First post
Jan. 18th, 2011 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andyschreiberWhen signing up the aspect of this class I found most compelling was, frankly, that it fit well with my schedule. Now that we're ankles deep, I think... well... I totally got lucky. Many of you guys can (and should) show me a couple things when it comes to sci-fi (Firefly? Isn't that by Owl City?), but I hope my consuming neuroscience major will be of value to the discussion.
To get a little more serious - Cloning, depleting natural resources, quasi-immortality of a population, and other approaching scientific developments will present challenges that no previous generation has faced. As was brought up in class, science fiction has both the luxury and responsibility of portraying that which is not but could be. Thinking about it, Sci-fi Writers create a mental sandbox in which one may explore the ramifications, positive and negative, of mankind's insatiable thirst for advancement.
That is not to say that these topics are boring. I, for one (only one?), found A Brave New World to be a lot of fun in how it presented a "dystopia" that, from a certain perspective, didn't really seem so bad. Huxley asks bold questions like why not solve our primitive, anti-social urges a drug like soma? I don't know for sure - but we can explore that hypothetical within his and other stories.
I see the most meaningful reproduction as reproduction of the mind. Research is being done across the globe, including here at USC, on the creation of artificial neural networks or true artificial intelligence. No one knows for certain what the final product will be, but maybe science fiction will help us get there.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
-Aldous Huxley
(I felt the quote was appropriate - I'd like to think I'm not one of those people.)
To get a little more serious - Cloning, depleting natural resources, quasi-immortality of a population, and other approaching scientific developments will present challenges that no previous generation has faced. As was brought up in class, science fiction has both the luxury and responsibility of portraying that which is not but could be. Thinking about it, Sci-fi Writers create a mental sandbox in which one may explore the ramifications, positive and negative, of mankind's insatiable thirst for advancement.
That is not to say that these topics are boring. I, for one (only one?), found A Brave New World to be a lot of fun in how it presented a "dystopia" that, from a certain perspective, didn't really seem so bad. Huxley asks bold questions like why not solve our primitive, anti-social urges a drug like soma? I don't know for sure - but we can explore that hypothetical within his and other stories.
I see the most meaningful reproduction as reproduction of the mind. Research is being done across the globe, including here at USC, on the creation of artificial neural networks or true artificial intelligence. No one knows for certain what the final product will be, but maybe science fiction will help us get there.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
-Aldous Huxley
(I felt the quote was appropriate - I'd like to think I'm not one of those people.)
