Category Archives: media review

video essay: passengers

For our video essay, I chose to watch Passengers, specifically the turning point in the movie when the big plot’s secret point is revealed.

I love telling the world about my unreasonable opinions so I was very excited to start this project. Though unfortunately for you all, I toned down my nonsense a little to cut down the video time.

My process for this video was pretty simple and shockingly wasn’t too stressful since I had video editing experience before this. The only part that added extra stress was adding a recap to the video. It was only a minute long but took a little bit longer because of the cuts I wanted to be synched to the audio.

I first searched for footage on YouTube since I couldn’t rip it from a DVD. I used the 4K Video Downloader that was recommended we use. I then wrote my script while rewatching the scene so that I wouldn’t have a harder time synching it later. In the theme of AI, I decided to use a text-to-speech reader from last week TTSMaker for two reasons. I was a little ill this week and unlike humans, software delivers the same lines the same way every time. I then found some nice background music on Freesound so that the video wasn’t stagnant in the pauses. After all those steps it was pretty easy to just import them all into iMovie and edit for a bit until the I got final product you see now.

I enjoyed making this video essay a lot and I would definitely do it again. I didn’t realize how much I like critiquing media that I find interesting. And I felt a lot better about doing it after doing the reading from this week. I might have spent a little too much time on the videos because I love film analysis or really just any type of analysis. Hopefully, next week isn’t a trainwreck but I guess we’ll see.

The videos and sound I used are here: PASSENGERS – Official Trailer (HD), Passengers (2016) – Did You Wake Me Up? Scene (5/10) | Movieclips, and Passengers: Did You Wake Me Up? (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt Scene).

the t-o cult manifesto: a review

This week we read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen to get a different perspective on AI rather than that we’re all gonna die. While this was definitely a tone shift from the negative criticism that populates the media, after reading it I feel that this manifesto went in the wrong direction of a good argument looked ahead, and still fell down the cliff.

While some of the points made were valid throughout the manifesto they were immediately stamped out by insane statements that were purposely made to guilt us. For example, they write about how intelligence leads to innovation and progress in our society which is something that I could possibly get behind if the idea wasn’t immediately followed by this attempt at obvious manipulation, “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” By essentially stating that if you don’t agree with this manifesto you’re a murderer is the most out of left field argument that is completely unsupported and leaves out all space for argument because then you’re a murderer.

It almost felt like I was being told “AI isn’t the problem focus on getting rid of the bad people of the world and everything will work out.” But obviously, that isn’t an option, and with technology advancing at increasingly faster rates that are easily available to the masses, it’s quite impossible to anticipate if the good will outweigh the bad. Because maybe all the movies were right and AI will take over and kill us all, maybe we’ll all become prisoners of technology that is ruled by bad people, or even the more impossible idea that we’ll all lose our jobs with most of the population falling under the poverty line except the 1%, not like that’s happening already. At least those fears have about the same support in reality as the manifesto does if not more.

The language of the manifesto really stuck out to me at the end especially. “We believe these captured people are suffering from ressentiment – a witches’ brew of resentment, bitterness, and rage that is causing them to hold mistaken values, values that are damaging to both themselves and the people they care about. We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain. We invite everyone to join us in Techno-Optimism.” My immediate thought was, “This is a cult I gotta get out before it’s too late.” By stating that the real enemy is all the bad ideas being used and speech control and everything else except Techno-Optimism which will save the world from itself is just the definition of blind idealization formed by blind ideation which is again, essentially a cult. Wow, how did I get here?

In the end, I was stuck in a lecture that was a front for a cult induction into the secret society of humanoid androids telling me everything is ok and to trust the technology.