Undergraduate /
"A discussion that has meant the most to me" Undergrad college application essay [3]
Harvard university essay prompt:An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion) that has meant the most to you.
Please comment on whether or not the essay fulfills the requirement of the prompt and suggest potential changes that can be made to make the essay better.
A discussion that has meant the most to me:
"A.I Winter"- The first time I heard this phrase, it sounded right out of a doomsday science fiction novel. And I learned that it was just about that. While discussing the creative writing topic "The End Of Mankind", My IGCSE English Language teacher explained it to the class that there was a period when society lost interest in artificial intelligence and scientists no longer imagined robots walking around, talking, looking like us, or beating us at complicated games of strategy.
Thanks to science fiction, almost all of us knew that the first thing that A.I will do is take-over the defense grid and nuke us all. Living in a world with artificial intelligence all around us, maybe an A.I winter is what we need. As my mates and I referenced novels such as
Rossums's Universal Robots, the realization struck me that for some reason, the first possibility of a sci-fi doomsday story plot that came to our minds was that of an outlandish scenario with killer robots, job-stealing AIs, and God-like super-machines instead of more realistic threats that we face today -climate change for one. Why is it that living in a "post-shock" era we feel that every new technology that we fantasize should already be here yet as a society we hold firm belief in one of the biggest
A.I winterist ideologies that this technology is the very thing that will bring doom to us? Maybe, just maybe, A.I will eventually end us all, but is an A.I winter really something we want while we eagerly anticipate the introduction of driverless cars?
Raising this point in class ignited a discussion about the public reaction to the novel
Brave New World. When it was published it was obvious to everyone that a world with no rebellions, no dissatisfaction, just free sex, rock and roll, and drugs is a frightening dystopia but it's very difficult to put a finger on exactly what's wrong in a society in which people are hacked in such a way that they are satisfied all the time. Today, more and more people read
Brave New World as a straight-faced utopia and I think this shift is really interesting since it depicts the changes in our view towards technology as well.
Fifty years ago, the idea of living among robots was the fodder of dark sci-fi. Yet In 2021, there is apparently nothing so disturbing about keeping artificial intelligence in our pockets, asking Alexa to send that pending email or submitting college application essays using many, many versions of A.I. What happened to the society that feared killer robots to end up adapting robots as the new norm? Why is it that we obsessed over A.I in the 70s, then gave in to winterist ideologies only to return to it with ideas that re-imagined life and philosophies that continue to drive us?
Aside from allowing me to take on sci-fi with a never seen before perspective, this discussion made me develop an interest in the amalgamation of Cognitive Science and Computer science to learn about our brains and the machines that might increasingly resemble them. Allowing us to understand how society relates to new technologies, this will be especially useful in predicting the future of A.I and determining whether or not fiction is in fact a medium to reveal the truth that reality obscures and how to not get to the point where super-machines terminate us.
