Week 1: reading response
Week 2: reading response
Week 3: reading response
Week 4: reading response
Week 5: reading response
Week 6: reading response
Week 7: reading response
Week 8: reading response
Week 9: reading response
For this week's reading response, I would like to reflect on several design principles from the book:

Principle 8.5: Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral (Kranzberg’s 1st law of technology)
It reminds me of a sentence I learned during my middle school, called “科教兴国“, which means “Educate citizens with technology and science to flourish the nation.” This phrase is interesting because it points out one of the intentions behind technology use in China, which involves using technology to gain relative advantages in the world trade market and achieve autonomy in the field of international politics. A second example close to this topic is the recently hot AI music debate. One of my opinions on the current AI music market is that many people who do not know how to compose music suddenly get a powerful tool that can copy-paste other music (from a dataset) without infringing on laws, and these non-musicians want to control the musician ecosystem with this tool and take what originally belonged to the musicians who spent thousands of hours training themselves. Many AI music startups have come to me and asked me to cooperate with them, but I cannot step into this zone in this way. If I do this, I would be betraying who I am: a music theorist who has self-trained for thousands of hours in listening skills and analytic skills. Technology is now a sword directed at innocent musicians. We have to create another sword to fight back against it.

Principle 8.6: Technology is about what we can do; morality is about what we ought to do
Technology is “术“（shu） and morality is “德” （De）. Although I think morality is a term that is itself ambiguous. What justice is makes us feel morality. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks Polemarchus what justice is, and they give a definition as “what is good for our friend and bad for our enemy.” So, justice itself depends on the shared ideology of a certain group. AI is a perfect medium that turns different groups of people’s ideologies into pragmatics. In a social Darwinist society, AI is a mega-sword that slays others to gain profit. In a left-wing society, AI is like rain in spring, solving social problems and providing more job positions. In an era where everybody has the ultimate sword called AI, morality, or his/her definition of justice, is particularly important.

Principle 8.24: Design toward the sublime & Transcend
Evolution still happens, but design is the impetus for evolution in human society. Only a design that perfectly fits the human status quo can evolve humans to the next level of species. The design of neural prosthetics, the design of a perfect political body, and the design of clean energy resources all transcend the current human society to the next level, which is an intelligent species that is proud to travel in the galaxy.