Story 1: The Veldt – Ray Bradbury
The imaginary interactive artifact that I came up with for story 1 is a machine that can print out biological entities based on my drawing. For example, if I draw a dragon, the machine will print out a living dragon. There’s 3D printing technology in modern days, but It is not advanced to the point where it can create living things. There are various potential problems that could come from this machine, such as cloning, biological weapons, and food chain disruption. Humans could use this machine to clone themselves until we’re all overpopulated. Humans could also develop a hazardous virus that could lead to a pandemic. Humans can also introduce a new creature into the outside world, thus creating an imbalance in the food chain.
Story 2: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – Ursula K. Le Guin
The imaginary interactive artifact that I came up with for story 2 is a brain helmet. This helmet will allow you to adjust your logical thinking and your emotional thinking by adjusting a knob. For example, you could allow your brain to think 100% logically or 100% emotionally, or 50% logically and 50% emotionally. There are A.I.s and machine learning today which can facilitate logical thinking, but humans still make the final choice. This machine allows humans to adjust between the level of logic and the level of emotions they want based on their circumstances. There are many problems with this creation. First, if every single human uses logical thinking all the time, we would live in a dystopia. Human creations are beautiful because they have meanings behind them, and being perfectly logical means that you have to be perfectly emotionless. Humans would also lose the ability to think critically by themselves. Using this machine all the time will result in humans not experiencing their own trial and error for mistakes, thus making them `faultless with them.
Story 3: The Plague by Yan Leisheng
The imaginary interactive artifact that I came up with for story 3 is a capsule that allows humans to transform into their fullest potential form. Humans will lie down on the tube and undergo evolution until they’ve reached the apex stage for mankind. There have been a lot of genetic mutations for animals and even human babies in the modern era, but it is not to the point where technology can transform them into a new species like in the story. This invention can lead to heavy inequality between those who have evolved and those who haven’t. This can also create a dystopia where the rich are the newly evolved species while the poor are humans.