Critical Issues in Literature

Page that includes links for a reading group guide and discussion question. The page also features an interview with the author.

"The hoverboard is fiction, the vision of screenwriters who created the film about Marty McFly, a teenager who travels from 1985 to Oct. 21, 2015, and uses a floating skateboard to flee a gang of bullies. The movie had other futuristic items, like flying cars and self-tying shoes, but none touched the imagination as much as the hoverboard. For the last 25 years, garage tinkerers, physics professors and top engineers at Google have been trying to make one. Inside a drab office park here in Northern California, Greg and Jill Henderson are working on the latest effort. On a recent visit the couple allowed a reporter to stand atop a noisy magnetic skateboard that can float above a copper surface. It hovers about an inch above the ground. But when the 190-pound visitor stood atop the 100-pound board, one gentle push was enough to send him spinning across the room over a cushion of air."

"While the problems we face have never been greater, our capacity to meet challenges is outpacing them.  That might not grab headlines (for example, the decline of Ebola received far less coverage than its rise), but, in the end, it's what really matters.  Here's why we should be optimistic about the future in 2015."

This looks like it could be a useful research tools. It's very visual. According to the website you can "research any topic with an interactive concept map, that you can customize and share."

"Unlike most films about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina isn't about technological anxiety. "The anxiety in this film is much more directed at the humans," director Alex Garland tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It was more in defense of artificial intelligence.""

"Searching for answers online gives people an inflated sense of their own knowledge, according to a study. It makes people think they know more than they actually do."

A blog that bills itself as "the citizen's guide to the future."

"The survey found that a vast majority of respondents - 87 percent - had heard of the leaks in some way. Among them about a third, 34 percent, had actually modified their behaviors to protect their privacy from the government more, with 25 percent reporting they had modified the way they use different technologies "a great deal" or "somewhat." Common reactions included changing their privacy settings on social media (17 percent), using social media less often (15 percent), avoiding certain apps (15 percent) and uninstalling apps (13 percent). Meanwhile, 14 percent of the 475 respondents said they now speak in person more often than communicating online or over the phone. About 13 percent said they now avoid the use of certain terminology online."

"The survey found that a vast majority of respondents - 87 percent - had heard of the leaks in some way. Among them about a third, 34 percent, had actually modified their behaviors to protect their privacy from the government more, with 25 percent reporting they had modified the way they use different technologies "a great deal" or "somewhat." Common reactions included changing their privacy settings on social media (17 percent), using social media less often (15 percent), avoiding certain apps (15 percent) and uninstalling apps (13 percent). Meanwhile, 14 percent of the 475 respondents said they now speak in person more often than communicating online or over the phone. About 13 percent said they now avoid the use of certain terminology online."

"When reading these cautionary tales, it's important to keep a long-view perspective. Your peers might like to party, but that doesn't mean everyone would enjoy being stoned twenty-four hours a day. You might feel like an island of smartness in a sea of idiocy, but that doesn't mean surgeons would agree to lobotomize everyone for a paycheck. You probably know some racist assholes, but that doesn't mean everyone in society would agree to de-humanize a targeted group and throw them in gas chambers; not unless we gain some new laws enforced by Nazis. You might be concerned about the effects of global warming, but that doesn't mean every nation will passively sit and get stoned while vegetation dies and their own populations starve to death. It doesn't mean that we're all going to need gas masks. It doesn't mean that bioengineered mammoths will replace petroleum as our best source of energy. You might be concerned that religious extremists or ideological lobbyists will destroy the free world, but as long as we uphold the U.S. Constitution and have the military strength to defend our laws, no one can remove our basic human rights. You might worry that corrupt politicians will stealthily vote away our liberties while everyone around you zones out on TV and YouTube, but as long as we have the internet and the freedom to say whatever we want and reach an audience, that can't happen. It's not that bad. Really. In contrast, take a look at places like North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan, or Taliban-ruled areas, where these dystopian settings are a hard, cold reality. There are places in the world where Big Brother really is watching, and where the poor live and die in abysmal slums. Dystopias don't happen to an armed, informed populace. A dangerously corrupt government can only take root where common people already lack legal rights, or the ability to enforce their legal rights. Here in the free world, we have free speech, the power to gain an audience, an

"In the context of the current culture, the film will have an impact because it demonstrates the consequence of living in a society where the select few - even if they have the most benevolent of intentions - are allowed to make binding decisions for the rest of the community. The rationale for all this, as one character explains about the organization of their post-apocalyptic utopia, is that when people are given the opportunity to make choices they invariably make the wrong ones. That, with all its lack of subtlety, is not only at the core of the film and Lowry's book but at the cultural and political divide in contemporary America."

"Despite being a sci-fi film, Ex Machina's most notable achievement is that it simply accepts that artificial intelligence has finally moved beyond the realm of science fiction. "Alex's film brings out the philosophical issues surrounding artificial intelligence much more explicitly than anything that has come before," Shanahan says. "The most important thing about it is that it will get audiences talking about issues that may become extremely important in their lifetime.""

" It has been widely reported that the likelihood of an American child being abducted and harmed by a stranger is tiny, about one in 100,000. So where did our excessive fear of child abduction come from, a sweeping and now deeply imprinted fear that has prompted the passage of all sorts of laws, spawned the growth of whole industries, and perhaps most profoundly, radically changed how children in the United States are raised, all in response to a threat that essentially exists nowhere but in our heads. The answer is a cautionary observation about a lot of risks that we learn about from the news media.   "

"Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs - or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them."