by This week we read a new novel called Frankenstein. This novel talks about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who created life with the intention of advancing the scientific field at that time. However, after the life was created, Victor ran away due to the scare of this creature. At the same time, the life he created started to explore the human world and was harmed by many people as the life was too ugly. After the life learned how to read and talk, it wanted to seek revenge on Victor. After a few battles, the life successfully killed all the people that Victor loves. In order to revenge back, Victor chased the life to the North Poll where he meets Robert Walton. Robert Walton with his crew members were heading toward North Poll for making discoveries there. The story we hear was told to Walton by Victor after they met.
There are so many modern topics that we can discuss with this novel, such as the ethnicity of genetic engineering, should good scientists also be good people, or how does oppression shape a person and his identity, but those are more related to the other classes. For this class, another interesting topic I want to talk about is the relationship between technology and human beings.
From the past to now, humans were always trying to control more things. In the prehistoric time, fire, water, and growth of crops were things that people tried to control. Nowadays, the focus shifted to controlling another entity that can help us to control the other things. For example, the development of artificial intelligence would be our effort to complete this mission. Along with this development is the intention to let AI help us to do things like driving a car, serving people in the restaurants, or other simple labors. By this sense, we believe that we take full control of the existing technology but is this really the case?
In the movie Frankenstein, we saw the negative case of the interaction between “technology” and human. The human created “technology” but was bitten back by it. It is undeniable that right now, there’s no such thing as machine rebelling against human beings, and personally speaking, I don’t believe this would happen in the future too as being intelligent is nowhere near having consciousness. However, the more important thing to consider is that how much should we use technology that would allow us to take advantage of it without hurting ourselves.
It’s hard to answer this question, and the best answer I can think of is to use technology in a way that doesn’t hinder our own skill development. There are people who uses technology to expand one’s horizon and learn new skills. For example, people nowadays use internet to receive news and read articles online. With the help of Internet, scholars don’t have to fly everywhere to read archives from different libraries or see different artifacts from different museums. The only thing they need to do is to open up the respective sites from these institutions and find an online copy of the material they want. This would be an explicit way on how human takes advantage of technology that makes us better off.
With positive examples come with negative examples. Examples of how technology “takes advantage” of us includes addiction to computer games, the alienation between people in terms of face-to-face conversation, the exercise we lost when playing with our cell phones than taking a walk outside. Those would be the skills or times we lost by trying to control technology. In addition to that, the most horrified reality is that those advantages are taken from us without us being aware of what happened.
I’m not saying that we should stop using technology completely, but rather, I’m proposing to seek an appropriate degree of how we control technology so that we don’t lose more than we gain.