Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris

This is the story of the cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse. Her ability to read minds makes her a kind of outsider in the small town of Bon Tomps. Many people in the town think she’s weird and her childhood was tough due to her disability to control her mind reading. But one day her life change drastically, when she starts a romance with Bill. Bill is a vampire and he’s decided to mainstream with the human kind now when the vampires have come out of the coffin. The society has acknowledged their existence, but far from all has accepted them.

Her decision to get involved with a vampire isn’t accepted by everyone. Many people are afraid of things that’re different from what they’re used to. To acknowledge and accept someone that doesn’t share the same life values, political opinion nor has the same skin color should not be a difficult decision, but in many cases there is. Bullying, racism and even war are all examples of a disability to acknowledge and accept. In many cases, these actions can come from a lack of knowledge or a reluctance to understand why the other part is different.

Bullying among children happens in every school today. But why do children bully? As I mentioned earlier, knowledge is one out of many reasons. The bully wants to ensure his or her position in the group and often do this by deliberately and repeatedly hurt someone else. This hurting mustn’t be physical and I think that the physiological bullying is much more common. It's also much harder to detect. Sookie suffered this throughout her childhood. She was different and the other kids didn’t know how to handle it.          

Throughout the book there are people who are unwilling to let the vampires get the same civil rights. People judge the whole vampire kind out of some particular vampire’s actions. It’s hard for them who’re willing to mainstream and live an ordinary life. This behavior can be compared with the racism that sadly is well spread in the society today. To categorize people due to their skin color and rank them is all wrong. There is no scientific evidence saying that our intellect or mental state depends on the color of our skin. Our personality is formed due to our cultural surroundings, things we experience and people we meet.

To judge a person you haven’t met or even heard of is absurd. People should have a chance to give an impression based on their own personality, not by what another person has done or believe in.        

Are droids taking our jobs?

In today’s society we’re dependent on all kind of different technologies. It helps us in our everyday lives as well as in our working lives. But what will come out if this dependence when the technologies get more advanced and more intelligent. Will the technologies overcome us and affect the labor force, “are the droids going to take are jobs?”

In his presentataion, Andrew McAffe discusses the trends in employment-to-population ratio. Today there is a big gap between the actual jobs and the working age population. If we assume the progression will continue as it has done in the past, the gap will not close. I think the gap will grow faster that we can imagine. The technology development hasn’t reached its maximum potential. In the future we’ll have artificial intelligence that will help us develop the new technology. The important question in this statement is where do we stand when the mental power of technologies overcome our own?

Today’s articles can be written by algorithms and you can have an instantaneous, automatic translation service in your smartphone. McAffe predicts that there will be many areas in the future where technology will be more efficient and cheaper than human recourses, but we all need to see the benefits of this development too. He talks about how the everyday life of people all around the world improves by technology. The poor fisherman gets a cellphone and his society climb a step in the hierarchy ladder.

We need to focus on the great things about new technology and shape our future along them. If we just stand beside and let the technologies get ahead of us, we all will be domed. But if we invite the new developments and include them in our way of thinking, I think we all will benefit from them. As Freeman Dyson ones said; “Technologies is a gift from God. After the gift of life it’s perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It’s the mother of civilizations, of arts and of science.”

By this I will call myself a huge digital optimist just like McAffe and I hope we can work side by side of the droids in the future and not compete with them.         

The First Five Years of the iPhone Obsession

By calling the urge to always wear your iPhone an obsession, Rosen just points out an important human behavior. As a human being it’s crucial to have control over your life. We search for things that give us a sense of security. By wearing an iPhone or smartphone you can get this sense of security since this technical advice contains a part of you. Pictures, private messages and important appointments make the iPhone your “friend” that you can’t be separated with.

This behavior doesn’t stand out through the ages. When the regular cellphone appeared at the market, wouldn’t people always wear them then and wouldn’t people use electricity when it was invented. Both these things simplified our lives and gave us a satisfaction similar to what iPhones gives some people today. The differences stand in availability and advertisement. Today everything is available all the time and you can get it anywhere.  

If Rosen call the use of iPhone an obsession, then aren’t we always searching for things to be obsessed with?