This week some key ideas we went over in my group were how do machines operate without humans to give them orders? and what happens when robots designed to help humans turn on their creators? Some texts we used this week were the short stories, the second variety and but who can replace man? both storyś were about robots that were operating without humans telling them what to do. the second variety was about a war between the russians and the rest of the world and robots were implemented to do the fighting that traditionaly humans would take part in but by the end of the story the robots had turned on all of humanity. I thought the story was interesting because in today´s warfare we outfit drones to fight in our wars dropping bombs and firing rockets and the second variety made me think about what would happen if a drone gained a mind of its own and could independently make choices that could result in the loss of human life. the story but who can replace man? was about a futerestic earth where one day all the humans had died off and all the robots were left to govern themselves. this made me wonder what would happen if something wiped out all of human life? what would all of our machines do without instructions?
throuoght this week I have been watching episodes of the twilight zone and reading short stories all related to the interaction between humans and robots. some issues covered were what makes a human different from a robot (TZ the lonely & TZ uncle simon) and what happens when a robot is given a human concious (I have no mouth but I must scream /TZ the lonely) and what I learned was that in most situations giving a robot the qualities of a human does not lead to good results because In the short story I have no mouth but I must scream the artifical inteligence became self aware of its power and it used it against its creators and in the episode of the twilight zone uncle simon the uncle copy's his mind and incaerts it into a robot just before he dies and the robot continues the dead uncle's work after his death. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/humans-not-robots-are-the-real-reason-artificial-intelligence-is-scary/400994/ This week I read some short stories which one was about a scientist that created a race of lizard like creatures that were super smart and had the ability to evolve faster than any other species on earth. what i took away from the story was that science fiction does not have to be aliens from space and the story can be really realistic in the sense that the technology and science they use in the story is not to far fetched. another thing we did this week was watch some episodes of a TV show called the outer limits, one episode was about two brothers one a scientist and one a buisnessman and they were looking for cures to siknesses and a way to make a variation of tear gas but while testing for cures they unexpectly create an super virus that is the cure to all sicknesses. what the brothers do not know is that the cure only lasts for a few days and after that you die, what i took away from the episode was like in the short story the technology is not to far fetched because today we are looking for cures for cancer and AIDS and it is possible that one day we could find a "super cure".
this week we choose new themes of science fiction and we all got new groups, this time I picked blurred boundries as my theme of science fiction. I don't really know much about what the theme blurred boundries is about other than I think it has a lot to do with the interaction of humans and robots/machines today my group is starting our first short story I have no mouth but I must scream. this time the big question for my theme is what makes a human a human and a robot/machine a robot/machine, we picked that as our big question because my group and I wanted to know what separates the two. This week we read some short stories one was about a scientist who creates a race of lizard like creatures on an island. The lizards are able to evolve in a matter of days and become more intelligent than humans and are able to invent a variety of new inventions for the scientist. What I took away from the story was that science fiction does not have to be always aliens and monsters and the technology does not have to be to far fetched. Another thing we did this week was watch some episodes of the outer limits, one episode was about two brothers one a scientist and one a business man both are looking for a cure to diseases and while looking fore a cure they instead make a super virus brothers think is a cure to all diseases. the one thing the brothers do not know is that the "cure" only lasts for a few days before killing the host. what I took away from the episode was that today with modern medicine we could one day find the cure to all diseases.
http://www.hulu.com/outer-limits In science fiction this week I watched the movie Frankenstein and read the short story the yellow pill I also got to watch an episode of the twilight zone. in my group we are focusing on mad scientists and mutant children which is why we watched Frankenstein, which is about a mad scientist who creates a human from dead people and brings it to life using lightning. the short story we read was the The Yellow Pill which was about a doctor who's patient is a killer who lives in a alternative reality where instead of killing innocent people he claims he was killing aliens from Venus, in the end the patient says if the doctor takes a yellow pill he will be able to see the alternative reality his patient was living in. the doctor takes the pill and sees the world his patient was talking about. in our group we debated which reality was real and which was fake and questioned if the pill made the doctor hallucinate if was the doctor hallucinating the world he was living in before he took the pill. what I learned from the movie and the short story was that mad scientists do not have to actually be scientists because in the yellow pill the mad scientist is a physiologist but he still has the qualities of a mad scientist.In the past week we worked on defining science fiction which was more difficult than I thought it would have been. the biggest problem we had with defining science fiction was that a lot of our definitions were close to the definition of science fantasy. we also had to do an activity this week which was to read a short story in a group and pull out the science fiction elements which was kind of hard considering the story was confusing because the short story zero hour had a plot that was hard to follow and we had to reread many parts in the story so that we could understand what was going on but in the end we finished the work and figured out the storyline.
.bustle.com/articleswww/86930-the-whispers-spoilers-from-zero-hour-by-rad-bradbury-suggest-a-huge-terrifying-twist-ahead This week in Science Fiction class we created a Weebly page which did not take long to complete the hardest part was answering some questions like how do you define Science Fiction and how is it important to you. We also had to chose a Science Fiction book to read through out the next five weeks. I picked out a book called the forever war I have not read very much of it but so far its alright, it is about special humans getting drafted into the army to to fight aliens in space. what I learned this week was that there are many different types of science fiction like the book the forever war verses the book Frankenstein. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2015
Categories |