Throughout this semester, my DCI 180: Black Mirror and Digital culture class has encouraged students to broaden their knowledge of the internet through various mediums: TV episodes, scholarly articles, public blogs, news articles, and more, but there was one popular online informational medium that was overlooked, podcasts. In this class, the semester has been broken down into three distinct themes that all the episodes and readings relate to: digital self, digital consumer, and digital creator. A particular podcast that I believe would bring in a whole new insight into the dangers and opportunities of humans, under the theme of digital creator, is episode five of Josh Clarke’s The End of the World.
Episode Five: Artificial Intelligence, focuses on the existential threat caused by artificial intelligence, as well as its history. It is about an hour long, and is chalked full of pertinent information that strongly relates to how humans role as digital creators, in that we build these AI models for the benefit of the human race, but they may eventually lead to our demise.
In the class itself, we talked about the role of artificial intelligence quite a bit, but never dedicated any readings to it outside of class. Since an important piece of the course is the TV show Black Mirror, as stated in the title of the class, I think this podcast would tie in well with the episode of black mirror: Be Right Back, which we did not specifically watch in class, but also relates well to the theme of digital creator. In this episode of black mirror, a women loses her boyfriend in a car crash, but is still able to communicate to him through an artificial intelligence recording of him on her phone. These two pieces of informational media would fit hand in hand, and would broaden the future students in the class’s knowledge on a topic we nearly glossed over this year.
In terms of an assignment or activity that could be tied to this podcast, I think that the students could write a blog post that describes the most destructed future they could conceive that could be brought about by Artificial Intelligence. This would be a very insightful and fun activity, as it would force the students to really think critically and outside of the box in their responses. Not only do I believe it would be enjoyable to the students, but I think it would be very interesting for the professors to grade, as each situation would be different and equally insane.
Unfortunately, this will be my last blog for the foreseeable future. Dear patrons who tune into my blog, I may be posting again, but that seems unlikely. I hope you have enjoyed my content, and if you are lucky, I may do a surprise post.
Sincerely,
Oddthoughts
Link to Podcast:
- https://www.theendwithjosh.com/podcasts/ep05-artificial-intelligence.htm
