Week 3 Readings

Throughout my lifetime, I have been taught about past rights movements (e.g. civil rights movements) and been able to witness them in motion as well. It always makes me think about what the norm was before and how it got that way. It seems that we have had a lot of issues in the past that we have overcome (or are still fighting to overcome), but something that I have consistently found is that there is a lot of resistance to the changes. Most of the changes (e.g. Black rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, etc.) in rights seem intuitively... well, right.

However, there seems to be (from my point of view) a correlation with age to resistance to the change. And part of this makes sense; humans inherently don't like change. If you've lived and grown up thinking a certain way and you know that it works, why would you change? It's a tried and true method. I can understand that.

The part that I am trying to understand, or that I want to know, is when our highly liberal generations grow up, are we going to become the conservative population? Or are we still going to want things to change? Will we allow the changes to occur? Are we going to go with the ebb and flow of societies changes and growing pains? If we become conservative, who are we to really say what is right or wrong? Where does that distinction come from? Who decides? When we will have gone too far?

This is where it ties back into the readings. With this idea that we are making computers our slaves. As we expand the technology, when do these machines become beings? When do they get rights? Do they get rights? Machines can't be treated like slaves, nor do we want to be enslaved by our machines.

Again, there was a lot of dense reading this past week. From the interview with Massumi (about Simondon) to Toscano, there was a lot of complicated text to sift through. There were a lot of new ideas that had never really crossed my mind. Do we treat our machines like slaves? Are we enslaved by them?

I think that the answer is ever-changing, but at the moment, I think we are a little bit of both. We treat our computers as slaves. Their purpose is to do what we want, when we want. However, machines have this capacity to capture our attention. We make this connection to them by personifying them and we empathize with them. They have control over our emotional wellness. It can be a great world that we create and build with technology, or it could end up being a really dangerous world that creates a dominoes effect of destruction.

It seems really dramatic, but it is really hard to tell what is going to happen. There are so many technologies that I have learned about in this class that I hadn't even heard of, so the magnitude of the techie things that are being created these days is large and it's something that I can't wrap my mind around. If this the stuff that is already out there, who knows what is being created or what will happen in the future. I think that the awareness of the direction that our world is going in is not high enough and the choices that we make are not necessarily conscious enough.