The Final Post

    

    Personally, I don’t have Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, or facebook downloaded on my phone. I see this as a blessing. I am not spending hours of my day scrolling to see what is the funniest TikTok of the day, nor am I making sure that the pose, the angle, the lighting, the caption, or the likes are nothing but perfection. So, I believe I have less of an online footprint than most people and with that people will have a harder time looking me up. 

    When it comes to my email, I am a little less cautious with it. I have given it to a bunch of sites, mainly just retail stores and I get a lot of emails from them. Due to this I am taking a tip out of Mr. Smith's book and start using a different email address for these cites, along with a different name. This way I will lower my online footprint even more.

    While I don’t have those social media platforms the one that I use quite frequently is YouTube. Youtubers are the same as any other social media star. Instead of funny captions or short videos, it is for people to watch tutorial videos, gameplay videos, or cooking tips. Although recently YouTube has been trying to showcase their new feature YouTube shorts. Which is basically TikTok, but on YouTube. YouTube for me is a great way to have something playing in the background. For some reason, I don’t like listening to podcasts or music all that much. 

    Social media is changing the way we view people and society. Especially when it comes to social media influencers. I notice when watching YouTube that people slowly start to change and this can be good or bad. As you build up your fan base, they start to trust you. In the past, this has led to many people abusing their fan base. Whether it is to get their word out, tell false information, or raise the price of an online currency is just upsetting. Betraying your fans just to make a quick buck will ruin your reputation and you will lose fans because of it. Of course, there are many good ones out there, but these kinds of instances force others to comfort their fans to show that they will not do anything like this. 

    Once again, I am glad that I don’t upload anything to these social media platforms. As I know that this can lead to people being stressed out. In the time that we live in, anything that you post could lead to some being offended. So, you have to make sure that it appeals to everyone. For me, I take a picture of myself and I don’t do it that often to make sure that I look decent or sound decent if I am recording myself for an assignment. I can only imagine how stressful my life would be if I was also uploading images on Instagram or Snapchat. This is what I think social media is and what people can do to misuse their newfound fame.

Age of AI

         The video "In the age of AI" by Frontline talked about the implications of having artificial intelligence. For me, it was quite terrifying to see what AI could bring upon us, but I saw some good in AI as well. One point that the video made was this AI program created by Google called AlphaGo. This AI program plays the Korean board game Go and learns how to play it while learning from its mistakes. They set up a game of Go with one of the best Go human players. After a few rounds, the AI ended up winning. Through learning from its own mistakes, it was able to calculate many steps ahead of the human player.

While I was watching the video, I realized a list of pros and cons of AI. Some pros include above all security. China uses Face ID to use almost everything and all of the video cameras keep us safe because everyone is being monitored. However, this comes with the loss of privacy and freedom. Another pro is that it allows the assembly of cars to be a lot more efficient, but once again this can also be a con as humans are no longer necessary to assemble the cars. This isn’t just the workers that make the cars but also the ones that drive them. One company in the video is using AI to tractor-trailers that are autonomous vehicles to transport goods across the country. 

I am a little worried as to what is going to happen in the next few decades. How far is AI going to be and how much are we going to rely on it? I don’t know if eventually a smart enough AI is going to try and kill us all like in the movie Terminator, but looking at the Go game we can already tell that AI is smarter than us.