Blog #5 The Age of AI

'The Age of AI' talks about the impact of AI in society and economics. There's potential in education, healthcare and the justice system. AI in the last few years has become very popular. It has been utilized for many different things like businesses, privacy, surveillance, and medicine. There has been so much development with AI and how smart it has gotten. Technology has advanced so much in the last few years that it is honestly scary. All of our information is available to so many different people. It is also easily accessible to skilled hackers.

There are so many ways to protect our own data but on the other hand, there are so many ways for people to access it. There is no definitive way to protect our data. AI has become insanely smart and has led to many positives and negatives. A positive has been the advance in the medical field. The work that AI has done to advance the research for cancer is amazing. AI is able to go through data and find people's health records. It also works hand in hand with doctors because it can sort through scans and find things that doctors might have missed. It can also assist doctors while there are lots of patients by pointing out mistakes doctors could have made or missed. It is truly amazing to see the advances in AI throughout the years to benefit society. 

 A negative of AI is privacy. Since AI has become a thing, everything you have is a lot less privacy. AI is so smart that it can find anything about you. Especially like the Snapchat AI, you could send a photo to the AI account and it will analyze your photo and respond with what you are doing and it is honestly a little scary. Being so smart, AI is starting to take over jobs that humans have been doing for years. In the line of work I would like to pursue after graduation, AI can easily take it over and I would be out of a job. AI is programmed to act like a human which is scary. 

Blog #8 EOTO Terms & Concepts

 Third Person Effect

The Third Person Effect relates to a perceptual bias that leads people to believe that they are less susceptible to being persuaded by media than others. This idea was introduced in 1983 by sociologist W. Phillips Davison, it reflects the perception that others are more vulnerable to persuasion or negative impacts of media than "I am." 

There are two facets of human nature that support this idea:

- Illusion of Invulnerability: We want to protect our sense of control over our own lives. Because of that, we believe that we are less vulnerable to negative influences compared to others. One way that we do that is assuming that ads only work on others and not ourselves. 

- Poor Self-Knowledge: We really don't know what goes on in our own brains. Many of our own intuitions about how our brains work are scrambled and subject to different biases like the illusion of invulnerability. 

It is hard for people to believe that we don't know everything that goes on in our minds. But if we were to acknowledge the fact that we will never understand, we would be able to protect our minds of persuasive advertising easier and take back control for ourselves. 

There was a telephone survey of 721 adults that examined the impact of the third-person effect on individuals' perception of media and immortality effects with three issues. The perceptual hypothesis predicts that other people will be persuaded by media more than themselves. The behavioral hypothesis predicts that the third-person perception will lead to support for restrictions on media messages. In the end, the findings confirmed the support for the perceptual hypothesis. These hypotheses led to a few studies in the 1990s but later in the early 2000s research led to total of 135 studies. 

Researchers wanted to see how much people thought they were affected by persuasive messages and compare it to attitude changes. During the studies, the participants watched an ad, read a newspaper, or another form of a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much they thought it would influence other people as well as themselves. After completing the studies, they found that participants thought others would be influenced but they would remain unaffected. This was then dubbed the 'third-person effect.' 

People underestimate how much they actually get affected by persuasive media. It can affect their behaviors, there are many things that could be a result of the third person effect. It also leads to people to believe that others are more gullible which pushes different stereotypes even more. 

Blog #10 The Progressive Era

 Antiwar Voices

Dissent refers to "the expression or holding of opinions at variance with those previously, commonly, or officially held." Dissent plays a crucial role in the political world because it pertains to an opinion that goes against an idea that was already had. The First Amendment protects the right to express dissent because it guarantees freedom of religion and expression without government interferences. The Supreme Court has previously had dissenting opinions which led to the change of how court cases are decided and looked at. 

A very important dissenting opinion is Yates vs United States (1957). In 1951, Dennis v United States, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of 11 members of the American Communist Party for violating the Smith Act. Also known as the Alien Registration Act, made it illegal to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government, or to be a part of an organization that participates in those actions. The Supreme Court found that the law did not violate the First Amendment, in a 6-2 vote. However in the Yates v United States, 6 years later, the Supreme Court reversed this decision. It ruled that speech is only illegal if it poses a "clear and present danger." This clarified what kinds of speech are truly protected by the First Amendment. 

Antiwar.com and Theamericanconservative.com are not very common websites. Therefore, I never knew about their efforts to lower the amount and severity of war across the world. I feel we never hear about these in mainstream news because the government is trying to censor us and what we can see because it could possibly change everyone's views. It would cause a lot of issues if these websites were a part of the mainstream news. After seeing everything on these websites, it is really heartbreaking to learn what is really going on in different countries and how many people are affected by war and how no one is helping them. The American Conservative has very unfiltered authors that publish their stories and are not afraid to truly voice how they feel. 

Blog #7 EOTO Presentations

One presentation I was very interested by was the Telephone/Cell phone. In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell discovered the principles of the telephone, He experimented with Thomas Watson to create the first telephone connection. The first outdoor wire was strung in 1877, it was a commercial telephone service that began in the US. The payphone was invented by William Gray in 1889. It allowed people to make phone calls in public places when they didn't have access to their own phone. In 1891, the rotary phone was invented by Almon Strowger. 

This was a very important invention because it allowed people to be able to call others independently in your own home. Oliver Lodge demonstrated wireless communication over 150 yards, which marked the beginning of cell phone technology like we know now.Motorola demonstrates telephones where people can call wirelessly which birthed cellphones in 1972. In 1989, Motorola introduced the first "Pocket" cell phone, called MicroTAC. During the mid to late 1990s, cell phone companies made their mobile phones lighter, faster, cheaper and, slimmer, to evolve the mobile phone. In 1999, Motion introduced the Blackberry 850 which began the Blackberry craze. Then in 2007, Apple launched their first iPhone which changed the game completely.

Blog #4 Privacy, Online and Off

Almost everyone is always constantly on their phones or on some sort of electronic. There are so many risks to your privacy every time you are online. In the first TED talk, he talks about how our phones are like electronic tattoos. Facial recognition has become very impressive and can easily detect different faces just through a photo. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter use technology to easily track people's searches and what they have been doing. Thinking about how companies can easily track all my stuff is scary to think about because they have access to all of my accounts and nothing is private anymore. 

Once something is posted online, it is out there forever, even if it was deleted. But once you are constantly online, your internet presence grows more and more and the internet knows more about you. I'm sure that everyone has had a scary experience of talking about a topic and then your phone shows you exactly what you are talking about. That is how developed AI and the internet is today. The 2nd and 3rd TED talk touch on security with license plates and our cars. There is so much software that can detect where we are at all times. The government also has access to all of our phone calls and can hear everything we are saying. Which is also scary to think about. 

The government should be reassuring us that our data is being protected and isn't easily accessible to hackers. They should also be actively making sure that our data is actually private. I think the government could also be more transparent with their access to our data and assuring us that is it not going to be used in a negative way. This affects everyone a lot because everyone provides data for everything online, even if it is not necessarily something super important but everything is tracked. There should be more protection on everyone's data because you never want it to get into the wrong hands and it could be dangerous for the person involved.

These TED talks have made me really see the dangers of technology and having my data online especially if the government doesn't protect me in the ways that they could. 

Blog #6 EOTO Tech Timeline

 Instant Messaging

Murray Turoff

 Murray Turoff created Instant Messaging as a part of the Emergency   Management Information Systems and Reference Index in 1971. Instant   Messaging is used to connect people all over the world and to easily help teams   in the business world connect quickly and efficiently. 

 It's original purpose was to help the government in different emergencies. It was   first used during Nixon's administration to help facilitate communication between government officials to assist the anti-inflation wage and price control efforts. 

EMISARI users accessed the system through typewriter terminals that were linked to a central computer. It continued to be used by the government to manage emergency systems until 1986. The original chat function was called Party Line, it was used to replace telephone conferences. 

Party Line

in the 1970's, the first platform was created and it was called "Talk," designed to work within the UNIX operating system. This was the most alike our current platforms that we use now. It required users to be logged into the program and sending a message was as easy as it is now. You could send a message and it would pop up in the other person's inbox. "Talk" partnered with another company called "Finger," which allowed you to see who was active on the platform. 

IM became more popular in the early 2000's when they were used on the Internet. In 2002, Apple's iChat made it's debut during the rollout of OS X Jaguar. Beginning in 2011, Apple began using a centralized service, iMessage, to allow users to communicate. Since 2011, many different platforms came about such as Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Talk.

Instant Messaging became even more popular during COVID-19. Especially Zoom and Microsoft Teams. They both allowed video calls and messaging in real time which was used a lot in school. Now, Slack and Microsoft Teams are used frequently in the work world to help connect different teams within the same company. 

One pro of IM is that it better helps people connect internationally, it allows people to be able to talk to family members or friends over seas. IM also helps everyone connect easier, it allows real time responses and immediate feedback on a project or any issues that might arise during the work day. It is a lot more efficient because you do not have to wait for an email which could take hours or even days. 

Some cons of IM is distraction, security, and message interpretation. IM is a big distraction in the work world and just in general. People will quickly pick up their phone to check who texted them when they are driving, or doing homework, or working. Security is also a big part because you put in your own personal information into the databases and people can easily hack into the systems and take your information. So it is a risk joining these different platforms. Also, another big thing is message interpretation because you cannot see a person's emotions or body language through a text message. People could read a text one way but the sender did not mean it in the way they thought. It can cause a lot of fights and miscommunication. 

Overall, instant messaging has become a great thing in this generation because it allows so many different people to connect and talk to each other easier.