Anthology Essay
Coming into this semester I didn’t know a lot about many of the new forms of technology and the ways that they will be affecting everyone’s lives soon. It was shocking how far technology has come and it was surprising to learn how close we are to extending how long humans can live for. A lot of the developing forms of technology that were highlighted this semester have similar fears associated with them. Much of the technology that is being developed right now that is going to majorly affect our lives soon are all intertwined together, and that will also present an interesting challenge for humans going forward.
Video games are a large part of our society today and many explore new forms of technology and how they could be used. Some video games make it look like in the future people will be upgrading their bodies so they can have powerful prosthetics that will allow them to be more violent and this is causing a reasonable fear in people (Kirk McKeand, 2018). Prosthetics are becoming much more advanced as technology is developing, and this is allowing people who need them to live a more normal life by being able to perform normal everyday tasks with their prosthetics. As this technology is advancing though some people are wanting to remove a healthy limb to have a prosthetic to try to gain an advantage over others or to gain some of the new features that prosthetics have in them. With this new technology becoming more popular and mainstream it is being added into pop culture that is highlighting this technology in the wrong light. Video games were also able to highlight the technical issues that are part of blockchain systems. A game called CryptoKitties was able to crash the crypto currency platform Ethereum because so many people were trying to play the game and make a lot of money (Orcutt, 2018). This game got a lot of people excited about the new way that they could make a lot of money that is part of the future, but this game and the issues that it had highlight how far technology needs to continue to develop for these forms of technology to be stable enough for all of society to use them. Video games are also being used as a medium for bioart that is shocking people and causing conversations about what humans can do with their bodies. Lu Yang has created a few different video games that don’t follow traditional human anatomy and some of their games are rather controversial (Xin Wang, 2014). Games such as Uterus Man are challenging the way that people look at modifications and bioart on people’s physical bodies.
Several of the forms of technology that were explored this semester also have a lot of the same fears associated with them. There are fears that people have had in the past that are resurfacing in new forms of technology, and they are valid concerns that people are having. Some tech companies are saying that they are never going to need customers private information at any point, but people are reasonably skeptical about this statement. After the 2016 presidential election that used peoples private information to target political adds towards them, so they are much more careful to give companies their information to, including companies that help to transport people (Withers, 2018). Waymo states that they will never need or ask for people’s private information, but people are skeptical of this statement because so many other companies claim to need it for various reasons. The fears that people have of companies having this type of information are like the fears that parents have about what their children can get into or see on the internet. Many of the fears that parents have today are the same fears that parents had in the 1990’s of what their children would see (Herrman, 2017). Online there are videos that seem to be children’s videos, but they have violence in them that young children don’t need to see. People are also worried about what people are saying online and with good reason. The internet was able to teach an AI chatbot to be racist and say bad things in less than 24 hours (Vincent, 2016). The fact that the internet was able to teach a computer how to act like this in less than 24 hours, then what will the internet be able to do to impressionable young children who are on the internet all the time?
Soon humans won’t experience as much death as we do now as technology advances to the point where people can live for hundreds of years. This idea was discussed in class that we are quickly approaching the point in the advancement of technology that we need to figure out what we are going to do with the technology when it gains this ability, which is going to be sooner than later. Right now there is one thing that people who are working to get humans to live forever; they all die (Selby, 2018). Technology has advanced far enough that people are able to freeze their bodies in hopes that one day they will be unfrozen and come back to life again. Science is also learning of new ways to try to keep the body functioning for longer and how to repair itself of the damage that happens to it as the body ages. These advances are quickly getting to the stage where they will be able to affect human life span, but there aren’t any conversations happening about what the future will look like (McKie, 2018). There need to be discussions about what is ethical with the changes that are happening with science and what people can get changed about their bodies and how long they can live for. Right now, society isn’t acknowledging how close we are to the time when this will be easy to do, and that is a problem. Science is only 20 years away from being able to drastically change how long humans can live for and how, but not many people know about this.
Technology is even changing the way that humans make art. There are special science labs that are being built for the purpose of creating bioart (Dailing, 2018). In these labs people are creating projects such as making a song with the yeast that is in a sourdough bread starter. Science has also made it possible to have neurons play a concert themselves (Clara Rodriguez Fernandez, 2017). Guy Ben-Ary took some of his own cells and grew them on petri dishes and hooked them up to a machine that was able to take the signals that the cells were giving off and create noises from them which was made into a song. There are more extreme versions of bioart that people are doing though. One example of that is Neil Harbisson who has an antenna implanted in his skull which allows him to hear colors. Harbisson is unable to see colors, he just sees the world in shades of gray. With the antenna installed on his head it can see the colors of the world around him and he hears sounds that represent the colors. Harbisson is even able to create paintings that show what songs look like. He listens to various songs and then he paints the colors of what the song sounds like so people can see it. With this antenna implanted in his skull he is also the first living person to be considered a cyborg. This is a first in the world, but he was able to convince the government to consider him a cyborg rather than a human. It is a major step for others who are modifying their physical body with new forms of technology that are being created every day.
All the new technology that is being created doesn’t just benefit private consumers, it is also being adjusted so it can be used by governments. Currently governments at many different levels and sizes around the world are working to build artificial intelligence systems to help them out (Ferose, 2018). These systems allow citizens to submit forms to the government or get their questions answered faster than if they had to track stuff down themselves. While these systems can be helpful, they aren’t working perfectly yet for everyone. Smaller governments with fewer people using the systems are working well, but larger governments who have more users and more things the system needs to do aren’t quite living up to the hype around them yet. The people that are developing these systems need to work first on the user experience and work backwards from there to have this type of technology work like it is intended to.
Today there are new forms of technology that are being created with new uses in mind all the time. These new forms of technology are things that you have heard about in movies and video games that you think are far away in the future still but aren’t that far away in real life. Some of these new forms of technology are being introduced to the public right now, but they aren’t all ready for that yet. Technology such as crypto currency systems are being created and released to the public for them to invest in and use, but they aren’t built large enough for the public to truly use it without crashing the system. This means that the firms and people that are creating these new forms of technology that are supposed to be the future for humans they need to work harder and faster to work out the issues with their technology so that it will be able to do its intended job when the public gets their hands on it. If a new form of technology does not work the way that it was promised or perform like people are expecting it to, they will get annoyed with it and no longer want to use it just as fast as they jumped in to try it. This means that the world is going to start moving and developing even faster than it already is. Soon more people will be able to become cyborgs and advance what their body is capable of. People will also be able to live for hundreds of years with the advancements that science is making that should be completely developed within the next 20 years.
Citations:
Clara Rodriguez Fernandez. (2017, May 20). A Concert Played by Human Neurons on a Petri Dish. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://labiotech.eu/bioart/guy-ben-ary-cellf-neuron-music/
Dailing, P. (2018, December 12). Inside SAIC’s Bio Art Lab, where art is life—literally. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/bio-art-lab-school-of-the-art-institute-saic/Content?oid=65038140
Ferose, V. R. (2018, November 13). How Governments Can Use Intelligent Systems To Reflect The Needs Of Citizens. Retrieved December 13, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2018/11/13/how-governments-can-use-intelligent-systems-to-reflect-the-needs-of-citizens/
Herrman, J. (2017, December 9). The Return of the Techno-Moral Panic. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/magazine/the-return-of-the-techno-moral-panic.html
Kirk McKeand. (2018, December 11). Best of 2018: Meet the bionic man creating real Cyberpunk 2077-esque augmentations. Retrieved December 11, 2018, from https://www.vg247.com/2018/12/11/cyberpunk-2077-bionic-man-creating-real-augmentations-hug-herr/
McKie, R. (2018, May 6). No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman? The Observer. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/06/no-death-and-an-enhanced-life-is-the-future-transhuman
Orcutt, M. (2018, December 13). Ethereum thinks it can change the world. It’s running out of time to prove it. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612507/ethereum-thinks-it-can-change-the-world-its-running-out-of-time-to-prove-it/
Selby, J. (2018, December 11). Even with the most advanced technology, our attempts at immortality are repeatedly foiled by nature. This is how. Retrieved December 11, 2018, from https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/immortality-advanced-technology-live-forever-biohacking-tradeoffs-nature/
Vincent, J. (2016, March 24). Twitter taught Microsoft’s friendly AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. Retrieved December 13, 2018, from https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist
Withers, R. (2018, April 3). Waymo Wants You to Know It Has No Interest in Your Data. Retrieved November 29, 2018, from https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/waymo-wants-you-to-know-it-has-no-interest-in-your-data.html
Xin Wang. (2014, November 21). Uterus Man, Pelvis Chariot, and the Irreverent Video Games of Lu Yang. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://hyperallergic.com/164210/uterus-man-pelvis-chariot-and-the-irreverent-video-games-of-lu-yang/