So I literally just joined two online Facebook “community group pages” less than a month ago, ‘Grey’s Anatomy Humor’ and ‘Wild About Raccoons’ (I’m a simple soul). I love them both, I love seeing the endless Grey’s related things(that I’m crying at most of the time, if you know you know) and cute little raccoons. I think for me personally, they’re still like social media. I was referred by a friend to each one, and I very rarely post in either of them. They’re decent sized groups, Grey’s with just shy of 250,000 members and Wild About Raccoons has about 19,000. I posted an art project I did before school started (below, guess which one I posted it to) and I still get notifications about it, easily probably 500 people interacted with the post in about a day and I’m super anal with notifications and it was too much for me from my normal 3 notifications a day being tagged in something by one of two people. Honestly I thought this was as far as community pages went, I thought it was interacting on a main stream social media site but in like closed group. I really didn’t know they have specialized forum pages for different hobbies. I might check into it.

I might check into the Replika thing too, I’ve been thinking about it for days but I don’t want to spin myself out of control. I’ve always believed in talking things through and leading yourself to find your root issues, but I feel like this would be something to too easily get attached too. Im pretty self aware at this point and know most of my limits, but I don’t think I’d be able to separate it from being a tool, to blurring the lines of reality or not. I’m really excited to read and see how the rest of y’all look at this, the entire concept is wild. It seems like the type of thing that can either go really well, and help someone work through themselves, or it can completely destroy someone with too much dependency. I don’t think there’s just a ‘happy medium’ ‘I can walk away at any time’ vibe coming from this type of thing.

There’s definitely no ‘happy medium’ in the Black Mirror episode this week. I’ve dealt with so much death, and so much loss, and I would do anything to have one more conversation with almost any of them. But this…this is just too far. I remember in March, I was driving back home from South Carolina and we stopped at a Cracker Barrel. It seemed like a normal day, but I still think about it often. My dad died when I was 17, it was unexpected, and a whole mess in general. I still haven’t fully recovered or accepted it. But on this day, in this random ass Cracker Barrel, I stopped breathing, only for a moment, but I stopped. All because I caught eyes with a guy who I swear could be my fathers doppelgänger. It threw me off, sent me on a downhill spiral. I stared at him the entire lunch, I didn’t talk to my best friend I was with, I couldn’t do anything, I just froze. Looking back I think I overreacted, but the point is, if i overreacted at this, imagine if I an uploaded ‘real’ person showed up one day. I genuinley think I would be mortified and shit myself, and not nearly as excited.

In the past years technology has only gotten bigger and better. This is no exception to artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI, but what is Artificial Intelligence? Nick Heath wrote an article called What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence. In the article he explains that “AI systems will typically demonstrate at least some of the following behaviours associated with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, perception, motion, and manipulation and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and creativity.”. Although there are often debates of what qualifies as AI and what definition does it justice, the definition by Nick Heath to me is pretty solid. In this article he also goes on to explain that there are several types of AI but that the one commonly seen in TV programs and Cinema happens to be what is called Artificial General Intelligence. He says “This is the sort of AI more commonly seen in movies, the likes of HAL in 2001 or Skynet in The Terminator, but which doesn’t exist today and AI experts are fiercely divided over how soon it will become a reality.”. This line of the article makes me wonder if it is bound to happen. I believe that it’s already happening. Perhaps one can say that it has yet to be seen but I would argue that even though it’s not so “visible” around us, that it’s actually unfolding before our eyes. 

Things often always start as ideas or visions. If you can think of it, there’s a chance it can be made if it’s worked on. For example, the Iphone. In the years before its release, the idea of it would probably seem over the top. One man’s vision made it happen and the Iphone can do things with AI that has made our life easier. Tesla cars, who would’ve thought that a car could be improved on, to even include features like autopilot that would let the car drive itself almost as though a human was driving it. These all start off as ideas and eventually they arrive right before our eyes.  The article sparked the idea I mentioned earlier and reminded me of Replika. Just like the Iphone and Tesla cars,  Replika started as an idea, due to tragedy, and it has been huge in AI. Replika started off as an idea to be able to communicate with someone through AI. In this case Eugenia Kuyda feared losing memories of her friend who had died in an accident. She says, in the Youtube video The Story of Replika, the AI app that becomes you, that after the accident she later started to forget how her friend who passed behaved and acted that all she had to go by was their old text messages. This then sparks an idea to try to revive him through AI in some form or app that would allow the app to respond back just as her friend normally would. This is done through the app being able to use text messages to basically study and become the person it’s studying. This leads to Replika being made and has been used by the public. I believe after reading the story of Replika that the abilities of AI can be pushed farther and perhaps it’ll become bigger like in Netflix’s Black Mirror episode Be Right Back. Do you think AI can or should be pushed to its full potential?

This week of class we look into how technology and how its role in our lives can be expanded on. Also we learn more about the impact of social media and the many qualities it has. We also take a deeper look into artificial intelligence from the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back.

After watching this episode I thought that there is no possible way for artificial intelligence to replace human interaction. In this episode, there is a woman who loses her boyfriend in a car accident and she is devastated. One of her friends tells her and suggests that she go to this online service where she will be able to talk to dead her boyfriend, because since he was always on his phone, it has all of his social tendencies to talk to her. After getting more invested with this service the woman wanted further her connection with her dead boyfriend. The service also offers an exact replica or clone of the person you want. After a night of seeing her boyfriend and his physical touch she realizes that the clone even though he looks the same, does not compare to the one that has passed away. She becomes so frustrated due to the fact that he cannot argue with her because he just goes along with everything she says. At the end of the episode both of them were at a large cliff with the clone standing on the edge, with the woman not knowing what to do and if she should have him jump. After this it cuts to their daughters birthday party where we see the clone living in the attic. I believe that the woman could not lose her boyfriend again, even though they only look the same it would still be to much emotional pain for her to go through the same thing again.

Even before watching the Black Mirror episode I had always thought that there can be no way that something created by man a.k.a AI, can ever compare or fill the gap of human interaction. After watching the episode it confirmed my beliefs and showed me that if we do that sort of thing we will just be disappointed because even if we want someone fake to be real, it will never become a reality. For me looking through the Replika website and watching their video about what service they provide for people, I thought it was a waste of time. I know that it is a great thing for people because it can make them feel happy and better about themselves, but I believe that this kind of happiness is actually bad for a person because there is no hope for these things to be real. We have enough technology in today’s society where you can find someone on social media, websites, or other places online to talk to and start a friendship or even romance if that is what you want to look for.

News Aricle

I looked up a story about Replika because I did find it very weird, but also a cool way to use technology. In this article in goes into saying on how it was first created and what it is like using the app. The post goes on saying what made Replika so good, and how weird or buggy it can be.

This week contents include some of the material which will definitely forces a person to sit and think about. This week’s Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, the readings like Social Network vs. Online Community and an introduction to Replika AI. All of these things seemed interesting yet persuade me to think deep.

Starting from the episode Black Mirror: Be Right Back, now they introduce a new character named Martha who recently become a widow and then she started using an online service which allow a person to communicate with your departed partners. At first this thing seemed to be a relief from the grief but eventually it turned out that there is a lot of difference between a person and a robot. But I personally found this thing depressing even after hearing the concept of such a thing. I mean you know that a person is not alive, how can you still wish to have them back in any form? This seems scary yet psychic to me. What are your comments on it?

The article “Social Network vs. Online Community” was an informative piece and it clearly explains the actual difference between social network and online community. There two terms are as different as the virtual and real world. Social Networks include the people with whom we have personal relations or we meet daily like our colleagues, family members or even our friends. So, every person with whom we have a relation in the real world comes in our social network. While Online Community includes the people or group of people who meet online for some specific reason or purpose. We have the virtual contacts with them because we share the same reason, interest which bring us to the online community, or our intentions and purposes are same.

So, I think these two are as different as the real and the virtual world. A person is now living two different lives, he/she is having a real life in the physical world and then he/she go to the virtual world and find people online who are not less than a ghost sometimes. What do you think about the online life?

From this online life, now I will talk about the new technology that I have been introduced with for the very first time i.e. Replika which is a text based AI. People use this app when they find it hard to share something with their close friends and relatives. Again my question is why are we striving to find the problems of our situations in the technology? Why do we find it easy to talk to a reboot than to a human being? I wanted to ask you all what made this difficult for you to share your problems with your close one? If I talk about myself, I think in the hours of depression what a person need is a self-care, I repeat “Self-care”. So, when I feel depress or feel no connection with people, I use to get some “Me time” or in other words some alone time with any activity which can relax my mind and my body. Tell me about yours? What will you do in the hours of depression? Will you prefer to have a “Me time” or will you go for a “Reboot chat”.

For this week’s news article, I have found this article quite interesting and helpful in understanding that technology is not an escape from the pain we feel. We have to bear the pain or pass over it, these are the only options by which we can move forward in our lives.

Link: https://medium.com/s/technically-dead/in-the-wake-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-mourn-df8ba72135ee  

This is a very interesting theme we had this week followed by screenings and readings. We watched a black mirror episode ” Be right back”, a short clip of “Story of my replica”, a reading called “Social network vs Online Community”, and a podcast “note to self podcast: Talking to Myself.” In the episode of black mirror “Be Right Back”, it is about a woman who loses her boyfriend in an accident and is grieving. Her friend convinces her to get an artificial intelligence of her deceased boyfriend but she rejects that idea. After she realizes she is pregnant, she decides to give in to the artificial intelligence that her friend signed her up unknowingly.  It is meant to manipulate him so that she can communicate with him as if he is there. Eventually it becomes frustrating because he will not argue back or fight back in a conversation and she realizes that it will never be her actual husband no matter how much it looks or sounds like him. Even though she knows it is not actually him, it will never be enough for her so she has to officially let him go. 

In the episode, it portrayed the strength and power of technology by replicating her boyfriend using artificial intelligence. I think that in a way, a lot of people use technology to try to replace something that they wish was there that they needed or wanted. However, for the most part it is just a temporary solution to things because after a certain point you need the real thing or you eventually want more. An example of that is right here in this episode because she eventually wanted more out of it and got frustrated because she couldn’t have that.  She was also grieving in the episode and the natural thing to do is to start the grieving process but her process was halted or stuck in denial for a period of time. The only way to heal with sad experiences, from people, or events is to go through all the processes and to avoid looking at the objects that it reminds you of until you are healed and ready. You cannot heal if it is constantly there otherwise you will be dependent on it and social media and technology gives you all the data you need in order to revisit those memories or to see those people. 

Along with the theme of this episode, we watched a short video called “The story of Replica” and it is a website where you can create your own avatar and you can talk to it and communicate back and forth. It is constantly collecting data every time you speak to it and some people tend to like it as views it as a friend or view it as real in a way. We talked about what is to say what’s real and what’s not because for some people it can be viewed as real and for others it is just a computer and is not actually the real thing. It’s a fine line… We also read an article called ” Social Network vs Social Community.” According to the article, the difference between a social network and social community is that the community forms from all different  backgrounds and have similar interests. I personally am not involved in a social community however I think it is of great benefit that people do. It is a great way to be connected to other people and having similar interests is a great way to start! This is one of the examples on how technology in having people stay connected and involved with one another in a positive way. Do you having a replica is a real experience ? and do you technology has gone to far with these artificial intelligence devices that talk to you or do you think it is a positive thing?

The news link below is about artificial intelligence and making neural networks smarter.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200916131103.htm

This week we talked about about social connects and how the internet has lead to people feeling more connected with people that are either strangers or that they hardly know but yet they feel close to each other. This might be one of the better things about the internet and social media allowing for those that have never meet each other in real life feel like they really know each and to connect with people who have similar interest. This is touch in the article “Social Networks vs. Online Community” which breaks down social media sites into the two categories social networks and online communities and tell you which each one is and how they differ and what there best use is. Your social networks consist of people you personally know and usually see on a daily basis. Do to this not every person know all the same people so each social network is different for each person. Much like myself and my friends back home generally all hangout with the same people when back home but no of us go to the same college so we all have different social networks when away from our hometowns. Then online communities are composed of people from all over that have a similar interest from old cars to knitting and most of these people have never meet in real life but are able to talk with each other about there common interest and ask for help with any problems they may be facing.

While I am not apart of online communities that you usually think of through Facebook I would consider some different pages that I follow on Instagram to sort of be considered online communities. One of the pages would be thebuffalofanatics this page is always posting constant updates about the Buffalo Bills and is just a place to be able to see daily information on what’s going on the with the organization and how they feel about certain moves made by the bills or that other teams within the NFL. If I choose to I could reach out and talk with other bills from all over the world but I usually just use it to see what they post and that about all that my interaction with the page is.

We also watched the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” which shows a scary realty that we were well could see at one point in the future. This episode show Martha who ends up losing her husband Ash in a car accident and just like any person would be with a sudden loss of a loved one is very upset and is having a hard time it. Ash had a constant present on social media just like almost everyone today. With advanced technology Martha was able to talk to a computer that used her husbands social media post to develop a mind of its own and talk to her in a way that Ash would of. It then gets ever creeper with when Martha goes even further and has a copy of her husband made. At first she is happy because it feel like she got her husband back but after a while she starts to realize the human emotions that weren’t displayed online really aren’t there and she realizes she has to end her connection with it to be able to move on.

This episode sort of reminded me of cloning and how it could become very possible in the future but hasn’t really be looked into due to ethical issues. While being able to get someone back you loss would be nice and might help you get over the loss initially. Once you start to realize that it might not act the same as whoever you loss you start to remember that they are really gone and you’ve been living a fake life with someone who really doesn’t exist then you have to go through that hurt all over again and then would that really be worth it. If clone became a thing would you get a loved one you lost cloned so you could spend more time with them.

News Article

This article talks about the possibility of making human clones and the difficulties that would come along with it if people were really serious about wanting to make human clones.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ethics-of-human-cloning-scientific-progress-2020-7

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

In the Black Mirror episode, ‘Be Right Back’, a widowed wife received the opportunity to turn all her husband’s social media data into a robot that looked and spoke like her late husband. She did not have a lot of time to grieve her husband before she was exposed to the robot and this made her go insane and kick him out. He couldn’t go too far away from where he was ‘awoken’ and therefore she kept him in the attic. Although the robot clone looked like the husband, the data did not include all the human-like emotions that he had. The clone was a temporary facade that added on to the widow’s list of problems and traumas. Being that the robot clone couldn’t go far away from her foreshadowed that people can’t be too far away from the technology that they have connection to, like an invisible wire. This invisible wire has innumerable people hooked to their ‘robot’ phones, tablets and laptops. Although this episode was created in 2013, there is a close alternative today that can even try to replicate yourself if you talk to it long enough and is called ‘Replika’. Replika is an app used to chat to and it is overall gathering data to become you, so that you can relate to it. It is pretty scary to see that years later this is an option. Replika had me thinking, what if the company decides to team up with robot cloning? I think I’d like to keep my data to myself and in my brain.

Laura Johnson states, “So when it comes down to it, what makes a social network a social network is the fact that you have already made each of the relationships. Your pre established connections have been built one by one, directly by you and an online social network is where those connections can have a place to live collectively”. This reminds me of the film, “The Social Dilemma”, it explained that these social networks collect so much personal data in order to predict what ad you’d choose or whose picture you would double click on. Technology is moving a trillion times faster compared to our brains that have not evolved as much. We don’t even know how much it will affect us in the long run. AI is literally trained to know what posts we like and how to increase the interaction with the app. Essentially the technology is winning over most of our lives and it’s become a norm for this. We need to make more of an effort to stay away from the social media apps because these apps are more intelligent than us because they gather information about our digital existence to use against us. The way this world is looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Black Mirror episode is mirroring reality in a few decades.

Is technology the new human? Do you think we are too far deep to stop the machines from replacing human interaction?

Here is an article about machines with brains like ours. https://medium.com/@mishaallakhani/machines-with-brains-like-ours-an-intro-to-deep-learning-a5dff4c24e97

As we close out the fourth week of the semester what I took away from this week after viewing all the material is that social media and technology is allowing people to become whatever and whoever they want. This week’s episode of Black Mirror “Be Right Back”, the article on socialmediatoday by Laura Johnson and the youtube video describing the application Replika all showed me this common theme for the week.

“Be Right Back” the first episode of the second season of Black Mirror was another thrilling episode. I did realize that in this series the episodes do start off slow to build the plot, but once the plot is built the episodes have shown to be very interesting and thrilling. So to get started on the episode it begins with a happy couple named Ash and Martha. The episode makes it known that Ash is a delivery driver and Martha is an artist. One day Ash has to make a delivery and Martha does not tag along because she wants to work on a new piece she began. As day becomes night Martha does not hear from Ash and she later learns he passed away during this delivery. Martha is destroyed by this because it is made clear Ash was her soulmate. At his funeral Martha encounters a friend and she shows Martha an application for their smartphone that could help her with her loss. After not wanting to try out the application Martha gives in because she is pregnant and all alone. Martha falls in love with this new program and when she drops her phone one day and cannot speak to this fake Ash she melts down. This makes her come to the realization that speaking on the phone is just not enough. This escalates to her buying a replica of Ash. She now has an addiction that cannot be helped because she misses her partner they were meant for each other. When she realizes that this replica of Ash is not the same she breakdown and almost has it commit suicide. In the end she keeps it in the attic which goes back to the beginning of the episode when Ash was telling Martha about his mother not being able to deal with the death of his brother and stored all his belongings in the attic. This foreshadowed Ash’s faith. Technology is a scary thing. It allows people and things to be something they are not as shown in this episode. Although this replica looked like and sounded like Ash it was not him. It did not have all the things that brought them together the flaws and perfections.

Second is the article by Laura Johnson. The article gives us the differences between social networks and online communities. Although the intentions of both of these categories are for the common good there is some negative things about both of them. I know the article speaks on the perks and good uses of the two, but there is more than just that. It is allowing people to be something they are not on social media. In social networks you can already know somebody and their feed could be completely the opposite of what you know them as. People can post anything and deceive anyone. In online communities this deception can be brought from just sharing the same interest as another. These things are possibly, but there is good brought out from this as well. You can connect to new people and connect with people outside of where you met. In the end there is pros and cons to this just like with the episode for the week. It was painful for Martha to be with this fake artificial Ash, but it still helped her cope with losing her partner.

The youtube video on the program Replika shows ties into both the episode and the article. Replika is a chatbot that creates a digital representation of whatever you want it to be. In the video talks about how Eugenia Kyuda started an early form of Replika by developing a chatbot where she uploaded all her message history with her friend into a network where it created a bot she could interact with in the form of her. This is very similar to how Martha started off in this week’s episode. So after everything we viewed and read for the week it left me with some questions. Is technology going to far? Sooner or later are we going to create something we cannot control?

WEEKLY NEWS: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-model-alleged-assault-trump/2020/09/17/8722c1fc-f92f-11ea-be57-d00bb9bc632d_story.html

The weekly news article I chose was the new sexual assault allegation against Donald Trump. Amy Dorris a former model stated that back in the 90s Trump sexual assaulted her during the US Open tennis tournament. I felt that this was relevant as a weekly news post because with the presidential election right around the corner we have to sit back and make sure that with everything going on right now is this who we really want in the office leading us for another four years. A man who has multiply allegations of assaulting women and from my last week’s news post basically the reason why we are still in the midst of a pandemic?

As time goes by everyone seems to lose someone close to them and it’s hard. I feel that we all go through that process hoping to meet closure, but as we all know it takes time. Losing a loved one is never easy, it’s painful and it makes you wish you had the power to go back in time and change everything. Now don’t judge me, but what if you had a chance to bring back one of your loved ones, would you do it? Most people in the early stages would probably take that chance even if it was a small one. When you have a void in your life you want to fill it anyway you can and by doing whatever means necessary.

This week in class we watched this episode on Black Mirror that brings up this same idea of bringing a loved one back. It starts off with this couple, Martha and Ash who had just moved into a new cottage. Unfortunently Ash dies the next day returning the moving van, this sends Martha into a state of grief naturally. This makes her decide to get rid of everything that reminds her of ash and just redoing everything in her image till theres nothing left of his memory. Even then it’s not enough for her she still feels him and remembers every little memory of their lives together. Now her friend tells her about this unnamed system that can scan the internet for the digital impressions of Ash, giving Martha a chance to make closure. Instead of closure this system only ends up making it harder for to move on, making her go a step further by buying a replica of Ash in the flesh. Martha ends up hating this, because it didn’t end up replacing the real Ash, but instead made this version of him that she hated. Ultimately making her more confused on how to move on than in the beginning.

There was this question in class the other day about how do we know what is real? Like seriously think about that question like how do we distinguish between what is real and whats not real. In the episode Martha wants this to be real she wants this new replacement of Ash to be like the old one, but it just isn’t and she knows that. What I couldn’t understand is why did she end up keeping him locked up in the attic. Why not get rid of it, was it because she couldn’t bear to lose him again or does it again come back to not being able to move on?We listened to a podcast in class this week that talked about this guy who tried this interactive app that he could just talk to. It wasn’t a real person talking to him, but instead a computer version of himself. He ended up enjoying it actually saying that it was almost comforting having something like that to talk to. I was pretty interested to say the least, imagine having something to talk to that thinks like you. My friends are great, but I feel that because the system knows you and how you think it would be able to help you more if you’re in a predicament. This system that this guy went through is essentially the same thing as the system in the Black mirror episode just not as developed yet. Although in this situation it was nice to talk a computer system, the question still arises about if this technology can actually help with closure?

This article I found talks about a series of new revelations about the federal government’s coronavirus response and how it could reinforce concerns about whether the Trump administration’s political motives were a higher priority than the health of Americans during this Coronavirus outbreak.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-usps-cdc-hhs/index.html