Folding Beijing:
The story of Folding Beijing takes place in the near future of Beijing and I think this is a very intriguing story. Different classes of people are distributed into three spaces and this is a society full of inequality. I came up with a design immediately when I read the first few pages of this novel. It is an automatic garbage classification system using image identification technology and it also has an inbuilt artificial intelligence. To be honest, this project was actually designed by myself last year when I was doing a project in Stanford University, so its not surprising that I came up with this idea at the sight of this novel since people from space 1 would create a great amount of money every day. HOWEVER, I also realized at once that this system could also has a far-reaching impact on the folding city. There are reasons why this city doesn’t adopt this idea, even if they have the ability to set up a system like this. The establishment of a system like this would cause tens of millions of garbage sorting workers to lose their jobs, leading to unpredictable results for the city as a whole, as told in the story, but I was also wondering that whether this system would lead to different outcomes, say, a different or even better future for the city. In the novel, inequality was highlighted many times, and garbage sorting workers are among the bottom of the society. The only reason why the city needs them is that the governors need to ensure the stability of the city, but this is exactly the key point in the whole novel. The fate of the mass are always decided by the minor, without any hope to change the situation. Drifting back to my original garbage classification system, I think the being of such thing would even help address the inequality inside Beijing. This system would cause countless people to be unemployed, and the authority would have to face the problem that there are a great number of people who have realized the fact that they are being oppressed and they want to change the situation. I think this would even probably help to make Beijing a more democracy place . On the other hand, the garbage sorting workers are not likely to be unable to continue to live in Beijing, because the reason why there must be a folding city is to accommodate people whose population has surpassed the initial capacity of the city. In general, though I’m not sure whether this artifact can be considered interactive, but I’m sure in a way that this would bring a brighter future to Beijing.
Newton’s sleep:
Currenly, what I thought about the artifact deign is to create a environment altering system through which people can artificially change the climate or the environment when Earth is not suitable for poeple to live anymore.
The lifecycle of software objects:
The artifact design I came up with from the novel of Ted is a translation system which is able translate the animals’ language. Frankly speaking, I came up with this idea thanks to the inspiration I got from the concept of the digients. I guess this is not a novel design, but it is interactive enough. Digients inside the story were primarily computer programs, later had bodies from the robots. Since they were created by human beings, they can absolutely speak human language, but I was thinking more practically in our real world, where there is a gap of communication between humans and animals. Research have found that some animals do have their own language system, similar to the one which we are currently using. The system will allow human to better interact with wild animals and their own pets, but this also could have potential consequences. People choose to own a pet because of their cute appearance and other characters, but there is also one reason which has been overlooked by most of us. We raise pet also because they are inferior in intelligence to us. This means a stability to us. If we can talk directly to our pets, the more reasonable consequence is that we are more likely to be afraid of them than in love with them, because the ability to talk is considered a part of the intelligence. We all should start thinking of this question: what do we really want from our companions? Whether do we want a creature who can accompany us, amuse us and play with us, or do we want a living thing can really communicate with us?
