Session Two

The Colonial Holocaust and its Legacy. Initially, the content and its link to Technology and World Change seemed superfluous tome. Why learn about our ancestors’ deeds and our bloody history, when we have high-tech gadgets to confer about? As it has been very kindly clarified for us, technology is interwoven in our daily mechanics. It is a revelation for me that technology is not exclusive but something that is very integral in our day to day lives.

The aforementioned article, describes the brutality of Europeans and how the indigenous people of Latin America and India were massacred. The insistence of European dominance, including military, economic, political and cultural, had the non- European populations severely exploited. Consequently, the Europeans profited from the vast looting and plundering of these natives’ states. This is where it struck me, the reason why Europe was the rising power in colonial times. Reflecting back upon the Jared Diamond’s book on Guns, Germs and Steel and Yali’s question that it revolves around of why the whites have more cargo than the New Guineans, brutal force of the Europeans could possibly be one of the answers. It seemed that they were a force to reckon with, especially in technological innovation.

Very interesting presentations were done up by my peers and one of them caught my attention, on Singularity and computers that are smarter than humans. Humans are forever and always looking for ways to live beyond and into immortality. Super-computers could be created that function as our support and life as we grow older. The questions posed and discussed, is what the impacts will be if we are half-human and half-computerised. The direction of the discussion was mainly on the intuition, feelings and emotions, or the lack thereof, in computers. It was shocking to find out that there are chips manufactures to invoke feelings in a computer. It is way out-of-the world and eccentric and unbelievable to have computers do that. The identity of humans is at stake as its unique ability to feel and respond is duplicated by computers. I might be a stickler for constancy but are we harming ourselves and our future with our own hands, as we might get dominated by computers?

The key take away points in this lesson is that to understand and better apply our knowledge in our daily lives, we need to find out the history of how it all began. Without that knowledge we might just end up being slaves of technology, instead of manipulating it to our suitability.

Another key take away is anything seems possible with upcoming technologies. Crazy as it sounds, even robots with feelings. The dynamics of the world might change and it might be anytime soon.

For the pure craziness of ideas that are the crux of class discussions that continually surprise me, I rate the session a 10 yet again!