Blog Post 10 | In the Age of AI

The growth in technology and AI is intended to make life easier and more efficient however through the video In the Age of AI we learn that this can also come with unintended consequences. 

The video speaks about a few different forms of AI however one specific thing that was emphasized in the beginning of the second hour was how private companies are using AI to track data on you and all of your searches/interests. 

In the beginning, some people looked at this as a helpful and cool way to find searches that interest you, however as time moved forward and the AI became smarter, more and more specific searches would be given which would begin to creep out everyone.

I myself have felt like this firsthand when speaking about something I wanted to a friend and then seeing it pop up on my search engine or social media within the next minute. This is a scary thing to think about but can come with pros and cons depending on how you view it.

The pros can be that it makes searching for items easier along with allowing data that relates to you as a person. Whether this is shopping or just searching for research for a class you're taking the overall effect is supposed to make things easier.

The cons however clearly outweigh these pros. The biggest and most important thing to take away from AI is your privacy. With companies having so much information on you they now almost hold a power over your head that you can't undo. They know everything about what you like, what you're doing in your life, what your goals are, and even who you may care about. This takes away all privacy that you would have had and almost feels like it's violating our rights as humans. 

Along with this, if our nation as a whole gets hacked or breached. A specific person or country now has all the access they could ever want to the people of America. This puts the nation at a tremendous threat and could cause the downfall of an empire. Although this is unlikely, it's important to remember when discussing a topic of this sort.

The final point I want to make is the idea of a digital footprint. With everything being saved and accessible by powerful people. Your online activity can now come back to haunt you in the future. Whether it's for a job or just for a legal reason a simple search or picture can now hold you back from getting to where you want to go.

To summarize, the idea of AI making things easier and more efficient is a good one, however, the unintended consequences that could come along with this far outweigh the pros. Therefore it's important to remember that with the advancements we make in technology, we need to ensure that our rights as people are protected or private activities can come back to haunt us in the end.

Blog Post 11 | Final Blog Post

Technology and its Impacts

It's clear that technology has revolutionized the world as we know it, however, with its revolutionary impact comes both positives and negatives. 

For instance, the biggest positive that comes from technology is that it has made things both easier and quicker than ever. Inventions like the iPhone, the internet, and AI are all prime examples of this. 

Back in the day, everything was so much harder to do because these things did not exist. If you needed research done, you couldn't just look it up online, but would rather have to go find the research yourself. Along with this, if you needed to call a friend or family member, the only option would have been to find a payphone or telephone poll where there would be a time limit and lines waiting behind you ready to use that phone right after you. It was a different world back then and because of technology humans have been able to truly make jumps in development.

The problem that comes with this is something called unintended consequences. Unintended consequences are effects that are unanticipated from something that is typically intended to be good. 

Creations like social media are a prime example of this. Social media's original intent was to allow family and friends to stay connected through sharing images and other news going on in their lives to each other. This was successful but it also became a dependency for people. The average person in the United States averages over 7 hours and 3 minutes in a single day. If you think about it, the sun is only up for 12 hours a day and people decide to spend more then half of that looking at a screen. 

This is truly a sad thing and we see that in the video "Mad World Remix of Moby Video". In that video we see a young kid trying to grow up in a happy world, however the sad music and grey color emphasizes the depressing world that we live in where technology has taken over people's lives.

This is a perfect example of a techno dystopian which is a person that believes that as technology grows the world has more and more negatives arising compared to positives. The opposite of this would be a techno utopian which is a person that believes that technology is affecting the world in a more positive manner than negative.

About Me

Image of my personal screen time

Now that I have discussed the backgrounds of technology, I will begin to reflect on myself and how I believe technology impacts me. 

When I look at my screen time my daily average is 4 hours and 19 minutes which is significantly below the daily average for the country. 

When I look at the specific apps that I spend the most time on it consists of messages, phone calls and Gmail, which makes sense considering I am working in the broadcasting world a lot and have to answer those messages or emails on a day to day basis. Along with this, I have a long distance girlfriend that I am typically on the phone with so that raises my phone call average as well.

So the question arises, do I believe my relationship with technology is healthy? The simple answer is yes. I believe that the time I spend on my technology is for the exact positives that it was created for which is to make communication easier. If I was spending hours upon hours a day on social media then I would change my answer however as I said before, my top 3 apps used are all work and communication related. 

To sum, my overall relationship with technology is something I would consider to be healthy however similar to things like drugs, can be a slipper slope of addiction if not controlled. After doing my research on this topic and reflecting on myself, I will be very smart about how much I use my phone in the future.

Blog Post 8

When I think about an invention through the lens of the Diffusion Theory. I think back to the topic I discussed in my first EOTC project. In my first project, I researched the invention of Google. Google is to this day,
one of the most influential pieces of technology ever created. 

Google made anything and everything easier and quicker than ever before. The idea that one can just look up a topic and find millions of results on it was revolutionary to the future of the world. 

With revolutionary technology comes the necessary adaption to the human population and because of that we see a major impact across different generations. For instance, Generation Z children like myself have grown up surrounded by this technology and have learned to not only use it but borderline depend on it. If you asked a majority of kids my age to go into a library and research a topic, almost none of us would be able to do so effectively, but this is the complete opposite for older generations.

Take baby boomers as a prime example of this. Most of our parents fall into the Baby Boomer or Generation X timeline where they had to go through the complete change that technology like Google had caused. They watched the world change from no computers, to only the rich having them, to finally everyone having access to one.

Even with them being able to see the impact Google had on the world they still struggle to use technology half as well as those who now grew up with it just going to show the adaptation that the world has had to make with the rise in new technology.

All of this still doesn't go against the fact that Google has made a tremendous positive impact on the world.

Without Google, almost everything and anything we do online wouldn't be possible. All of those searches to different websites for businesses or for shopping would never have happened.

Some argue that there would have been other search engines that would have been developed even if Google hadn't been created however that argument is ridiculous because Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the creators of Google and it was the first ever search engine to be created. After Google, other developers began to create their own versions of it based on the domain that they created. That's why Google has always been the biggest and most developed of them all.

In sum, the development of Google was revolutionary to the world we live in today and through the lens of the Diffusion Theory is one of the most impactful pieces of technology known to man.