This week in blogging for Digital Divide class

[scarfman]

Based on the movie clip from Minority Report [the scene in which the "spider" devices go through an apartment building checking occupants' retinas looking for Tom Cruise], how do you see biometrics affecting your life in the future? What are its pros and cons? Do you see what happens in the clip as realistic for our future?

I think, like anything else that exists, it depends on how it's used. An object or a process isn't evil or wrong in itself, but in how people apply it. The cops in the movie clip ought to have had to present a warrant to the apartment house occupants or to an authority on their behalf before conducting the search, by the standards of the society I live in. That they didn't implies things about the film's society that an American will dislike and, barring that the filmmakers intended it that way (I've seen the film once and don't remember much about it, such as this scene), it wouldn't have taken but a few seconds of screentime to avoid the implication. Are similar developments in our future? Well, it's been a trend now for ten or thirty or a hundred years that technology's advancing quicker than society.

What is the subject of your end of the year project? Will it be a demonstration of software/hardware, an example of a hack, a security audit, or something else?

The discussion of biometrics in the last class meeting, specifically the way we recognize people from their gait, inspired a thought in me. There are certain action scenes from classic movies most people have seen that we could probably identify if we saw unadorned stick figures performing them: the lightsaber battle in Star Wars, Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, etc. I thought I could present some of those to the class somehow and have them guess as a group which movie each sequence came from. What I'm stuck on is how to present it. My first thought was as Flash animations, but I don't have that kind of time between now and the end of the semester. Storyboards? Great big flip books? Any ideas, groupmind?

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

It's pretty typical for pulpy science fiction to portray the science or technology as the great evil, oversimplifying it to avoid discussion of the societal forces that let the technology be used that way.

Witness the standard-issue Mad Scientist, who has the technology and plans to use it against the world for unelaborated-upon reasons of being power-hungry. These stories are never about military leaders or corporate bigwigs dreaming up scary technologies and hiring scientists to implement them -- the evil always comes from the scientist's mind.

You've probably heard me say this before, but I liked The Truman Show for its translation of the Mad Scientist trope into a Mad Artist. :)

Biometrics

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you Paul. I think that everything can be used for good or evil. It is up to the person who is carrying put the action to decide if what he/she is going is acceptable to himself/herself. The object itself is nuetral and how it is used, it will either be famous or infamous.

Ivan Kong

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Given that the whole movie was built around the ethics of using precognition to arrest criminals before they could commit crimes, I would say that, yes, it's a fairly safe bet to assume that the filmmakers intended to imply things about that society that a present-day American would dislike.

As for the biometrics of gait: I'm extremely nearsighted, and I've worn glasses since the fourth grade. While I have 20/20 or better eyesight with the glasses on, I've discovered over the years that I've learned to pick up information from cues besides just high-rez detail. Back when I was in the Coast Guard, I used to be able to pick out specific people from a couple hundred feet down the pier, when other people around me could just see "a person". I'm pretty sure I was picking up on how they walked.

Alas, my trained observer skills have two decades of rust on'em. At least at that range.

[prettydragoon.livejournal.com]

Technology is just a tool. Like an axe can be used to build a house or to kill a person, any technology can be used for good or for evil.

Or petty annoyance. Which is my experience with biometrics. Thank you DHS.