Week 6 Post

Jibo is a robot that just looks like a little speaker. I do not think it will end up being our robot servant because all Jibo does is take photos, read stories, and order food.  Supposedly, with Jibo, you do not have to even think, using the example of “Eric” ordering food after a long day of work. To me, It looks like a little gadget to waste your money on and then it would not work like you thought it would. The author, Evan Selinger suggests that robot servants will make us worse people. He states that it already happened with Siri because we are now too lazy to check the weather or send a text by ourselves. With the addition of QuickType added about a year ago, Selinger believes that we truly are lazy. I would have to disagree with him, I never use QuickType: It is annoying, never works, and always gives me the wrong words. I type so fast on my phone, that using QuickType would take me longer to send a message rather than just typing it. I agree with Selinger how we always look at the downside of drones and robotic cars, but not really these small robots like Jibo and Siri.

Week 5 Reading

Another week, another blog post. Professor Elek, another shipwreck story? Really? At least this shipwreck story happened back in the 1800’s not in present day. Call me Ishmael, because this story is about Moby Dick.

Anyways, this week’s post was a TED talk about fear.  The presenter, Karen Thompson Walker was a great presenter and made it feel like I could actually feel her fears.  When she talked about her childhood in California, I felt like I experienced those earthquakes that she went through. Walker tells us that it is normal to experience fear, even though people are programmed to be optimists. I like how she compares fear to unintentional story telling, that made me feel much better about my fears, like they were just little stories that I was writing in my head.  The idea that our fears can predict the future is crazy to me, even though it happens every day.  In a way, you do not expect the expected. What stuck with me the most was Walker’s closing the TED talk, saying that “And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them.” This stuck with me because she then mentioned smaller fears like one’s cholesterol and global warning.  

Week 4 Blog

I’m going to be completely honest, I never read The Circle by Dave Eggers.  I tried so hard to read it and got through about 20 pages.  Once I saw on the syllabus that this class did not need any required texts, I decided to not continue reading the text.  The rest of this blog post is going to be based off what my friends have told me off the book and the article I had to read for this week’s blog post.

First off, what in the world is a chutzpah? I may be a shiksa, and know it is a synonym for audacity, but I had no idea what the author, Jessica Winter meant by including it.  Winter writes; “Steve Jobs drank chutzpah smoothies each morning and gargled chutzpah at bedtime.” Honey, are you really Jewish or are you just some goyim? Okay, back to The Circle let’s not get too off tangent now.

Before reading this article, I never knew that The Circle was a satire.  Everyone told me the book was slow and predicable.  The article on the other hand said it fast-moving book, which makes me wonder; Do different generations determine the speed of a book differently? Also, found that it was interesting that Eggers did no research to write this book, he just straight up wrote it.  Pretty cool if you ask me though, I’d read it if I had time now.