Author Archives: Zaria Kangethe

Fashion and Technology

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After going to Dr. Yvonne Forester’s presentation, “Designing Future Bodies: Fashion and Technology”, for the first time in my life I realized that clothing is “technology”.  My idea of technology had always been something cold, hard, and mechanical, and I now realize that that conception is born almost entirely out of the modern digital age.  There are very obvious fashion technologies that fall in line with this image such as the Apple Watch, but Dr. Forester also offered some other bits such as temperature moderating cloth.

I realized that like clothes, we can see technology as an extension of ourselves.  In some ways nakedness can make one feel less human and more animal.  Our humanness is often characterized by these ingenious inventions which account for the limits of our physical body.  A sweater serves the purpose of retaining and producing warmth and clothing in the future might perform that same task but in a more advanced way.

The conversation about the Apple watch and the Fitbit again brought up the ethical dilemma of data privacy.  Now your computer doesn’t just have information on what you think, and what you like, it can now gather large amounts of data on your physical state.  It can monitor your mood through your pulse and perhaps in the future be used to create specific sorts of experiences tailored directly to your emotional state.  

All of this made me wonder, what is our responsibility to ourselves if even our clothing might one day do all of this for us.  Where do we begin to claim our experience of our minds and our bodies when there is tech that may very well know us better than we know ourselves in the form of blood pressure and beats per minute.  I will never be gathering as much data about myself as my computer is.  At some point will the computer be able to tell me who I am physically and mentally better than I can tell myself.

Dr. Forester brought up the phrase “the quantified self” and I’m starting to grasp that through algorithms and data collection my technology is able to experience me in a quantified form.  I know that I do not understand myself or conceive of myself in a quantified state so my computer or my Apple Watch are the objects which have access to that form of me, to the patterns that I would never be able to see.

Captilaism and innovation

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I went to the talk by Dr. Yvonne Forester on May 3 titled “Beyond the Anthropcene: Techonology, Innovation, and the (Post-) Human Condition” and one of the points which made me think the most was how all of the issues especially in this class around the ethics of computing are partially arising because technological innovation up until this point has been motivated mostly by economic gain.  This idea sort of set off an image in my mind of what technological innovation might look like if the driving force was truly to expand the human experience rather than about making money.  Though I do think there is a lot of talk about expanding the human experience in the idea of innovation today I also see that the pressures of monetary gain constrain what actually ends up being attempted.

Another thing I thought was really interesting was this striving by the tech industry to create a frictionless experience which is formed by using large amounts of data on us to create and ideal, individualized online environment.  In this environment created exactly from us there is apparently the illusion of simple solutions.  Dr. Forester described it as a dystopian idea which was a bit strange to me, bit then it sort of called me back to reading Brave New World awhile back.  It makes me wonder if by taking paths of ease we are actively destroying our own sense of purpose.  The talk touched on these images in the media where robots eventually leave humans behind and humans themselves finally become the obsolete technology.  It’s honestly a bit disheartening to imagine such a world.

I imagine all of this goes back to the first point about technological innovations being driven by capitalistic gains.  On the other hand, increased tech should open up the door to new opportunities, but I suppose an expanded human experience is only going to come about if we actively make it a goal.

The robots are coming

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I went to a talk in April called “The robots are coming” by Dr. Heidi Shierholz in which she discussed incoming automation and what affect it might have on the labor market.  Automation , I believe, is something  a lot of people have been taught to be paranoid about as it relates to work, but contrary to what I expected, a lot of Dr. Shierholz points contested this cultural paranoia and claimed that automation isn’t really going to be any bigger of a deal in the near future than it has been already.

She evaluated one of the most common narratives of robots replacing human labor which is the image of the trucking industry being replaced with self-driving vehicles.  She stated that it was unrealistic for the trucking industry to automatically overhaul and automate completely when so much revenue has already been spent on the already existing trucks which work perfectly fine.  From a rational economic standpoint it doesn’t make sense for the industry to completely overhaul itself and for these same reasons automation across most industries is likely to be gradual.

I was surprised to find out that we were actually at record lows in technological innovation, probably because the media is constantly bombarding us with futuristic ideals.  I realized that if we are at record lows in terms of technological innovation, then I probably don’t have a good image of what a technological revolution looks like even though I felt as if I did.

Even if automation was argued to not be much of a concern, Dr. Shierholz did enlighten me to other possible concerns.  I hadn’t known that up until the past few decades wages and productivity rose together in a linear fashion, and now even though productivity has risen significantly, wages have flat-lined.  The graph was a bit disheartening to see and then the realization that all of the increased revenue as a result of that productivity was going to the top 10 percent but most of all the top 1 percent was a shock.  Since I’m not well versed in economic theory, it made me wonder whether or not this is to be expected and what are the implications of this sort of situation on a broad scale.

Automation, I suppose, will continue to increase productivity, but who is entitled to those increased economic gains?

The Vulnerability of Our Virtual Selves

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On Monday, my reading group read an article about Deepfake videos.  In it the two actors of the article, Marie-Helen Maras and Alex Alexandrou discussed the legal implications of an imminent future in which the everyday person can manufacture fake video and even audio of a person.  Much of the Deepfake technology is used in order to transpose the image of famous women into pornographic videos.  These videos, once put online, are very hard to remove considering how rapidly content is spread, consumed, and reproduced across platforms.

This new reality made me wary of all the images I have of myself online and how accessible they are.  It was mentioned in class that photos stored in Google Photos aren’t even private and that they can be accessed by anyone who has the url.  Since I’ve been relying on Google Photos for years now in order to save space on my devices, I realize that there are a heck of a lot of images of me online and that if someone was really diligent they could possibly use Deepfake technology in order to manufacture fake media of me.

All of our conversations have made me think of the concept of our virtual selves, our digital footprints, and how vulnerable these recreations of ourselves are to manipulation.  If you know enough about the virtual identity of a person and their behavior, then you can know enough to sell something to the physical person.  If you have access to enough images of a person online you can place them in them in situations virtually which they would never allow themselves to physically be in.  You can incriminate or bankrupt another person through the use of their banking information and social security numbers.

On some level, the whole idea of regulating the internet seems like the old effort to tame the Wild West, but my instinct is that taming something in a virtual space is a very different challenge than taming a physical space, and I’m somewhat skeptical of our ability to do so.

On Our First Ethics in Computing Discussion

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In the readings I was really impressed by the fact that people had come up with guidelines for ethical decision making, but when I think about it, it really makes sense to have done so.  I wonder how they come to a decision about what frameworks are most useful in different situation between consequentialist, non-consequentialist, and agent-centered.  Perhaps, it would be in sort of a whichever makes the best case for itself in any given situation.  

In reading the ACM Code of Ethics my group saw the consequentialist approach show up as a sort of prompt for programmers to think about the possible effects their work might have on society should it be integrated universally.  As stated in class, the code itself and the expectation that it be followed by anyone who wants to meet the standards of being a good computing professional is representative of the non-consequentialist approach to ethics.  The agent-centered approach appeared as well in the way they headed off the sections of the code of ethics with the phrase “a computing professional should” thereby creating the image of the ideal virtuous computing professional who any aspiring computing professional should seek to mirror.

I believe it was touched on in class that a lot of the directives within the code are dependent on words that don’t explicitly lay out any particular behaviors, such as the word “respectfully”.  I imagine then, that if there is possible misinterpretation on the part of an individual in regards to whether or not their behaviors are justified according to the standards of the code, there would have to be some debate as to whether or not it qualifies as a violation and to what to degree.  All around, I’m starting to get a clearer picture of why ethics boards are necessary beyond of course, the obvious job of maintaining the standard, and moving more into the more nuanced job of creating the standard and evaluating its limits.

Open-source, capitalism, and society?

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For Monday’s class my group read “Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality” by John Unsworth.  The idea that arose in class in regards to the relationship between this reading and the other groups’ readings was about how the reality of capitalism was subliminally woven into the other texts, even though my group’s was dedicated to this idea for the most part.  Capitalism is the world that I’m familiar with and things like research funding, patents, and work for pay are just a part of the way the world works to me. So that point really gave me another opportunity for reflection on how the way I see the world is not necessarily the world.

In regards to the part of my reading that focussed on what Unsworth meant when he talked about a “virtual community”, as we were going through our jigsaw discussions, I tried to picture how these kinds of discussions could be simulated in the digital world.  In a way, I am paying tuition in order to be a part of discussions like this, but linking this whole image back to the question of what place an open-source digital environment plays in capitalism, I wonder how much of my educational experience could be outsourced to a digital environment, and what does that mean for all this money I am paying in order to be here.  I’m starting to realize that our world is still sort of growing into its own potential as far as digitization is concerned.  It makes me really curious what sorts of changes I’ll see in the next few decades of my life and what affect that will have on the way we structure our society.

Integrated Circuit

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I didn’t know anything about the integrated circuit before the three readings regarding both its invention and large scale production, and I appreciated learning about the Navajo women in conjunction with Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.  Hearing about the role that a seemingly unlikely population of women played in the production of what is one of the most important foundational technologies to our modern digital age, really helped me break down my own perception of what innovation looks like as a whole.  It is so easy to focus inventors and sensationalize and idolize them while completely ignoring all the necessary aspects of production following invention and all the people that are involved in that process.

Of course, these three readings together didn’t capture the whole story, but they did encourage me to look at innovation as an event that may start with particular individuals, but is ultimately carried out by a very large population of people who will often times remain unnamed.  The first integrated circuits started it all, but then there was also the necessary subsequent improvements, the efforts for large scale production, the various ideas that this technology inspired in others and so on, all of which has brought us to where we are today.

O’Regan :The Invention of the Integrated Circuit and the Birth of Silicon Valley

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Transistors were the successors to the vacuum tube technology which dominated the electronics industry through the mid-1950s.  Following the invention of transistors, engineers began to design more complex electronic circuits with a variety of components.  In order to improve the performance of the electronics, more components were necessary. At the time, this meant that thousands components had to be connected by hand soldering a bunch of wire.  This was expensive, time-consuming, and faulty.

Jack Kilby realized that the resistors and capacitors used to make electronic circuits could be made from the same material and interconnected in a single circuit and thus, he built the first successful integrated circuit made of germanium in 1958 at Texas Instruments.  Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors built an integrated circuit on silicon in 1960 and along with Kilby is considered a co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Silicon is the most popular material for semiconductors today and Noyce’s design was overall more suited to mass production.  Noyce was also one of the co-founders of Intel, one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

In the late 1950s, Gordon Moore noticed that transistor density (as in the number of transistors) on integrated circuits was doubling each year. Moore eventually condensed these observations into Moore’s Law, which charts a progression of growth in transistor density eventually leading to exponential increase and thus an exponential increase in processor speed. So far, Moore’s Law has proven to be accurate.

The first uses of the newly invented integrated circuit were fairly select. Texas Instruments, the company where Jack Kilby worked, developed a handheld calculator using the technology. The military and space exploration agencies also made use of the integrated circuit.

Silicon Valley arises out the silicon chip manufacturers within the area because most semiconductors are made from silicon. The 1980s brought widespread use of the term Silicon Valley because of the IBM personal computer that used the chip as well as many semiconductor companies in the surrounding area. Silicon Valley is now the home of many technology giants as well as thousands of small start ups aiming to make a considerable impact.

Division of labor: Each group member summarized about two pages of the text.