Dimitri Diakopoulos & Nick Porcino, Circa 2020 (Note that this is a living document and might change in structure or content!) "Your scientis

Black Mirror / Light Mirror

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2021-07-09 01:00:04

Dimitri Diakopoulos & Nick Porcino, Circa 2020 (Note that this is a living document and might change in structure or content!)

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." - Michael Crichton (1990)

We've been aware for some time there's a disconnect between technology as an art, and technology as a science. The episodic production Black Mirror takes technological artifacts and projects their interpersonal and societal effects to extreme, oftentimes dystopic ends. A common theme among the creative narratives in Black Mirror is the notion that all technology has some amount of intrinsic danger, with varying degrees of dramatic uncertainty around its uses and side-effects. Disappointingly, the ill-effects of technology on humanity are not always fiction. With every new scientific breakthrough, we move towards a real-life sci-fi existence not implausibly different from the cautionary tales told by past and present storytellers.

In recent years, the landscape of consumer technology has dealt with difficult issues including data collection and the misappropriation of personally identifiable biometric & anthropometric data, a breakdown of the policy-making process surrounding the tech industry, an abundance of black-box machine learning algorithms trained on heavily biased data, and much more [1]. Crichton's challenge gives a sense of what we should be thinking about, but it's only a whimiscal prompt.

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