Week 3
Beautiful future
Ugly future
This week’s readings reminded me of a project I did in the past on Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine.
The experience machine is a thought experiment conceived of by Robert Nozick to refute ethical hedonism. If you enter the machine you experience a virtual life with any preprogrammed successes you desire. If pleasure was all that mattered, people would accept this scenario even though their achievements would be artificial.
For this project, I depicted the Experience Machine in two different ways, wondering whether the aesthetic and process of entering the machine mattered to people considering whether they’d “plug in.” Nozick’s story and Forster’s story have much in common- both involve authentic reality vs. a programmed, technologically simulated reality.
Forster’s depiction of this technological future is dystopic- there’s no fresh air, no family, you are separated from your children upon birth so they can be isolated in their own pod, etc… But technology doesn’t evolve to directly ruin everything good and promote everything bad. There’s no doubt that Forster’s technological future is bad. No one wants to live like that. However, the insidious evil of technology is the temptation of instant gratification and pleasure, for fleeting good feelings, rather than authentic success/personal accomplishment/love. I think the experience machine touches more on this reality (though to be fair, it was published ~65 years after Forster’s). I wonder- why do people so easily reject entering the Experience Machine but get sucked into the hedonistic indulgence of social media? The future I fear is one where the control looks beautiful, and operates on good feelings, not one where control is locking people into dank, ugly, cells.
Facial detection fail
Snapchat Filters
Why is this synthetic media?
It maps your face and can change how you look subtly (giving you longer eyelashes) or to an extreme extent (turning you into a hotdog.) I found that the algorithm is an “active shape model” which learns how to identify parts of human faces based on thousands of analyzed images. The image I took on the right is pretty interesting because nothing about my fingers has shading or contouring like a human face.
Snapchat filters are destructive. Front-facing cameras themselves have negative effects on self-esteem because the focal length creates unflattering pictures. Snapchat then provides a solution, and then some, giving users unattainably “cute” faces. Seeing photos of beautiful, photoshopped people in the media is bad for the self-esteem of teenagers, I imagine seeing how you could almost look that beautiful and smooth would drive them to pursue surgery/expensive cosmetic treatments.