A.I and Adversity

Unfortunately after getting a little bit sick during the past week I wasn’t able to attend many of the classes that included things such as the gallery walk with my fellow classmates, but luckily enough I had managed to make it to the class that had made use of handwritten sticky notes with some other groupmates! This style of learning definitely wasn’t new to me and my groupmates, and while I hadn’t used sticky notes in a while, my group mates were very understanding when I told them that my typical penmanship could be misunderstood as chicken scratches. After dividing sections of the text among my group mates and I briefly we dove into our assigned parts to begin answering the question “What are the ethical implications of A.i?”

The article that I was tasked with going over was Morantz’ “Among the A.I Doomsayers”, which right off the bat the title grips readers (or in this case; me) with a negative implication of what A.I brings to the table in a modern setting. Within the article itself Mornantz utilizes any and all statements from people either in support of A.I or totally against it. Such references include (but are not limited to) Snoop Dogg, twitter user “Beff Jezos”, and oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Colorful references aside, the contents of the article detail that while the ethics of A.I aren’t exactly horrible, they’re definitely not the best route to go either. Morantz details an experiment done by OpenAi researchers in which they instruct an A.I model to get the most points available in a boat racing game, and while the aforementioned model does the task it’s assigned, it manages to do it in the most convoluted way possible. The model had apparently found a way to almost abuse the games point system by lodging itself in a part of the game’s map and spin around in as many large circles as it could. 

As funny as a robot spinning in circles really is, it makes me wonder how many times I myself have used the wrong formula to obtain the correct solution in my life. It’s certainly in the double digits, but how am I supposed to count the times when I really don’t know I’m doing something incorrectly? My life certainly wouldn’t be over if people found out, but unlike A.I programs I wouldn’t receive criticisms that my next plan would be to take over the world. That’s why I think that maybe A.I is a tool that could be used in higher education as much as the user wants as long as they also know that the programs used have a capability of being incorrect in terms of how they go about answering questions. 

Agency and Applications

Out of all the platforms in my whirlwind of a life that I use, whether it’s something electronic like a laptop or phone, or maybe even just the charmingly classic pen and paper, my hands always drift towards the more techy side of things in order to get what I’m thinking down on a page and flowing seamlessly. It doesn’t have to be anything major like lets say a thesis paper or big project, sometimes I find myself easily jotting down casual thoughts or concepts throughout the day on my phone or laptop right onto a google doc just because it’s the most convenient for me. The agents in this particular case are yours truly, and my very handy laptop. In terms of agency, my laptop and I are working harmoniously in order to put ideas down onto a digital page (such as this one!), and just because my device is non living doesn’t mean it’s incapable or excluded from going through this intra-active phase! As Cooper puts it “Agents are individualizing entities; they become in transitory phases, but still they act and they act creatively, in the sense that they make a difference.” (136) Meaning that as I take my time pondering my thoughts and letting my fingers do their funny little dance across all the keys, my laptop is here to translate all my musings and slip ups right onto a page of my choosing. Which nearly perfectly follows Coopers definition of intra-action as my laptop and I are moving in harmony to make a difference on what typically is a blank page at first.

Work Cited

Cooper, Marilyn M. The Animal Who Writes. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019.

Collaboration and Critiques

After the initial formation of my group,and the selection of our task manager Victoria, most of us had decided to start our work through casual conversation in order to get to know both our strengths and weaknesses as writers in order to get a better grasp on how we were going to tackle the project. However, the more time that we’d given ourselves to communicate our interests, the more we began to grow comfortable with one another to turn the conversation itself into not only a casual class discussion for our project, but an electric circle of banter and jokes pertaining to our common interest of a variety of video games. I mean sure I’ve worked in a few groups before, but I don’t think I’d ever actually gotten excited to have further discussions extending past classwork! It’s both new and a little nerve wracking to have people I just met get to know me with the pretense of academia, as its totally new territory for me to step into. 

If there’s one thing I’d like to discuss further with my group however, it’s the way we’re going to go about putting our words to paper. While I did enjoy the time we spent speaking together I would have liked to discuss more concrete deadlines for the things we want to accomplish before the project is finished. Of course I don’t think they’d mind if we spent a little time during class to ease any concerns I might have, and in a strange way I feel completely at ease when it comes to voicing my concerns out for them to critique as well. It makes me want to dive deeper as to why I feel so comfortable around them. Is it because we share the same interests? Or something else entirely?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P8ISVVZTqfU4h0jY695CpCmj7zVPmYyCslOuyomm87E/edit

Discourse and Discussions

I feel as if throughout my life i’ve only ever been in a handful of communities where I could say “Yeah, this is totally for me.”, because I personally believe that I shouldn’t have to go and fix something that isn’t broken. I’ve found my perfect little corners of the world in alternative communities, fashion communities, and about a handful of gaming communities. With each of the groups in question consistently interlocking like puzzle pieces around certain areas. For every random band comes a random lyric referencing a game, and every game somehow inspiring new clothing trends, and those said trends magically filter into the alt community for new outfit inspo. Its as if Ouroboros was a super weird and nerdy snake that spent way too much time in Hot Topic instead of a symbol of destruction an rebirth.

Being in all these communities means there’s got to be different goal posts that people want to work towards. for example, while one group may want to focus on inclusivity and encouraging the Journey of self-creation another May believe in the union of all Concepts and ideas to the point that it becomes one large amalgam of an ideology. Of course this doesn’t come without trial and error, in which the people in these communities bounce ideas back and forth before reaching a solid conclusion, and coincidentally enough Kenneth Bruffee touches on this method.

Let’s take a classic argument from within the alternative community, which is the age-old question of “what makes a goth person, goth?”, and while the question itself may seem a little bit silly from the perspective of people who are ignorant to the nuances of the community, the final conclusion from the inner community had been cemented with Bruffees concept of “Abnormal Discourse”, in which “ “the prod- uct of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolu- tion.” Unlike the participants in normal discourse who sound “rational” to the others in the community, a person speaking abnormal discourse sounds “either ‘kooky’ (if he loses his point) or ‘revolutionary’ (if he gains it)”

So how does this tie in with the aforementioned argument? Its because many had to look back on exactly why the goth subculture was created in the first place, and in challenging the building blocks of that knowledge, the standard conclusion to the question is undoubtedly just “listening to goth music.”. That’s all it is, no extra platform boots and eyeliner required. 

Works Cited

Bruffee, Kenneth. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English, vol. 46, no. 7, 1984, pp. 635-652.

Marshmallows and Mayhem

While planning the build I feel as if the role of leadership fell a little too much to myself as I began to assert my own ideas a little too quickly for the rest of my team. In terms of the actual labor of love that was crafting our tower, it seemed like everyone had an active roll in what went where and how it was applied. At some point the whole process passed by so quickly that my team and I had been having a good enough laugh about the project and forgot that we were on a timer. 

In other terms I feel as if we operated on a sort of funnel type system. With my group tossing ideas into the air and letting the best ones funnel through. Allowing us to work efficiently with the final ideas.