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 these ideas from the assigned essay.

“The big red button”
In the 1990s, Kevin Kelly, in his book “Out of Control,” pointed out a concept called synergy, wherein computers and biological humans would co-evolve together. However, looking back from 2023, the richest person on Earth, Elon Musk, said, “a human is [a] bootstrapper for the silicon-based intelligent[.]" In his right-wing saying, the role of humans diminished in future civilization. So, this depends on how the world is governed by people. The left-wing party has the US Democratic party, and most European countries, but on the opposite side, right-wing parties, like the US Republicans, (Extreme Left) Chinese Communist Party, Russia, and many other developing countries (Japan is also on the list), want the power of AI to control more people. It is interesting to see how each government party uses the big red button called AI.

“Human in the Loop”
“Human in the Loop” might sound ideological at first, but it is hard to guarantee that this concept will end in a just way. In the beginning of the twentieth century, when factories started to equip with automated machines, people thought they would never work again. But instead, automated machines helped capitalists exploit surplus value in Marx’s theory. Is “human in the loop” just in this case? Also, back to my intern project, where I tried to build music neural prosthetics that read human alpha wave band energy, indicating their focus level during work and updating music for them to improve work productivity. It is still about the story of how to maximize the surplus value of a human being. So, “human in the loop” is not necessarily better than “all machine in the loop.” It is hard to say whether it is just or not from my point of view.

The broader question, at the end of the day, is perhaps not “how do we design more intelligent machines,” but rather, “how do we want to live with those machines”?
It is pessimistic to say, but people who do not understand technology usually do not have the right to decide how to live with machines. As I said at the beginning of the course, what we live with is controlled by the media. As long as capitalism exists in the world, people do not have the right to control how they could live with machines. Normal people will be analyzed, dissected, and attacked with all types of ‘dopamine drive’ technology. Utopia only exists in Utopia. But who can be the hero to convert this dystopian world to an idealistic 大同社会 (datong shehui / Great Harmony Society)? I really want to see this happen in my limited life.