Session 9-17/10/2011

New technologies are emerging at an unbelievable pace, which is the result of several factors. The first and most important one is the persisting insatiable desire of humans for new things. Humans are all greedy and selfish, though the level of greed and selfishness may vary from person to person, so even when they are leading a far more comfortable and convenient lives compared to those in the past, they still long for more. But these devilish characteristic still bring about some positive points since they push people forward, to come up themselves with new ideas and realize them, which is what Kahli Gibran tried to convey through his saying. Another factor is that the intrinsic creativity of humans. Being creative gives rise to new ideas and thoughts of goods or services, some of which may be eventually actualized and help to satisfy the esurience of humans.

During this session, I was shown several existing yet still very intriguing technologies. The first one is artificial intelligence, which was illustrated in a video named “Perfect Women”.

Even though the outer appearance of this “lady” is not really humanlike, it still really excites me.Just imagine one day you have a gorgeous woman in your house which is not only subservient to you and never argue with you but also be able to interact with you as a real person. She speaks perfect English and converse with you intelligently like a human. Also, her movement is also very lithe and humanlike, which lessens our impression of her as a robot. This video must have been made a long time ago so at present, the AI technology has already advanced tremendously. One more field in which AI is applied is the game industry. Nowadays, people can find great pleasure in diving into computer games because they have become so real in terms of not only graphic but also the intelligence of the characters of the games. For example, the football game series Pro Evolution Soccer, a product of Konami, becomes graphically nicer and harder to win version-after-version.

One of the presentations in this session touched on cybernetic limbs. Undeniably, cybernetic arms and legs provide handicapped or disabled people opportunities to function their arms or their legs again, which is usually very hard to actualize prior to the invention and innovation of those limbs. Moreover, with their sheer strength, these robotic arms and legs certainly give their owners an edge in some daily activities such as lifting heavy objects or catching a bus. Still,  one question was raised which was that whether it would be fair or not if sportspeople replace their natural limbs with cybernetic ones. Cybernetic limbs indeed maximize human ability in athletic field such as running or jumping, but transplanting such lims to human bodies kills off the basic raison d'etre of sport at large: People put their best effort into the gmes and enjoy them.The deserved will win the trophy eventually.

Augmented reality is rising as one of the technologies that can radically reshape the world. Primarily, this technology revolves around creating a layer between humans and buildings, objects as well as even other humans and  devices such as mobile phones or other electronic devices so that whenever people point their devices to such objects, building or even people (quite futuristic), the latter detailed information will show up.

Quite cool isn’t it? But there are also cons for this technology. Excessive access to too many sources of information may not only lead to an overload of information to people but also intrude the privacy of people who are pointed with devices incorporated with this technology.

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.  ~Jules Renard

One current issue with technology is that humans have yet to develop an economic system or concepts that can substantiate the development of technology. Advanced technologies enable people to do certain things that previously they weren’t able to and lessen the current normal workload people have to bear. As a result, people will have much more spare time, which will definitely surge as technology becomes more and more advance, and here lies the crux of the problem. How come having more time to spare is problematic? Naturally, working everyday really exhaust people, but only by experiencing hardships and tiredness can people really value any joys, no matter how small it might be, they experience in life at large. Putting effort into a certain cause or work incentivises people and makes their life much more worthy to live. And that is what I believe to be the real message behind Jules Renard’s saying.

“Innovation distinguishes the leader from the follower.”

- Steve Jobs -

To wrap up, as has been mentioned ad nauseum in my blog, those who dare to challenge the status quo and social norms and take initiative to change the world, though may face numerous and seemingly unsolvable problems at first, will definitely be able to shape the world according to their desires and resultantly gain worldwide recognition. Gideon Ong, one of the students that presented in this session, is somehow a good example since his slideshow was totally different from the previous ones of other students since there wasn’t any word on the slides at all, just merely videos. That approach, though quite potentially dangerous, eventually won him credit and good grade (currently the one that receives the greatest number of  grade “10”)

This session is indeed very eye-opening since it enables me to free my imagination and also show me some existing yet still very mind-boggling innovations and technologies. Thus, it deserves a score of 9/10.