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Summary:
A woman lives in a dystopian future run by oil companies who have created zombies to defend their pipelines. Her husband is abusive, and her only escape is playing guitar on her back patio. One of the zombies comes up to her and listens to her play, and they become friends. There is a break in one of the pipelines, which the zombies usually fix, and so people congregate to get free fuel. Then, all the zombies show up and kill everyone except for her, because her zombie saves her life and then they have raise a child together.

Quotes:
"My greatest, my only true possession was my father's guitar"
"What did I know about zombie intellect?"
"Pray that Udide and I can convince man and droid to call a true, otherwise the delta will keep rolling in blood, metal and flames."

Questions:
1. Why does she trust the zombie?
2. Why would the zombie not have killed her husband?
3. How are a human woman and a droid possibly going to raise a child together in a dystopian world?

Connections:
This kind of reminds me about a book I read called The Girl With All the Gifts which was set in kind of a futuristic/ zombie/ dystopia. In the book, they try and study the zombies to see if there is any way to redeem them, and they collect samples to test for possible cures. While their aren't robots in that book, the dystopian vibe is very similar.

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As Colorado Rover Dries, the US Teeters on the Brink of Larger Water Crisis

Summary: Water rights are dire in the US, and there are a lot of politics involved about how water is used and distributed.

Quotes:
"It has to drastically change."
"I would say within 40 to 50 years we would run out or the water is so saline or so deep that it’s just too expensive to extract"
"The western United States is, famously, in the grips of its worst megadrought in a millennium."

Questions:
How have water rights changed over time?
Is federal intervention going to help?
How can climate activists spread awareness about water usage?

Connection:
My grandpa owns a ranch in the mountains and it is right on the Colorado River. He (as a rancher) has a certain amount of water rights that he can use for irrigation in his pastures, and those water rights are bought/ sold with the land itself.

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Summary:
The documentary essentially explains how negative technological advancements can be. With the rise of cell phones and the internet, tech companies use psychology to draw you in, and the profit off of revenue from ads, using your attention as a commodity to be bought and sold.

Big Picture:
"If you aren't buying anything, then you are the commodity that is being traded"
"Most people are addicted to technology these days"
"Big tech is ONLY there to make money, not to care about the consumer"

Questions:
1. How are young people vs old people effected by technology in different ways?
2. This reminds me of an article that I read in 7th grade that was titled "Screenagers" which at the time I thought was very funny. Now sometimes I have to stop and realize that I am being a screenager, and do on fact need to do something other than being one my phone. How does perspective on technology change?
3. Do they really have a solution, or is it all just impending doom that we are supposed to live with?

Connection:
Netflix has been trying to recommend this documentary for literal years. So when I saw that we had to watch it for class, I finally caved. I think that it is an important concept considering that we all exist in cyberspace, but also strangely it is something that (at the time) I had just accepted as a part of my reality. Now though, I think I notice it a lot more than I did previously.

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How confucianism could put fears about artificial intelligence to bed

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How confucianism could put fears about artificial intelligence to bed

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Summary:
Western countries have an apocalyptic take on AI while Eastern countries think about it differently. They use Buddhism and Confucianism to aid in the moral development of AI, and to make it applicable and useful within their lives. Mostly, there is a dramatically different way of thinking about technology between eastern and western philosophies.

Big Picture:
1. One of the corollaries of Confucian thinking “is that technology focuses on making us better human beings in terms of those virtues,”
2. If the philosophy of AI and robotics only comes from the West, that won’t be enough, because it won’t always apply to non-Western countries
3. If the philosophy of AI and robotics only comes from the West, that won’t be enough, because it won’t always apply to non-Western countries

Questions:
1. Would westerners be responsive to an AI programmed with these philosophies? Or would there still be skepticism?
2. How do western pieces of media reinforce the AI robot-is-not-will-never-be-human story?
3. How would this AI perform tasks differently from one designed with western "ethics"?

Connection:
This just makes me wonder weather or not people would be open to this sort of technology, or if the western "AI is evil" narrative runs too deep. Because it is scary, and that's a narrative that's been beaten into us, but I think it would be really interesting to witness a cultural shift like this.

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Summary:
As humans, we have an incredible influence on the planet, and now live in "the Anthropocene". We have gotten so use to exploiting natural resources for our own gain that it would take a monumental event to make us stop. At our current pace, we will destroy the earth and its climate irreparably.

Big Picture:
"It seems appropriate to assign the term 'Anthropocene' to the present"
"Things have become much worse"
"Unless there is a global catastrophe... man kind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia"

Questions:
How would the Earth be impacted if humans were wiped out entirely? have we done too much damage for the Earth to ever recover?
How does Hardin's "solution" differ from the idea of a global catastrophe?
How can we now, without a dramatic event, make a change to start repairing the climate?

Connection:
This reminds me a lot about famous painters like Thomas Cole who explored the American west and did incredible landscapes showcasing the beauty and wonders of nature. The government used these paintings as a sort of advertisement for people to move west. Ironically then, these same areas of natural beauty that once drew people into these areas were destroyed by settlers and stripped of their natural resources.

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Summary:
A seemingly normal small town bustles with activity as people prepare for "the lottery". All seems well and everyone gathers together and each of them take turns drawing slips of paper out of a black box. When all of the papers are opened, one family, and then one woman, is finally selected. We then find out that she has been selected to die, and all the villagers stone her to death.

3 phrases representative of the big picture:
"Most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around"
"'It isn't fair, it isn't right"'
"'There's always been a lottery"'

Questions:
1. Why does Jackson wait until the very end to reveal what the lottery actually is?

2. How is this story similar to "The Ones Who Walked Away" by Le Guin?

3. Since one of the villagers mentions that other people have quit the lottery, why do they still find the idea of a brutal sacrifice so necessary? How does this relate to the power of tradition and unwillingness to change?

Connections:
1. I've read this story before, and it has stuck with me ever since. When I saw that it was on the reading for this week, I was wondering if reading it again would change  the shock/ horror that I felt when I first read it (in 7th grade). It really didn't, and I still find the story as unnerving and awful as I did the first time I read it.
2. This reminds me a lot of "The Cold Equations" and "The Ones Who Walked Away". All three of these short stories include ideas about a "necessary sacrifice" whether it be for the sake of a mission, societal happiness, or tradition. All of them prove a point that I find gruesome and bleak.

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Summary:
Speer was Hitlers right hand man for efficient architectural projects. He later claimed that he didn't know about the full extent of Hitler's atrocities and that he was simply too engrossed in the idea of technological advancement to realize it. The big takeaway is that engineers need to realize that technology and innovation are not neutral forces and that there are in fact moral responsibilities entwined with the technical aspects of the job.

Big Picture:
"technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgement, can also make a reality of nightmares"
"How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?"
"Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technicians often blind devotion to his task"
"Most engineers are gifted in math and science; this alone is not sufficient to make them responsible or moral human beings"

Questions:
Was Speer actually so isolated that he didn't know about the realities of war, or was he just lying to make himself seem better?
How does Speers "remorse" over his actions help us believe him that he actually was just a machine performing a task?
Why is it that engineers often see themselves so separate from the world around them?

Connections:
In my econ class we did an activity about clearing landmines in Cambodia, and considered the costs/ benefits of it. For me, the biggest benefit is safety, and that no one else would have to die or worry about the issue again. We then had to try and assign a theoretical monetary value to each of our costs/ benefits. But you can't measure the value of human life with money. You can't think about people like equations and algorithms. I was taken aback by how some people were so easily able to compare human life with a monetary value, and then decide that (for example) its not worth clearing landmines in Cambodia because the cost of labor and equipment would outweigh the benefit of saving human lives. It's the same thing in this article, engineers need to be really aware about how they view humanity and the ethical repercussions of that.

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Summary:
A captain of a spaceship finds a stowaway on board. He is surprised to find out that she is a young girl, and gets to know her despite the fact he knows that he will eventually have to kill her due to a myriad of circumstances that make her death inevitable. Even after getting to know her and garnering sympathy for her through her heart wrenching story, he is forced by circumstance (kill her or let many others die) to send her out into space to her death.

Big Picture:
The title itself, "The Cold Equations"
"It was a law not of men's choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier"
"'I didn't do anything to die for'"

Questions:
Why does Godwin create such circumstances in which the girl must die?
This story clearly relies on the concept of utilitarian ethics. Why?
Why does Godwin make the stowaway a young girl? What impact does this have on the story and the conscience of the captain?

Connections:
I honestly felt really weird about this story while reading it. At the first introduction of Marilyn, I was immediately concerned about the implications of her gender and age. I think that it creates an interesting situation for male sympathy, which pertains more to the captain than to her. Especially after reading the except from the essay, of which my favorite quote is:
"It says that now is the time to pull together, the time for all foolish girls to die to save brave explorers from certain death, and not the time for assigning blame."

Which leads to the implications of the authors choices to create a situation in which she has to die. Why? What purpose does she serve in this story? Why do we get to know her so well only for her to inevitably die? Do we even consider blaming the captain? Do we see her sacrifice as just? I think that there is a lot more going on here than just at surface value, which would just compare it to the trolley problem overall (sacrifice one to save many), but her character creates a lot more intricacy and personal involvement in the story. Realizing that this story was written in the 50s lets me frame in it a bit more of a historical perspective, but doesn't make me feel better about the overall character development on both sides.