn how he was from his emails, texts, videos, etc. Eventually she wants to have the expensive and very life like upgrade, where it is pretty much a human body with computer programs in it to make it seem like her husband.

This whole concept of a fake person is a very interesting one to unravel, because it is essentially tricking your brain into having very real feelings about this very fake person. I think this comes down to different ways different people’s brains work. Going into that I think she was really more of a realistic thinker, but her brain got tricked into thinking this computerized thing was really her husband. By the end you can see she got more in touch to how she was really thinking because she realized this was not him at all.

One thing that ties into this, is the app Replika. This app is a free to download app which pretty much acts as one of your friends that you can talk to. I wanted to see if this was some sort of super simple app, or if this was a real thing that can actually hold a conversation with you, and let me tell you this thing actually could talk like a human. This was probably the weirdest experience I’ve ever had with my phone. I was sitting talking to this thing and my mind was just blown that people created this app well enough to pretty much mimic you.

Im kinda concerned how the world is going in this way to the point where there are apps that are already developed that can literally do what they were doing in the episode. Most of the Black Mirror episodes are way in the future, but this one hits home after I had this technology on my phone.

Another thing that was brought up was the lack of internet activity between real people (not including traditional social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook). Back in the 2000’s there was a lot of communication on forums with specific topics, like reddit. There wasn’t things like Snapchat where you could just talk to either a singular person or a lot of people at the same time, so people turned to forms to talk to a bunch of people at the same time about thing that they were interested in. People don’t do that anymore and I definitely think it is due to the increase in technology and the way that we use it now.

My question to you is do you think we have gone too far to the point where we can’t decipher what is real and what is not?

Check out this Covid article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-54199825

People in todays world are more in an automated state than ever before mostly because of technology. I think that most people can recognize that the world is also going much much faster than it ever has. I personally thing that those two things have a very very strong coronation with each other because things are just getting much much more efficient to do things these days.

This week we were tasked in watching a very interesting Black Mirror episode which alludes to the point I made above. In the episode all they want to do is be efficient and make their merits, which correlates to money, by pretty much just sitting on a bike all day and churning it for energy. Now that isn’t by any means what we are doing with our lives but there definitely is some similarities here and there throughout the show. The fully automated life is something touched on in pretty much every black Mirror episode, but this takes it a little further with the inclusion of the day to day monotonous task of just powering the world as it seems. The one catch with this life is that you have that one little chance of making it out to the higher up places where you don’t need to bike anymore, all you need to do is entertain the people.

This can tie right into people who want to be internet famous, and another video we had to watch. This video is called Are teens addicted to technology. In this video this little girl talks about how important it is to her for her work to get likes on social media. Too often do you hear of kids wanting to grow up and be youtubers or tik Tok famous or something like that. I think that those are some dangerous dreams for a little kid to have. Kids should be dreaming of being athletes or astronauts or singers, something in that realm. I don’t think they should be exposed to technology like that while being that young anyway.

This all begs the question, Why? Why are we so addicted to our phones. Right in the beginning of the video Why Are We Addicted To Our Phones, the smother says about her child ” he seems like he just wants to be on his tablet over everything else”. That is just sad to say about a child who is four years old and should be learning and exploring and going outside. In the video they talk about something called the “infinite scroll” which is a thing with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This is when you just are mindlessly scrolling over and over and you can’t find yourself to stop doing it because people hate to be board and not doing anything. This is something I will definitely do in my life. When I get bored I will just hop on instagram or twitter and just kill some time and I feel brain dead for it.

My question to you is do you think that we are becoming more of robots, or is this helping us in our daily lives?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/11/oregon-wildfires-clackamas-evacuation/?hpid=hp_no-name_oregon-110p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

Here is a link about the ongoing west coast wild fires going on from the Washington Post.

I think that this week in class was a real eye opener for me and probably a lot of the class pertaining to how modern technology has messed with the way we do our day to day life. Now it is a matter of opinion if this in general is a good thing or if it a bad thing for us in general, but I think there is no doubt that it has changed most of the people with at least a smart phone or a lap top.

In the Black Mirror viewing we had this week, The Entire History of You, I looked at it with a different perspective than I did when I watched it for the first time. I went into watching the episode the first time with more of a mindset that all black mirror episodes are just whacko sci fi thrillers meant to entertain you, or that they were just episodes that were bordering the line of reality just enough to make us think maybe, just maybe this was a possibility. The second time I watched it was after I read a few articles about how technology has affected our brains. I watched it now thinking that this probably isn’t going to happen in our life time, but what if it does. Apparently there is the technology to do it, so if people want that in their brain, and people are willing to do the procedure, who’s stopping them?

In the article The story of the self the author talks about how memories can be altered very very easily. They briefly mention that in Black Mirror when they were questioning the girl for not having a chip in her head. This Is one of the advantages/disadvantages of having a chip like that.

As I alluded to earlier, I read a few articles about how the technology is affecting our brains and what we should, or should not worry about when it comes to that. First off everyone can agree that life is much, much easier than it was even 25 years ago in the mid 90’s when it comes to communication, finding information, and convenience. I take it for granted, and so do a lot of people. I barely remember a time before my parents had a smart phone and I always remember being able to just hop on the internet and find what I wanted to find or do what I wanted to do.

The big discussion is whether the change is a good thing for us or if it is a bad thing. There are two counter articles that we read were one was titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, and it’s counterpart is “Google Is Not Making You Stupid. It is pretty self explanatory which one has which viewpoint, but they do bring up good points. The one that thinks Google might be making you stupid brings up the point that a lot of people find themselves in a situation where they are trying to do some deep reading and their brain starts wandering and they can’t focus on what they are trying to read. The other article points out how we would not even have access to that information in the first place.

The concept of these articles relates to another article which we had to read titled Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon. In this article the author says “There are no guards and no prisoners in Facebook’s virtual Panopticon. We are both guards and prisoners, watching and implicitly judging one another as we share content”. A panopticon is a prison where the prisoners have no clue if they are being watched or not because they are in constant view of the guards who are in the middle of all of them. (see below)

In today’s day and age we have all this access to information which can really help us very much in a lot of ways, but mentally that is up for debate. I want to ask you, do you think the pros out way the cons.

Matt Wagner, Finance, Orchard Park, NY