Group Project Step1(Reading)
- Folding Beijing
In this science fiction story, I have noticed one very cool thing, which is the idea of “folding”. The whole city can fold itself and then stretch itself so that people living in different zones can enjoy their parts of all 48 hours. But I think the process itself is not as smooth as I expect. So I come up with an idea of what I called “smart cube”. I get inspiration from the Lego bricks. We all have the experience playing it in our childhood and we can use them to build whatever we want, including buildings, trees, cars, and so on.
Sometimes we can distinguish one color of bricks from the other because we think they represent different materials. For brown ones, we think they are made of wood and the blue ones represent water.
“Smart cube” has a metal core in the center of it and it is responsive to human demands. Outside the core, there are liquid-like materials, which can change to any materials such as steel, wood, plastic, and so on. And I imagine the whole folding city constructed by these cubes. Also, the core can recognize different people’s permission of changing their property. For example, it can change to anything if the command is given by the city governor. By giving orders to “smart cubes”, the governor can control the switch of levels. And once their living time is over, the cubes will respond to the governor’s command again and switch to the next stage so that people living there can enjoy their lives. But if you are only a gardener, you are only allowed to change the cube in the area of plants. You can change it from the sunflower to violet, but you cannot change its property from a plant to metals. Meanwhile, the core will be responsive to users’ requests. It will automatically generate a report among violet and sunflower, which is more attractive to people. In this way, “smart cube” is interacting with people and aim to provide statistical results of the influence of residents.
For now, I think there is no technology like this. It’s even hard and costly for us to transform element carbon into diamonds. But you can view it as the beginning of transforming one material to another and I believe it will come true one day in the future.
For the “smart cube” itself I don’t think there will be any issues of it. But the side-effect it has on the construction of society and morality recognition might be the main conflict of future human society. As I mentioned before, it has a core inside of it, which can distinguish different people’s identities. So a huge problem raised by it is how can we distinguish different people’s permission towards using it. Is the fact of owning less permission means you are worse than people with higher permission? And questions like “how to separate people into different groups?”, “Is it allowed for a cleaner with almost no permission to suddenly become a manager with many permissions?”, “Who should be blamed when cubes are used relentlessly and something bad happened?” will appear. The problems coming along with the “smart cube” might be future human beings’ priority to solve.
2. Newton’s Sleep
In this short reading, I find a phenomenon that people living in a Wasteland of latter-day, no matter how high their IQ is, their lack of emotional care will be a deadly cause for them when encountering urgent cases. Also, rumors will be extremely dangerous and the survivor group will be put in danger if group members cannot agree on whether it’s true or not. To solve these problems, my imaginary solution is to build a wearable device that mainly has 2 functions.
First, I want to show its appearance and introduce the function of the helmet. And I find it might be very similar to what Bane is wearing.
The helmet is used to catch everyone’s thoughts and relate it to the thing that might arouse this piece of memory. We all have encountered the situation that there is something fantastic suddenly appear in our mind, but there is no paper and no pen around us, resulting in the consequence that we are not able to write it down. Afterward, when faced with a similar condition, we are going to say “I have a brilliant idea, but I just cannot remember it.” Others might think you are lying, thinking that you may not have an idea at all. And this is the break in the relationship. It’s very dangerous because it will separate a larger group into smaller ones, reducing their chances of surviving. So with this helmet, we can help survivors generate all the ideas including useful ones and useless ones, good ones as well as evil ones. Also, the helmet can provide you with the best option generated by the big data when you are in a dangerous situation, helping survivors to make the best option. For example, if you are chased by a fierce animal, it might give you options like stop running and fight or keep running away. Each will be added the chance to survive beneath them and it’s up to the survivor to make the decision.
The second function is that it will inject different chemicals to stabilize your emotion. When you need a quick sleep and get ready for the fierce fight coming tomorrow. You might find yourself too worried to sleep and the result is that you might find yourself keep awake all night and is too tired for the fight. In this case, you can turn to the chemicals for help, it will inject something helping to calm your emotion to your body so that you can get the sleep you need. Similarly, it can keep you calm when you are in a dangerous situation, keep your fighting will high even in a hard condition, and keep you cautious when something unexpected happened.
I think stimulant is something like the second function, but it just covers one aspect of human emotion. We still can regard this design as the future of the combination of drugs like a stimulant and brain technology, which is the pro-type of function one.
I think several problems will be raised by this design. The first is that the best options generated by the big data don’t necessarily stand for the right decision because the machine never takes human emotion as a variable to consider. The second is the heavy reliance on these chemicals. Drugs and injections are merely tools helping people deal with their emotions better, not existing as the replacement of the training of the handle of human emotion. People’s heavy reliance on it will undoubtedly weaken humans as a survivor group.
3. The lifecycle of software objects
One of the main conflicts I find in this science fiction (btw, 108 page is long!) is that people cannot form an agreement on how much time should be spent on raising digital pets. So I come up with this wearable design, called time accelerator. 
It looks like the thing he is wearing on his ear and It works as an extensive version of AR. Its working mechanism is similar to the function of the dream. I believe we all have encountered a similar situation, which is that we only spend around 20 minutes taking a snap while waking up with a month length story. The speed of the time floating in this device is much faster than the speed in real life. That is to say, we may log into this device and may have experienced 3 or 4 days in the game while waking up with a few minutes passing by. In this way, we balance real life and virtual life better and the most important thing is that we no longer need to be afraid to be accused of playing a game is a waste of time! (just kidding) And of the definition part, I regard it as a piece of interaction equipment because it offers us a new platform to interact with the software objects.
I think no similar tech exists right now. If the time accelerator is going to work, it means that humans have found a way to manipulate time manually. That also means we are able to travel by using time and that’s just a fantasy so far.
From my point of view, the biggest issue raised by this design is the difference between physical age and mental. If no new designs like fastening the process of cell division, we all may die at a physical age of 10. In other words, we need to find a new way to help our brain work actively when wearing this device.
In conclusion, these are my new designs after reading 3 science fictions, hoping one day some of them will come true!