All hailing from Hwa Chong Institution of Singapore, what our team lacked in diversity, we made up with personality. Consisting of film enthusiasts (Tianyu and Zhao Feng), literature fan (Chilling) gaming fanatic ( Dominic) art designer(Mok Hofai), and programming expert (Xiaoheng) our motley crew was united by the mere fact we all couldn’t survive a day without technology. This project was launched by Tianyu and Zhao Feng, who were both fascinated by the technocratic apocalypse films such as Terminator, The matrix and blade runner.
The project quickly expanded to include literature in the same vein and after Chiling joined our project, we began writing our own novella to fit the theme of technocracy into local context. Observing that gaming was gaining notoriety as a force of corruption to youths, we decided to capitalize on this issue and Dominic Teo was recruited. Dominic provided much personal insight on this issue and his access to the gaming community was invaluable to our data collection.
The potential of our project led us to enroll ourselves. This is a example of a tooltip in the Thinkquest Website Design Competition. Mok Hofai and Lu Xiaoheng were welcomed into the group to help with the interactive elements and website design. Despite being in the same school, communication was not always easy as our timetables clashed we were all involved in various extra-curriculum activities.
Ironically, our discussion of technocracy was mainly done with technology itself, with online conversations serving as the main platform for group meetings. The skills of different members were fully utilized such that we not only performed efficiently but also enjoyed our work. Chiling was a fan-fiction author so writing was her natural forte. Zhao Feng and Tianyu have always been critically reviewing films in their spare time while game design and web design were the respective hobbies of Xiaoheng and Hofai.
While each member was allocated a specific research area, we did not keep our to our designated job scope and shared our opinions openly with one another. Much of our content was the fruits of such discussion sessions. Over time, we learned to appreciate both comments and criticisms and acted on them appropriately. Furthermore, we picked up skills from our group members and were able to aid them in their respective areas.
Once our research was completed, we all pitched in to complete the novella and the fictional tale eventually turned out as a splendid crystallization of our findings. All in all, Thinkquest was an amazing process that helped us learn as students and bond as teammates.
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- Data surveillance
- Human or machines?
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Human and animal experimentation
Athlete Oscar Pistorius, known as the fastest man with artificial limbs, is also nicknamed the Blade Runner.
British Ministry of Defense have named their military satellites “Skynet”, which is in control of 4 unmanned Killer Vehicles (MQ-9 Reaper). Talk about daring the robots to destroy us all.
Long before robots were introduced to humans, Mary Shelly has already postulated the presence of the uncanny valley with Frankenstein’s monster.
Programmers are taking into account that AI is far superior compared to human intelligence in the aspect of chess, and work on handicaps such as giving the AI less time to think, or removing a piece from the computer.
Deep Thought became the first Artificial Intelligence program that managed to beat a grandmaster of chess in a tournament when it defeated Bent Larson in 1989