My Relationship With Technology

 Introduction

I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfil your request. As an AI language model, I am not capable of writing a blog post based on a human perspective.

Hey it's the real me now, and I wanna talk about AI. You know, some people think AI is reliable. Many businesses are organizations are starting to employ AI and people are continuously and hilariously finding ways to break through it. New York City decided to start using an AI chatbot to help the residents of the city. Almost immediately people found ways to exploit the bot. Even simple questions got the chatbot to encourage it's user to commit acts which are illegal in the city.

There are pessimists who say that AI will overtake humans and we will not be needed any more. But fact is, we are very very far from that. The human brain takes up 2.5 square meters of space, while being able to make 10^18 calculations per second. Humans have only just recently, (2022) made a computer that can reach that speed. But the computer requires 272 times as much space and a whopping 2 trillion times as much power to use.

With that power us humans have something AI does not: creativity.

AI's Creativity, or Lack Thereof

AI writes the same way boring people write. AKA, the same way you wrote essays in school. Now I'm not calling you boring, what I'm saying is that school wanted you to write essays in a specific way. Surely you remember, using big fancy words, and excluding anything deemed "unprofessional." Looking back on how I used to write in school, it's just not a way a normal person talks! It's boring! And nobody wants to read an essay written like that either.

The writer's strike of 2023 showed that big Hollywood execs could not make shows and television without the power of creative human minds, and they were forced to back down. This grade school essay style writing that AI likes to do, just would not cut it, and they needed the writers back. 

Human's Creativity

Results of the NASA creativity study

Creativity is what separates us from the machines. But unfortunately, humans lose creativity with age. A study by NASA showed that 98% of children scored a genius level in creativity, while only 2% of adults did. Many people stop being creative as they age and they lose that skill they once had as a child. Society and the schooling system beat the creativity out of us. But we do not have to let them do that. 

Creativity is like a muscle: use it or lose it. I believe that no matter who you are and what you do, you should be doing something creative. Even if you are making a good living doing something that's not creative, you should be exercising the creative part of your brain on the side. Everyone should have a creative hobby to keep in touch with your human self.

This is where my relationship with technology finally comes in. Technology has allowed me to discover my passions and hobbies, and I am far from the only one.

How Technology Allows Us to Create

Think about what you're passionate about. Maybe it's playing an instrument, or writing, or drawing. Alright, now imagine if you were a rice farmer from ancient Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC. Now chances are you could not have that passion because the technology simply did not exist at the time.

Hobbies like music production, for example, was not realistic for an average person to do until about 1983. With the introduction of MIDI, anyone with a computer could now compose an entire orchestrated song. In the past this was not doable, as you had to have access to an entire orchestra, which was not affordable by the average person at all. In this way, many people discovered they had a passion for composing that they otherwise would have never realized. 

With computers and software becoming mainstream in our society, there has been an explosion of creative works. The average person now has access to artistic tools and resources that are leagues better than what only the rich could afford a century ago. People now have greater ability to discover their passions than any point in history. And one of those people is me.

How Technology Allows Me to Create

Over the past two years, I have discovered my passion for game design. I wholeheartedly love creating games, and wish to continue doing it for the rest of my life. Games are the most multifaceted media source. While a media source like a book only requires proficiency in writing and narrative, making a game requires proficiency in programming, art, narrative, sound design, level design, mechanic design, music production, and even more depending on the genre.

Most of these skills would be near impossible for me to learn if it was not for the free software I have access to. I learned art through digitally creating works in GIMP. Completely for free and I did not have to buy a million markers/color pencils. I learned programming through PyCharm and Godot. Two completely free software.

Okay But Is My Relationship with Technology Healthy Though?

Yes. Yeah, I'd say so. I mean for one I do not have Instagram. I also deleted both Twitter and TikTok a few years back after realizing they were negatively affecting my mental health. I mainly use my computer to work on schoolwork, make games, or talk with friends. Even then I much prefer to talk with my friends in person, and always prefer calling over texting.

I do have a lot of screen time and I'll admit I do partake in my fair share of doom scrolling. And I always play on my phone right before bed. But overall I really hate wasting my life in front of a computer so I try to ensure what I'm doing is productive when I can. I got into the habit of staying out of my room and instead doing my work in public areas. Being in a social setting really helps me stop myself from going on random websites and not be productive.

People are resistant to change. Whenever something new comes out that changes how we do established tasks, there are always people who resist it because it's different. I am not saying technology does not have downsides, it obviously does, but to me the upsides heavily outweigh them. I would not be the person I am today if it were not for technology and I am so grateful to be myself.

The Silencing of Antiwar Voices

The horrors of war we often don't truly think about

Introduction

War is an extremely glorified act. We obviously know war as a horrible thing, but we often do not think of it more deeply than that.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." 

- Joseph Stalin

This quote perfectly describes the popular view on war. It's hard to truly grasp how horrible war is because it's of such a large scale. It's easy to say "yeah! Let's go to war!" in order to achieve some political or social goal. But in truth, a war in the modern era would cause much more negatives through tragedy and trauma than any positives from any goal it could possibly achieve.

Many important wars throughout history are glorified. We think of the revolutionary war as creating the United States, we think of the civil war as ending slavery, world war II as defeating the nazis, etc. It is true that these wars did these things, and they are good things, but for every "good" war, there are 100 brutal and pointless ones we do not hear about.

Why Don't We Hear Anti War Voices That Much?

Going on antiwar.com, we see a website that is clearly underdeveloped and underfunded. It's not one that's very popular at all. Voices against war would seemingly be the most popular voice? Right? I mean nobody truly likes war.

But as I mentioned before, wars are historically glorified. The reason these voices are silenced could be one of two reasons.

One: These voices are hidden because people in power want them to be hidden. As citizens we have little to gain from war, but people in power have a lot to gain. Governments get to justify more taxes for military spending, and a win of a war leads to a lot of political gains. 

Certain businesses also see a large rise in sales during war time. Because of this, these people actually do like war. And ultimately the most powerful people in the world control what media the general population has access to. At least, according to the theory of agenda setting.

Two: Another explanation for why anti war voices are silenced is human biases. Human's have a propensity to only focus on specific parts of a larger whole. These are called confirmation bias/cherry picking, or tunnel vision bias/selective attention. This would explain why we often think of only the positives of war and not the negatives.

Diffusion of Innovation: TikTok

Introduction

Everett Rodger's Diffusion of Innovation theory is a model for how a innovation spreads throughout a population.

It's modeled after a bell curve, and the idea is that when a new innovation comes out, not everybody will adopt it all at once. For example: the world wide web. When it was initially invented it was only the early inventors who used it. It wasn't until 7 years later in 1996 that it really started to take off. Now, it's a part of our day to day life and has (almost) completely diffused into our society.

The internet was not fully accepted by society even in year 2000

The theory does not only apply to innovations, however. It can also apply to ideas. For example: acceptance of same sex marriage. In the 90's it was not something that was very accepted, with only 27% of the population thinking it should be legal. But today, that number has increased to 71%. So of course it's not fully diffused yet, but we're in the stage of late majority.

Diffusion of TikTok

I wanted to talk about TikTok, because the story of how I adopted it is interesting. According to YPulse, only 12% of my generation used TikTok in 2019. Now that number is over 75%. Checking my app history, I first downloaded TikTok on October 7th 2018. That makes me an early adopter of the app, pretty significantly so.

But today, I no longer own the app. I uninstalled it in late 2020 and have not looked back since. I realized it had a negative impact on my mental health so I decided to delete it. So today, I do not have TikTok and I refuse to reinstall it, so what does this make me? Am I both a early adopter and a laggard?

Conclusion

What this research left me wondering is how does the diffusion of innovation theory account for the innovation being abandoned? Because most innovations are abandoned. A great example is chlorofluorocarbons. A substance that was widely used as a refrigerant, but got abandoned when it was discovered that it was damaging the Earth's ozone layer.

Diffusion of innovation definitely is not a perfect theory, but it's a good way of looking about how innovations are adopted.

EOTO #2 Reax

 Introduction

This week's EOTO was about a variety of topics. Each group had a different topic and each group member chose examples from that topic. Most of these topics were very interesting to me and I learned a lot of stuff that I did not know about before

Reaction

One of the most interesting presentations to me was Charles' presentation on cord cutting. Because before this, I had never even heard of cord cutting, and it's a really cool idea. Personally I do not use cable, which I guess makes me a cord cutter in a certain sense, although I have not actually cut the cable cord in my home. This was just a really cool topic because I did not realize this was a movement that a lot of people were doing.

Another presentation that stood out to me was the presentation on social credit, by, I wanna say Lola but I did not quite get the name. The Chinese government is one that I am aware is bad, but also one I do not think about much. But every time I do any digging on it, or hear anything about it, I am appalled, and this was certainly one of those times.

A great graphic used in the presentation

I knew about the social credit system before this, but I did not realize how truly bad it was. I did not realize they maintained it through constant surveillance and scrutinization, or that was raises and lowers your score is so arbitrary. I knew that criticizing the government could lower your score, but I did not realize not visiting your parents could as well.

To me this is such a disgusting system that really goes against my personal beliefs. I mean even if we ignore the fact that they have constant surveillance on their citizens, (because let's be honest they have that here in the United States as well) deciding someone's score based on personal values such as visiting your parents is terrible to me. I think people should visit their parents, but if someone decides not to that's their decision.

I think my favorite group was group 4, though, who's topic was theories. I find theories like these so interesting, so I'm a little jealous I did not get to present on one of these. But in any case I found all of these presentations fascinating.

Of them my favorite was Ella's, on the illusory truth effect. It's a really interesting psychological pattern in humans where information that is repeated can start to feel true. Ella really stressed that psychological studies showed that familiarity can overpower rationality. Sometimes humans like to believe that we are above it all and not like the other animals, but we have to remember that sometimes we are just as prone to, if not more prone to, deception and suggestion.

I think being aware of biases like these is super important. Sometimes I'll have thoughts or opinions that feel off and I try to decipher if those thoughts are truly coming from a place of rationality, or if I'm being affected by some bias. So I really think it's important to be aware of common human biases so you can know to avoid them.

Another interesting presentation from this group was Miri's on The Theory of Agenda Setting. Which basically says that our view of the world is biased by what the large media sources choose to show us. This is something that I have not really thought about but makes a lot of sense. What scares me about it, though, is that even being aware of it does little to stop it.

Unlike the illusory truth affect, being aware of agenda setting cannot cause you to receive news that is not being show, because the news that's not being show, is, well, not being shown. It sounds really stupid but it is true and it is scary. I guess the best thing to do is to look into more independent journalism. I think about biases a lot, and this is one I want to start considering a lot more.

Final Thoughts

I talked about a lot of presentations, and even then there's more I did not even get in to. The presentations on news deserts and media consolidation were also very interesting. Once again the class really killed it with these presentations and legitimately had me thinking about them after I left the room. So really good job to everyone.

Images used:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUN6EuVeNo4T4QodEPpC9Arhqel7IAcLA_00n37veziA&s

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/china-social-credit-score-prev.jpg

https://assets.asana.biz/transform/fe120116-d2dc-4928-bb5e-3869569e22c3/inline-leadership-unconscious-bias-examples-5-2x

EOTO Awareness

 Introduction

This week's EOTO was different than most. Instead of everyone choosing one example from a broad topic, each group was assigned a different more narrow topic. I was in group 1 and our topic was awareness. I choose to do my presentation on propaganda. My speech is as follows:

Speech

"Hey guys, it's Brad.

Ok, who here, hates this man. If you're not raising your hand right now you're a horrible person. Yes okay everybody in this room hates Hitler, good good. Hitler is the most hated man on the planet, everybody hates Hitler. Buuuuut in the 30's and 40's most Germans loved Hitler. Why? Well it's because Hitler was constantly ensuring everybody thought he was great through his campaign of propaganda.

Propaganda is the spread of information in order to promote a particular belief. So to us, it's very obvious that Hitler was bad. But to the German people at the time, they were brainwashed into believing he was good. Because all of this pro Nazi press was around them everywhere, I mean the Nazis literally had a ministry of propaganda. 

And this type of propaganda still exists today. I mean we all know how bad it is to live in North Korea, but everyone there seems to love their glorious leader. So these examples are pretty ridiculous though. All of us here are smart enough to recognize these as propaganda. But this does not mean you are immune to propaganda.

In fact, throughout the course of this presentation I have actually subtly planted propaganda of my own in order to give all of you a biased opinion. That's right, I propagandized you and you didn't even notice. (silent for a second) Okay so I did not do that, I'm not smart enough to know how to propagandize you, BUT for a second there you all believed that I was.

Apple's misleading "super. computer." ad

Ok but seriously lets look at some modern examples of propaganda, because it's not just the government. It's the media for one. Again propaganda is the spread of information in order to promote a particular belief, I don't think news sources like Fox News and CNN are even trying to hide that they do that. 

But it's also companies. Again if we're going by this definition then advertising is literally just propaganda. Here's an apple ad, calling the ipad pro a super computer. The ipad pro is not a supercomputer, but it is a computer, and you could describe it as super, so that's how they get away with this blatantly false advertising. Let's look at some other examples.

... So actually I did some research, do any of you all remember during your tour that they said high point has the #1 dorms in the nation. The official HPU website says the dorms are ranked #1 by Niche and the Princeton review, so I did a quick google search and nope! that's just not true! (Princeton Review, Niche)

Okay one more thing to leave you off with. Remember how the Nazi's got everyone in Germany to believe they were great? Yeah well congress saw this, realized how bad it was, and created the Smith Mundt act, which basically said that the U.S. government was not allowed to spread propaganda in our own country, of course we're still allowed to spread U.S. propaganda to other countries but that's beside the point.

65 years later the government's realizes "dang, this anti propaganda law makes it really hard to spread propaganda." So when the NDAA, which is just a yearly bill that just authorizes military programs and activities, it's a bill they sign every year. So before the 2013 one got signed, they just slipped in a little thing that said "oh by the way we're repealing the smith mundt act."

Now it may seem like the government allowing itself to spread propaganda is a bad thing, like when you say it out loud it seems really bad. Buuut it's okay guys don't worry. Because, I looked it up, and the government says it won't use this to spread propaganda, in fact, this website (that is an official website of the government) says it supports this bill because it will allow people across America to hear their "valuable news"! Hooray!"

Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83gTtmCrmdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWNXUiLSIwM

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda

https://armedservices.house.gov/ndaa

Images:

https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/storage/914/f87130c8-ba94-11ec-bc82-0a86e68a834f.jpeg

https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2017/06/ipad-pro-super-computer-100726428-large.jpg?auto=webp&quality=85,70

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75d3850d-3796-4204-9e82-6c7b099cb041_1604x1214.png

The Age of AI

Introduction

AI is an existential threat that we, as a generation, will be the first to enter the workforce facing. The age of AI is a documentary about how AI is changing the world. The problem is that this generation was released in 2019. In four short years, our perception of AI has changed drastically. For perspective: ChatGPT was released in 2022.

It feels weird to call a documentary that's only four years old outdated, but AI has developed so quickly that it's true. However, this does not mean that the documentary has nothing to offer, far from it. It has a lot to say about not only AI, but privacy and modern technology as a whole. It's also enjoyable to watch this documentary knowing what happens with AI next. So let's jump right in.

Reflection

The Age of AI is a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic film. The film starts with Google's AI beating the best player in the world at Go, A game that I had not heard of before. It is considered one of the most complex board games of all time. Everybody thought the Fan Hui, world champion of Go, would win. But Google's AlphaGo ended up besting him.

In my mind and with a more modern perspective, this makes sense. It is much easier for computers to do binary objective tasks like pieces on a board compared to more subjective tasks like creating art or writing. However, according to Google, solving Go had been a great challenge for AI for many years.

"Go was long considered a grand challenge for AI... The strongest Go computer programs only achieved the level of human amateurs, despite decades of work. Standard AI struggled to assess the sheer number of possible moves and lacked the creativity and intuition of human players."

- Google on the challenge of creating AlphaGo

So Google's AlphaGo was much more challenging to create than I would have initially thought, and it really was the starting point for the more advanced AIs that will define this decade.

Privacy bill being passed unanimously,
as seen in the documentary

The documentary also delves into other concerns related to modern technology, such as privacy. A moment I found really powerful was near the end when Alastair Mactaggart got the California privacy bill passed unanimously.

Everyone in the California senate agreed to pass this bill, it's kind of eye opening. All of us feel uncomfortable with these giant tech companies collecting our data, but we all sit there in silence and let it happen. It makes me really optimistic about future privacy laws and holding these companies accountable.

How Much Privacy do we Really Have?

 "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about." This remark is often heard right before someone's privacy is violated. B

ut is there any validity to it? Well, no. For one simple reason: we're human! It's part of our nature to want some privacy, even if we have nothing to hide. Personally, when I'm in the car alone, I'll sing to myself. This is nothing incriminating or worth hiding, but that does not mean I'm okay with everyone hearing my car karaoke! I value my privacy.

But when I'm in the car "alone," are there truly no ears listening? Unfortunately the answer is no. I have my devices with me in the car and they always have an active microphone, and truthfully, I do not know exactly where the microphone recording is going. If I were naive I could say that the microphone is only active so my phone can detect when I say "Hey Siri!" But I know that it's much more than that.

The other day I decided to watch a show with some friends over a voice call. I had never seen this show before, and it was a fun time. The next day I wake up and check YouTube, and I suddenly have a ton of recommendations of clips and moments from that show. I never typed anything about the show into Google or anywhere online, it was my first time ever seeing it! All I did was watch it in a voice call with my friends, but YouTube somehow knew.

Privacy in the Modern Age

So this made me think; what even is privacy anymore? In 1965, the right to privacy was officially recognized by the supreme court. I have wondered: what did privacy mean back then? Because the word has much different connotations now. Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. government's gargantuan system of mass surveillance in 2013, privacy has not been looked at the same.

Maybe in the late 1900's privacy just meant the times when you are alone and no one's listening, but now, it feels like that time just does not exist. As someone who grew up in this age of privacy falling apart, I have viewed privacy in a very pessimistic way; I view it as something we pretend to have.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of one of the
largest data collection companies,
shown with tape over his laptop webcam.

To me, and many other Americans, our lack of privacy is something we choose to look over. We're not naive, we know we do not truly have privacy, but it's just easier to act as if we do have it. Because at the end of the day, those who are spying on us and collecting our data are robotic algorithms who cannot judge us, or some worker who we will never meet just looking through a giant database. It's much like the way I could choose to constantly think about my inevitable death, but I choose not to because it's something I do not really have control over. I view privacy in the same way.

I do what I can to be as private as possible, I put tape over my webcam, I use a VPN, I put fake birthdays and names for websites I sign up for, but I've accepted that only does so much and there's nothing I can do to truly be private in the same way people in 1965 were when the court first recognized privacy.

Privacy Going Forward

New technology which allows people
to be seen through walls using Wi-Fi.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tech-see-people-through-walls-wifi 

This nihilistic way me and many others view privacy, is sad. It's terrible that we're forced to accept this. And in the future, it will only get worse. New technology is coming out that is just making spying on us easier and easier. At what point will we say we have had enough? At what point will it have gone too far, if it has not already.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. In 2018 the California legislature unanimously passed a bill that require big tech companies to allow people to know what data has been collected from then in the past 12 months, and allows people to say no to these companies selling their data. (AB 375) This is a huge step forward and I'm cautiously optimistic about new laws that will be passed in the future.