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.