Utopian

Source: Pintrest

In the year 2050, everything is technology based. Cars that used to run by gas no longer exist and are used as decorative pieces in the city as there is no more oil left in the world. There is so much more greenery and society is more ecologically sound and everyone is seen as equal. Education is free. Health care is free. Living is free. Everyone works together and helps each other out. Death still occurs but humans have this enriched technological body that lasts so much longer. Once your body vessel expires, it will be put back into the earth, but you will then turn into a digital form of yourself where you are able to occur on this earth in a pixelated form like a hologram. 

As for transportation, there will be underground roads where all vehicles are computer driven and can fly and go in the water when needed. All buildings will be generated by renewable sources such as the wind, sun, and geothermal. 

All beings are either human or robots. Humans will get chips inserted into their wrist that will be used for everything. This chip will act as the key to your house, locks/unlocks everything that it is programmed to, can also be used for payment ( like a credit card), your driver’s licence, all of your medical history, and it will be able to start up your self-driving car. With this chip, everything will be controlled. Your blood pressure, heart rate, steps taken, body temperature, blood levels to see if all your levels are okay, as well as calorie intake and outtake. If there is anything occurring that is out of normal, there will be a hologram that will show up right in front of you with your levels. This chip will also be able to detect any diseases or onsets, like a heart attack, that may occur. You will be able to get help before anything bad happens. 

With the educational program in this utopian world, students and robents (robot students) are able to have access to everything technology based, such as iPad, computers, VR goggles, 3D printers and pens. EVERYTHING is available. Each student also has an Artificial Intelligent (AI) robot that is by their side to help with any questions possible. These AIs guide and tutor each student to make sure that they are up to their academic potential. Also everything in the building is command based with facial, retinal, and voice recognition. Teachers are also paired with an AI who helps them out with all of the tasks that need to be done, such as photocopying, laminating, prepping for lessons, tidying up, sanitizing the room, and communicating with parents by constantly sending them updates on their child. 

A typical day for a human would look like this. 

I wake up. 

Stephanie: “Alexa, turn on the light, open the blinds, and turn the home temperature to 18 degrees Celsius.”  

Alexa: “Yes, Stephanie.”

I get up and say good morning to my robodog, Bot, and to my AI housekeeper, Sir Chip.

 I use the bathroom, and wash my face. Sir Chip lays out all of my toiletries to make my morning routines go smoothly. I place my face in this device that washes my face and brushes my teeth. 

In the bathroom.

Stephanie: “Alexa, start the water for my shower and set the temperature to 26 degrees Celsius.” 

Alexa: “Okay.”

After I get out of the shower.  

Stephanie: “Alexa, stop the water and self-clean the shower.”

As I walk to the bathroom to my bedroom. 

Stephanie: “Sir Chip, may I have pancakes for breakfast with tea and orange juice please?”

Sir Chip:  “Of course, Mistress Stephanie. Can I get you anything else?” 

Stephanie: “No, thank you.” 

Sir Chip: “Very well then.”

I get into my bedroom. 

Stephanie: “Alexa, find my clothes.” 

Alexa: “What would you like to wear today, Stephanie?”

Stephanie:  “Something comfy yet professional, please.” 

Alexa: “Coming right up, Stephanie”

After getting ready, I eat my breakfast made by Sir Chip. 

Stephanie: “Bot, fetch me the ipaper.”

Bot: RUFF RUFF

Stephanie: “Alexa, can you put on my morning music?”

Alexa: “Yes, of course.”

It is now time to go to work. 

Stephanie: “Alexa bring my car to the front.”

Alexa: “Yes, Stephanie. 

I lock the door to my home with my chip in my wrist. Then I unlock my car and jump in. My car drives and flies me to work. 

When I get to work (which is at a school because I am a teacher), my AI robot has a hot soy chai waiting for me on my desk, along with any updates from the principal or parents. The classroom is full of technology and every student has their own rolling cart filled with all of the toys you could imagine. Days go by great as all students have their own AI for the support that they need. We all work together to make sure that all the students are successful in every single way.

 

Dystopian 

Source: Pintrest

In the year 2050, all humans still have chips in their hands that would monitor everything we do, however, robots would be in control and watching our every move. Buildings and structures are all around with no greenery in sight. There is also a dome that covers the city where you must remain inside or else you will start to crumble into a million pieces. 

All humans and robo-humans have digital numbers on them. In order to get ahead in life, the digital numbers will act as points. The higher your number, the better a person you are. The lower the number, the crappier the human you are in the eyes of the society you live in.  Every time you do a good deed, you will earn points. Whoever you did the good deed for would be the one who is able to control your points with that interaction. 

If you do something rude or not nice to other humans or seen by other humans, they would take out their phone, scan you, and take points away. Everyone around you controls your points. This will also determine how well you do in life. It is not about the money but about the points you earn on how others view you. Once you go down to a certain number of points, you get into the red zone. Once you get down to 0, you will blow up into pieces and the cleaning robots will scrape your flesh and blood off of the floor and walls.

Sounds simple enough to get a good person and do good deeds, right? Wrong. Your whole life and your movements are monitored and controlled. There are curfews, strict rules, and robots that monitor the streets with point zappers and gun blasters towards you. No one goes to school. Everyone does what the robots in charge ask of you. If they want you to learn a trade, they will teach you. You do as they say. 

A typical day for a human, would look like this: 

Diary from Stephanie. Day 734.

The lights come on and the drapes draw back automatically. We are forced to get out of bed by the robots at 6:30 AM. Everyone who lives in the city under this dome must take part in cleaning up our city to make it immaculate. Once we are done with that, the government forces us to do jobs that we are not fans of but we have to have a positive outlook as these digital numbers on our chest determine our fate. I try to be the best person possible by being a kind and helpful individual. I do not know how long I can wear this mask for. I may show that I am happy but in reality, I am miserable. This is not the life I imagined for myself. Oh no, I have to stop thinking about this as my levels will be out of sorts and the robots will know that something is off. I must continue to keep a happy face on. 

Throughout my day, I constantly praise others and help them in every possible way so that I can earn my points. If you get to 50 million points, we will be upgraded to another dome that is bigger and better. I know some people who have moved onto the next dome. I still have a long way to go. I have 15, 892, 347 points. I have such a long way to go but I am determined. My entire family, aside from a couple of second cousins, have been able to leave this dome for the better one. One day…one day…

As I was walking back from work today, before getting into the self-driving car, I bumped into a lady by accident which spilled her coffee all over herself. She came out of nowhere. I tried to help clean her up but she wanted nothing to do with me. She knocked me down 23 points. How is that fair??? I didn’t even see her coming!!! I was so angry that other people saw me break down and they started to knock more points off of me. There were 6 people around and the more angry I got, the more points they took from me. By the end of this encounter, I had lost 148 points. What the heck!! 

Oh no I better not get worked up again. The robots will come and I will get in so much trouble as I have to always be happy and positive. How am I going to make it to the next dome?? I better just forget about this day and go to sleep. 

Well that was annoying and frustrating. 

First of all, what was that? I tried this “game” three times and then gave up. However, I do not like to give up. 

There were many challenges that I encountered.

1)    Scrolling to the bottom of the Terms & Conditions. 

•  I started to get Carpal Tunnel in my wrist. Then I googled how to quickly get to the bottom of a page. So I used alt and swiped down. Okay great. I was able to accept. 

2)    Figuring out a password

• Well that was fun. I was able to do all of the requirements for the password but then I needed a Cyrillic character. Yes I had to google what that was. I also figured out that it had to be 9 characters, one capital letter, one numerical, at least one letter from my email, and one Cyrillic character. (later on, I realized that it did not matter as long as your password contains one uppercase letter and one number.)

3)    The box that comes up from the bottom of the screen. 

• At first it was annoying because I could not get it to go away. Then I pressed, “send to bottom” and it was all good. After that I just ignored it.

4)    The “Hurry up, time is ticking!” box appeared. 

• Lock?? Unlock?? It was just messing with me. Then I read down at the bottom left that it said ©lose 2021. Very clever. It is annoying that it pops up every minute though. 

Have I been able to go past the first section…nope. I will keep at it.                        

I needed to google User Inyerface to see if I could gather any clues as to how to do it. So weird. I have done everything that it told me to do and I cannot move to the next section. I wonder what it is that is making it so I cannot move on. I really want to move forward in this game!!!

Many days later….

I gave myself a few days away from this game and decided to open it up in another browser. Yes that was the problem. I could not get past the first part as, I suppose, the game did not like that I was in Safari. Once I tried it in Chrome, I was able to get a time of 5:03 by going all the way to the end. 

Now that I know how this game works. I am going to try it again as I am competitive and want a much better end time. By trying it again, and knowing how everything works, I was able to get a time of 1:24. Not bad. I think that is good enough for me. 

To me, this type of User Inyerface game, or should I say an initial irritation, consisted of a “dark pattern” (Greenberg et al., 2014, p. 524). A dark pattern is “a type of user interface that appears to have been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things [that] are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind” (Greenberg et al. 2014, p. 524). User Inyerface successfully achieved this. The types of dark patterns that occured on the User Inyerface were trick questions, misdirection, bait and switch. According to Bringnull (2010), trick questions occur when an individual is “filling in a form [where] you respond to a question that tricks you into giving an answer you didn’t intend [, however] “[w]hen glanced upon quickly the question appears to ask one thing, but when read carefully it asks another thing entirely” (para. 1). Misdirection is when the “design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from another ” (Bringnull, 2010, para. 6). Finally, according to Bringnull (2010), bait and switch is when an individual “set[s] out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead” (para. 6). Technology developers are able to think about and understand human psychology in a simple way that can easily be flipped over into the dark side (Bringnull, 2011).

In Harris’ (2017) TED talk, he mentions how social media, websites, and entertainment streaming companies, such as YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and Snapchat, are racing for our attention as they control user’s behaviour intentionally. For example, Harris (2017) mentions that with Snapchat there are millions of teens that use this app every day and there is a Snap Streak that teens are addicted to where two people communicate with each other every day. Snapchat created this intentionally as it “gave two people something they don’t want to lose” as they want to maintain their streak so it does not disappear (Harris, 2017, 3:25). Ultimately, understanding and controlling human psychology allows for these technological companies to be successful as everyone that owns any piece of technology is affected and stimulated by these dark patterns and susceptible to the attention economy.

 

References 

Bringnull, H. (2010). Dark Pattern. https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: A critical perspective. Paper presented at the 523-532. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598541

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en

During this task, we had to observe our Golden Record network that was created in Palladio where it showed the musical choices from the quiz that students in ETEC 540 took last week. In our class there are 22 students that chose 10 out of 27 tracks. The image below shows the network of connections between students and tracks. I moved around the network so that the tracks were on the outside and the students were in the middle.

In this network graph, there are nodes and edges. The nodes represent the students which have dark grey circles and the edges in this network graph represent the connection between a student and the 10 tracks they chose during the quiz. Not only are the lines connecting a student to the 10 tracks that they chose, but with each track, there are connections that link together with all those chose that track. Surprisingly there were no tracks that did not have a connection. Track 4 (Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song) and Track 8 (Men’s Housing Song) only have two degrees of connectivity that connect to the two individuals that chose that music. Whereas Track 6 (El Cascabel) and Track 18 (Fifth Symphony: First Movement) have the most connections and degree of connectivity with being linked to twelve students. I analyzed this by selecting the largest circle and then by counting the lines that I visually observed.

Next, I decided to explore and analyze Community 1 with the number of nodes. To me, it is unclear how these communities are made, but I assume it is because we had the most similar choices among the 10 tracks that we all picked. Myself and five others are in this community (Anna Rzhevska, Derek Doherty, Connie Sim, Richard Wong, and Mandy Alves). In this community, there were four tracks that only had 1 degree of connectivity. Those tracks were Track 15: Bagpipes (Azerbaijan), Track 19: Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin, Track 22: Panpipes (Solomon Islands), and Track 24: Flowing Streams. There were no tracks that had all of these students connected, however there were five tracks that had 5 degrees of connectivity. Those tracks were Track 5: Morning Star Devil Bird, Track 6: El Cascabel, Track 7: Johnny B. Goode, Track 12 Tchakrulo, and Track 18 (Fifth Symphony: First Movement).

It would be interesting to investigate this data further by figuring out why each student chose the tracks that they did. The graph does visualize the connections between tracks but there is no data on why each person selected these tracks. As well, it would have been effective to also have data where the tracks could also be connected to the instruments that occur in each song. With this data, we could see if there were any correlations between the types of instruments and all the tracks that each student picked for their top ten tracks. I wonder how many more connections there would have been between all students. Also, it would be so neat and visually appeasing if the tracks were categorized into colours depending on either the instruments used (for example, all wind instruments would be blue) or the pitch and tones of the instruments (for example, very high pitched sounds would have a red colour, whereas low pitches would be blue). There are so many different ways that data could have been collected in order for us to see all the different connections between one another. However, I enjoyed this task as we were able to get a taste of what data networking looks like with the only data being the ten tracks each student picked.

I then wanted to see which student I had the most connectivity with, so I analyzed myself with the five other students in pairs. I discovered that myself, Stephanie Carr, and Mandy Alves connected the most.

We both chose the same eight tracks out of the ten tracks we were allowed to choose. Do we both like the same types of music? Do we enjoy certain tones and instrumentals while listening to music? It would be fascinating to see why we both picked the eight tracks that we did. However, this data does not provide this information. I know this is not based on music, but I wonder if we were to both open up our Netflix to see what movie recommendations there would be, would it be similar? Does the type of music that you enjoy also correlate with the types of movies one enjoys? That would be neat to collect data on to see the similarities and differences.

When I think about the political implications, I think back to why I consider a committee from Cornell University were the chosen ones to determine which tracks would be placed on the Golden Record. Did they have biases on the tracks they decided to choose? Out of all the music in the world, how did they narrow it down to just 27 tracks? Also, how come not all musical genres were represented on this track? There are significant information gaps on the Golden Record and with the tracks that were selected for this voyage.

Now with reflecting on the political implications of the current data taken for this task, there are some missing gaps. With the visualizations of the data, viewers can identify which tracks were most liked and which were not. However, we can only see who the curators are and what tracks they chose instead of why they picked the tracks that they did. Were the tracks chosen only on the sound of the music? Or by the instruments played on the track? Or did individuals prefer instrumental music opposed to hearing someone sing? Or perhaps the curators just randomly picked ten tracks because it was too hard to choose? Or perhaps they did not have a liking to any of the tracks but had to pick ten for the purpose of these tasks? Without any reasoning or criteria behind why these tracks were chosen, the data really does not provide us with that much information.