Blog #3

These last four weeks of class assignments have ran from exploring deep within your own identity and how you present yourself online to realms almost unimaginably far outside your own being and how this artificial intelligence is evolving and becoming more and more complex. What a lot of ground to cover! I feel as though I am still absorbing all of the information we have been presented, and it may take me weeks after class is done to keep realizing some of the meanings we have uncovered and possibilities of some of the cutting edge technologies such as Sixth Sense.

In Turkle’s Life on the Screen, she says we are reconstructing ourselves and our identities online. That, “this reconstruction is our cultural work in progress” (Turkle, 177). That is interesting; especially as we learned so many people intentionally or unintentionally misrepresent themselves in the virtual world. When looking back, will the exploration of our cultural history online show an accurate representation of who we are and what we were accomplishing during this period in time? It appears we need dedicated Digital Anthropologists to explore these facets of society to a greater degree, as they are growing and occurring, as opposed to anthropologists specializing in online societies.

As we are reconstructing ourselves online, we are seemingly doing so offline as well. Several people have mentioned Military Robots and the future of war, but it really is exciting and frightening as well as eye opening to see these weapons being created when they seemed like unachievable science fiction just a few years ago. Both the military robotics and the interactive technology of Sixth Sense are ways to try to create a better, more informed, less delicate us.

We are constantly striving to update and become enhanced, but usually fall into the same mistake of trying to do so by creating robotics with better sensors, or finding an algorithm to solve conundrums, instead of performing the really hard work of being better humans. When we discussed cross cultural and intercultural ethics, I believe we really began exploring the human interactions that are necessary to become more cosmopolitan. It is possible, and for the most part, global digital citizens are working together to solve some pretty hefty problems. But when we are still at a point that the coolest technologies are made for warfare and our children don’t always see the ethical problems that arise from not being real in the digital societies they are growing up in, we still have an uphill climb.

Mistry, Pranav, auth. "Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology." TED Talks. TED Conferences, LLC, NOV 2009. web. 2 Dec

Singer, PW, auth. "PW Singer on military robots and the future of war." TED Talks. TED Conferences, LLC, Apr 2009. web. 2 Dec 2011.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 177-209. Print.