Posts

Blog Post 3: Automation and Poverty

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I've been thinking about automation recently, and how it relates to the ideas we've discussed in this class. This blog post is the result of that reflection. Some background: a couple months ago, I watched a series of videos on the effects of automation on our society (One of the videos is on the right). The general theory (which I subscribe to) is that automation is about to fundamentally change our society in a massive way. As an example reinforced by this video, take transportation. 3 days ago, Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, Space-X, and real-life Tony Stark) announced that Tesla would be releasing an electric semi-truck with full automatic driving capabilities. That means that the 3.5 million truckers currently living in the US are at serious risk of losing their jobs in the next 10 years. Transportation isn't the only industry being overhauled. Virtually everything is getting automated - a deep-learning supercomputer named Watson at IBM, for instance, is now able to pre...
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Blog Post 2: Gender norms American culture

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A few months ago, my mother posted a link in our family group chat about a controversial decision made by a particularly progressive preschool teacher on Bainbridge Island. The teacher's decision provoked a great deal of thought-provoking conversation within my family about gender equality in our world. This past couple weeks, the gender equality conversations we've been having in class have reopened my thinking on the issue, and so in this blog post I'd like to try to tie together my family's conversation and our classroom conversations into some kind of cohesive whole. The teacher's decision was about which children got to play with what toys. The young boys in her class predominantly liked playing with trucks, guns, and other violent toys; the young girls in her class predominantly liked playing with dolls, toy houses, and other quintessentially female toys. She saw this as a problem, and decided to not allow the boys to play with toys like trucks or guns, and ...
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Blog post 1: The Single Story

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So far, the most influential thing for me in this class has been Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's TED talk on the single story. This first blog post will be both an exploration of the single story within our own culture, and will provide an argument that the world is culturally flat (contrary to Pankaj Ghemawat's view in E&Z, Ch 2 reading 3). I will specifically focus on an example I brought up in class after the talk: the massive online communities that are beginning to have a pervasive influence on global culture. When I think of the central hubs of online discussion, I think of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. Facebook and Twitter are popular for everybody; they serve as the central links of the hubs. Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan are each culturally distinct. For the purposes of this discussion, I will brand Tumblr as the home of the far-left of the political spectrum, Reddit as the intermediate home of 20-something moderate left intellectual males, and 4chan as t...
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