Living in the Digital world: the inevitable progress
We are now living in the digital world unavoidably. You are reading this blog on your electronic device, isn’t it? Even the people of the remotest places are part of the digital world, though they are more likely to be one of the numbers about the poor.
What does it mean to “live in the digital world”? Let’s look at a day in a college student’s life. It seems to be a meaningless text, but what behind it is thought-provoking.
This student is waked up by the alarms she set on her phone, and before she put on the clothes, she checks whether she has missed any messages or emails sent to her last night.
After coming back from class, she starts to enjoy videos online. She turns off the advertisement about the discount for the lipstick she wants. She also read through some news from social medias.
It’s getting dark. The student takes conversation with a chatbot for fun. After all, she takes a shower, turns off the lights and goes to sleep with her alarms ready for the next day.
Are all these things familiar to you? Like what I mention at the beginning, the text is boring. However, this day is an excellent sample for living in a digital world. I will show you all of them in the following paragraphs.
She is using her phone as the alarm instead of having a real alarm. This is how technology benefit us. More and more functions are available on a single electronic device. We can set alarms, listen to music, read news and search for information with only a cell phone needed. The alarm connects to sleep time, and Apple makes iPhone and even Apple watch available for tracking the sleep time. This function generates the users’ data and achieve the aim for tracking.
This feature is quite useful for self-regulation, but it also means that the company can obtain more data from users. This is not the only point that there may be data breach. As long as we need the applications and websites to do their works, they are able to gather information about their users. The safety on personal information is always important, and many large companies try to keep it as safe as possible.
However, there are always accidents. The data breach happened in 2019 in Facebook was a serious example. The data breach 530 million including the phone numbers, names, locations and some email addresses. Other information included in user profiles were also lifted in the breach. Facebook is undoubtedly a big company, but such a serious data breach happened. We need more methods and guide to protect us online.
Did you realise that the student turned off an advertisement about the lipstick she wanted? This can the result of Big Data, but what if your shopping application send you advertisement about something right after you mentioned it with your friend? This possibility is worrying, and all we can do is speed up the legislation and force the companies to obey.
I believe that many people have the habit of checking whether there are any messages or emails after waking up just like this student. Sending messages online make communications fast and easy for people around the world. Together with the message part, the relaxing part on watching videos and reading news are also discussed here.
There is no doubt that modern technology has made receiving information faster and easier. In the past, people were not able to know what happened on the other side of the Earth, but now we are able to know anything as long as it is important in some areas. However, the easy and short information fill our pockets time. When there are no phones, people would prefer chatting with someone nearby or watching the surroundings. Some studious people would choose to hurry up and read books. There is nothing wrong to fill our pockets time with short news and information, but reading short things day after day would reduce our ability to concentrate. We are used to read the short things and concentrate on them only for a short time. This is of no benefit to our learning, while we should learn for life.
Chatbots, which this student is just asking questions for fun, suddenly become popular after the appearance of ChatGPT. It must be mentioned that here in University of Manchester, using ChatGPT for coursework is forbidden. It’s not just about avoiding cheating, but also protection. ChatGPT is good at making up things, which is a disaster for the scientific articles.
Chatbots like ChatGPT is also a kind of Artificial Intelligences. Therefore, Turing test can also be used for chatbots. None of the AIs has ever passed this test. Some people may clam that Eugene Goostman passed it, but the truth is it only managed to convince over a third of the jury. To pass the test, 50% in needed.
Though AIs are not able to pass the Turing test, they are already put into use in some ways. ChatGPT can be used for making scrips for movie commentary, and some people use them directly to produce low quality videos. AIs can help people, but they should never be the one creating. Human beings have the irreplaceable creativity and imagination. If the jobs require creativity are replaced by AI, human beings will slowly lose our relative skills, and those born with gift will have nowhere to show their talent. That goes against the original goal for having AIs to help us with our works.
Personally, this course itself is completely new. I am learning online, which is common in recent years, but all the learning contents are on an open platform in blog style instead of giving the scientific PowerPoint and recordings from the professors. The informal teaching style took me a few weeks to get used to it, as the starting weeks were busy, and the online materials were easy to miss. Also, writing in informal style is not easy for me, as all I have wrote are lab reports and simple stories. The blog post style writing is completely new for me. I did not do well in my first work. Though the improvement in marks was small for the second one, I still learnt a lot from the feedbacks.
Back to the course content, I took about 1 to 2 weeks to get used to the teaching style. I was amused by the contents. They are different from what I imagined and makes me feel like unprepared for the course. In my imagination, this course will be focusing on some advanced technology that will be put into use in future.
However, as more course contents were released, I found them connected to each other. The Internet part is the base of the whole course, so it is introduced the first. Students are supposed to think from both positive and negative side of the questions, and that’s why Critical analysis is the second part.
Chatbots is the part of the course since ChatGPT suddenly comes into public view. This is quite different from my courses, as it is connected to the very up-to-date events. I am able to link classes to real-world situations, which helps me to think more about what is happening. There is an old saying, the spectators see the chess game better than the players. It is always not easy for those experiencing the event to think critically, and such combination provided gives me a chance and an exercise on it.
Besides the critical thinking of the real-world situations, the other contents like the Ethics thinking and Simulated spaces also teach me a lot. What I learnt can be sorted to the influences to the society and the new technologies. The ethics of technology is always the topic, and it is not far from anyone, as the wave of innovation will not let anyone go. Humans are often divided on moral issues because of the specific situations and the different personal experiences. It seems to be a nice idea to let the AI decides the moral issues in order to avoid the influence on personal positions, but as the FAQs page of “Delphi” pointed out, there are too much limitation on AIs to let it work out the moral problem.
From this course, I learn a lot about things I used to take for granted, and have deeper understanding of the world I lived in. The ability of writing will probably be useful in future, and the ability of critical thinking will make me think more instead of following blindly.
