Buddha Ex Machina
Image from the indy100 article: AI like HAL 9000 can never exist because real emotions aren’t programmable Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a blanket term for a diverse range of… Read More
Category: Group A
I Want My Own Janet
Whenever I think about AI and algorithms (both inside and outside of an academic setting) I can help but picture Janet (played by D’Arcy Carden, the omniscient non-robot and non-human character from NBC’s The Good…
Why Are Virtual Assistants Female?
What’s one thing that Siri, Alexa, and Cortana all have in common? They speak with female voices. They tend to respond warmly and politely, carrying out whichever task you ask. We have come to think of these virtual assistants as competent, efficient, and reliable women, who set us alarms and get us directions. Why have …
Virtual Assistants or Conversational Computers?
We use virtual assistants (VAs) because we’re lazy. Well, no, that’s not entirely true; but we employ our VAs with all the tasks we can’t (or don’t want to) be bothered doing ourselves. In theory, dictating tasks to a computer that is always at your beck and call, never gets annoyed with your constant demands,…
What is Her Story?
In class today we briefly mentioned a video game that really encompasses a blending of the database and the narrative. As Dr. Sample and Liv mentioned, you search and sort through a database of video clips…
Troll’s Accidental Gift to Society
If there is one thing everyone can relate to, it’s the playground bully. There are three perspectives that everyone can be sorted into. There is of course the bully, the… Read More
The Library of Babel
As Lev Manovich points out in “The Database,” the advent of computers shifted the key form of cultural expression of the modern age from the narrative nature of novels and cinema to its correlate: the database – a structured collection of data. In the late 20th century, the creation of the Internet epitomized the power …
Time
We see colors, hear sounds, and feel textures. These aspects of the world can be perceive through our senses. But what sense (or senses) do we employ to perceive time? It definitely cannot be tied to one particular sense; it is strange to say that we see, hear, or feel time passing because even if…
When doing it for the gram becomes life
Black Mirror is a show based off a dystopian future alternate society where aspects of our current lives are blown up and portrayed in this society. In the episode Nosedive, their entire society is based off of social media. Everyone rates their interactions with pretty much everyone they see throughout the day in addition to …
Black Twitter is Best Twitter
I would not consider myself an avid user of Twitter but it is a platform I interact with on a fairly regular basis. I would say that Twitter is fairly well known for its reaction…