Final blog post

 Technology and its evolution have gone up exponentially in the past 20 years. In my own lifetime, I've seen things that were considered science fiction become reality. Virtual reality headsets, 3D printers, Artificial intelligence, facile recognition technology, just to name a few.  From this evolution, our relationship with technology has also changed. Cyberbullying, memes, likes, etc. all either had different meanings or no meaning at all. For example the word “rizz” a word that got its popularity and definition by internet culture and memes. This word got so popular, it won word of the year from Oxford.  The image below shows search statistics for the word “rizz” in the past 5 years.

As we can see, The word was unused up until early 2022. In language, words normally take a very long time to catch on. But with social media, it has expedited this process. You could go up to any person who uses social media frequently who's under the age of 30, and they'll know what rizz means.

With the popularity of the internet and with almost everyone carrying a smartphone. This is the first era in history where most humans have almost all the worlds' information at their fingertips. Any hobby or skill can be learned from the internet. During the Covid-19 lockdown, I picked up several skills. Crocheting, cooking, Dungeons and Dragons and even a some programming languages just to name some of the skills I picked up and still use to this day. Online tutorials have made learning anything just a few clicks away.

The internet has many benefits and there are many examples of the internet helping people, However, Social media and the internet isn't all great. Cyberbullying and revenge porn are unfortunate side effects of the internet. These terms gained mainstream attention after the infamous Amanda Todd suicide. Amanda Todd was a 15-year-old Canadian girl who was blackmailed after she gave nude photographs to someone online. This harassment and cyberbullying led to Amanda uploading a 9-minute video telling her story. This video was her suicide note, and she ended her life on October 10th 2012. The person responsible for her death was arrested and charged, but this is not the only example, and in most cases the person responsible is never caught.

Online scams have become a plague on society, and the need for online literacy has become a requirement to avoid getting scammed. Most people believe scams are targeted towards the older generations, but that's not always the case. One of the most common scams is targeted to generation Z known as “sexploitation” This is what happened to Amanda Todd. Victims are usually tricked into sending nude or explicit photos/videos to a scammer, the scammer will then threaten to release those photos/videos to the public. This is a very effective scam and affects many people. Social media has dark sides to it, Sides we can only avoid if we stay educated on internet safety.

AI has changed the world, and it's only been in the public eye for about a year. Every day, AI technology gets stronger and stronger. AI can be used to help progress science with its ability to help with protein folding simulations and with processing other forms of data. Unfortunately, with such a powerful tool being acceptable to the public and acceptable to sketchy companies. It's not always used ethically. Deepfakes, AI generated voices and images, have been used to misinform the public. AI generated videos are not too far from the horizon and when that happens there is no telling what will happen. Being someone who is considered technologically literate, I can tell the difference between what a human made and what an AI made. But with each update, it gets increasingly harder for me to make that distinction. Think you can tell the difference? The website https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ is a website that creates faces of people using AI, these images from a glance are indistinguishable from a real photo. 

With technology changing and getting more complicated, if we want to keep up, we must learn, or we will be exploited. It's not just your job to keep technology use ethical but the job of us as a society. Technology is scary, and science fiction has not made it any better. We must make sure we understand technology and its limits. Ethics and politics have always been a heavy topic to speak about, but it is something that must be brought up. People create and control technology, not the other way round.

Blog #10 automation and AI

 The rate at which technology evolves has increased exponentially in the past decade. The consequences have been made apparent by this documentary. AI and self-driving cars 10 years ago were considered science fiction but are now a reality. AI if used properly can further every branch of science and bring us into a new age of science and innovation. But that comes at a cost.

Automation has caused countless people to lose their jobs. In the documentary, we see a factory that used to have hundreds of people working the floor reduced to a handful of people and automated machines. In theory, this should make these goods cheaper but as we’ve seen in recent ages the cost of everything has increased. Also in the documentary, we see former factory workers helping a food bank distribute goods to those who have lost their jobs.

Later in the documentary we see the facial recognition software used in China which brings up the topic of privacy. With AI’s integration with surveillance technology, it has become increasingly easy for governments and corporations to closely monitor people. This technology is not just used in China but around the world. This asks the question: is the safety of our cities worth our privacy?

This documentary reminded me of the dead internet theory. Automation and AI on the internet have created a strange relationship with its users. Dead internet theory is the theory that in the near future(or now) the internet will be full of automated responses that human-made content will be rare and that AI-generated content will make up the majority of what we see online. This can lead to AI’s being stuck in an echo chamber which will cause something known as “model collapse” where AI bets are trained by AI-generated content which will in a sense poison the AI causing the next generation of content will become warped and illegible to humans. 

An example of an AI model collapse article here

Model collapse was also the case in the infamous incident where two Facebook chatbots were made to talk to each other and made up their language so Facebook shut them down. The so-called “language” they created was a very inefficient version of English.

AI is dangerous when used improperly it's up to humanity to ensure that AI is used properly and the dead internet theory stays a conspiracy theory.

EOTO #2 Spiral of silence

The Spiral of silence theory suggests that people naturally hold back opinions to protect themselves socially. The more unpopular the idea or opinion the more likely it is to be self-censored.  

This theory was first coined in 1965 when a group of German researchers along with Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann looked into the political views of German citizens. The election at the time was split between two parties. The researchers thought the votes would be fairly even. The final results showed otherwise with one party winning a much larger margin.

It's only natural for people to want to fit in and with political opinions having such a large factor in what groups a person will fit into, hiding or altering a political opinion to fit in is the most common form we see the spiral of silence manifest as. This theory does not just go for politics. The spiral of silence can apply to any topic or concept. Pineapple on pizza, the smell of gasoline, "Is water wet?", etc. People will alter their public opinions on even the smallest topics just to protect the way others view them. 

Before the age of social media, a person would only have to worry about the people they interact with and the community they are a part of, if they're a celebrity or public figure of some kind they'd have to worry about what was previously mentioned and what was broadcasted about them. Now in the age of social media, every single person is given a platform where anyone can become famous or infamous in minutes.

With the curation algorithms of modern social media, it become incredibly easy for young people to be put down a pipeline to lead to a far-leaning political view. All a person can see on social media is a biased political commentary that drip-feeds beliefs into the user. It becomes increasingly difficult to know what is the "mainstream opinion". With the isolation that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic with access to the public being limited social media was many people's primary source of news and entertainment and the rising divide between the two major political parties in the US. A centrist view was not only rare but frowned upon in American politics.

This video by 60 minutes is very interesting although it doesn't directly mention the spiral of silence it does bring up its core properties. In the video it mentions that the centrist take up the majority of the population but because of the publications made by both the far right and far left.

The spiral of silence is a truly fascinating concept and hasn't gone away since its discovery. However, it has changed quite a lot in the past 10 years as we've seen with the polarization of the political parties in the US. Depending on legislation and changes in culture the spiral of silence will continue to spiral. Although breaking the spiral is possible it is important to note the consequences of speaking up against the "status quo".