Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

In Why The Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy the thesis is that if humans become too reliant on robots we will let them control out lives and our survival will actually depend on these intelligent machines. To avoid becoming obsolete humans need to not increase our reliance on machines to do our jobs. If we let them do everything for us out mere existence will depend on them doing our jobs. With robots doing our jobs who needs humans and there will be the elite few who tell the robots what needs to be done, everybody else will be eliminated. Institutions are contributing to this "inevitability" by playing the machines game. They let their jobs be taken by machines, the exact opposite of what needs to be done to continue our lives as we now know them.

Huxley would agree with Joy's article. This is because Huxley's fears that too many technological advances and the oversimplification of human existence creates a dystopian society, just like Joy. Joy's argument has a strong basis. It seams plausible but some of the greater details he goes into are just his speculation and fears playing their way into his article. Joy's literary devices he uses are Rhetoric language and extensive imagery, he depicts the picture exactly in your head and therefore helps to push his ideas to greater understanding. This article connects to BNW by Joy's depiction of a dystopian society with great technological advances and an oversimplification of the human life.

Harrison Bergeron

Vonnegut is satirizing current societies intellegence and memory tendencies.The story is being told from the point of view from hazel bergeron. If Vonnegut had told the story from the 1st person it would not of had the nat caring or not paying attention unintellegence that it contains.This Quote exemplifies cuttent society with its technology is no less advanced than the advanced future technology.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas is not so much a story but a description of a town. Omelas is a beautiful town with citizens and nice buildings. There is a horse race to begin summer. There is a child locked in a dirty room who only gets a little food every day and is never talked to, the child has to just sit in its own feces and pick its nose all day. For some reason this is why everyone in the town is doing so well and if the child is let out then nobody in the town would be happy anymore.

This story is about one bad thing in the town that makes the rest of the town happy. In 1984 the societies bad thing that makes everybody happy in Winston’s eyes is Big Brother. This is the only connection to 1984 I can make because The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas made no sense to me.

This description of a town uses imagery to demonstrate the happiness of everyone and the pain of the child.

5 Questions-
1. What was the meaning of the piece?
2. How did the child’s pain help the town?
3. What’s the point in including the horse race?
4. Is the child’s pain a symbol for something else?
5. What’s up with the ones who walked away from Omelas?

Asimov Reading Response

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov is a short story in which a robot named Elvex has dreams of ruling over other robots and he is a real man. In the end he is punished for free thinking by the destroying of his positronic brain. Similar to this in 1984 Winston Smith is a member of a conformist party. He thinks for himself in the longing for something better, as in the downfall of the party. Once the party figures this out he is brought in for questioning and torture. Throughout this his entire way of thinking is changed and he believes in the ways of the party. In both of these pieces of literature a minority of the working class have thoughts of overpowering the higher power and become themselves the higher power. Despite the main ideas of the two pieces in Robot Dreams Elvex dreams of himself taking on the strong human characteristics of knowledge and power, and most importantly the human form, while the beings he rules take all the weak characteristics such as the physical weakness of human and the form of a robot. In1984 Winston just wants to overthrow the current party in power but not necessarily become what they once were.

I believe that if George Orwell and Isaac Asimov were to meet they would agree on the main ideas of what they are trying to say but not on the details as their books take different paths into the future, such as Asimov's Robots and Orwell's Big Brother. I believe this because of how their stories differ and are similar.