"Why Doesn't The Future Need Us" response

Joy's thesis is "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies- robotics,genetic engineering, and nanotech- are threatening to make humans an endangered species". Humans can avoid being unnecessary by becoming more advanced themselves. Humans can get more training and create less computerized systems to do their work. If humans do the work themselves, humans will not become unnecessary. Institutions are contributing to the inevitability of humans becoming unnecessary in that everything is becoming computerized. For example, schools are using computers to take attendance, whereas in the past, attendance was handwritten. The more computers are used, the more advancements are going to be made on computers, the more computers will become the more popular choice.



Aldous Huxley would respond to Joy's article agreeing that technolgy is indeed getting out of hand. Since Huxley illustrated the idea of technology advancement to the highest extreme, his ideas might have been taken from the same sources that Joy got his from.



One rhetorical strategy that Joy uses is introducing ideas and stating his opinion on them. He leaves room for readers to ponder his ideas and make an opinion. Joy also uses examples and quotes from books to enhance his argument.

I believe that Joy is a fear monger. His arguments are to set fear in readers' minds. Joy wants everyone to fear human extinction.

Joy uses a lot of personfication when speaking on robots and other machines. He gives them human characteristics to show that the machines will take over all human jobs and functions; leaving humans with nothing.

In the Brave New World, technology is used to control society. In essence, Joy's article connects to the Brave New World in that technology is crossing the line.

Writing Prompt 2 - 9/19/08

In George Orwell's 1984, a totalitarian government is present. There is a character named Winston Smith, who hates the government's pwoer and tries to break free from the "Party". The Party is the government's organization. Winston Smith is an individualist that has his own beliefs and George Orwell used his character and his struggles to enhance the novel.

Winston is an extremely curious person. Smith's curiousity about his past, in which the Party and Big Brother has totally wiped ou. Smith is also a rebel in the novel. He purposely does things that he knows is against the rules of the party. Smith, however, look for others that share his belief that the Party is horrible.

Smith struggles in many ways to free himself from the Party. He does things that he knows is against Party rules and regulations. He does not get caught doing his first acts of rebellion, however, that changes when he gets involved with a lady, also a member of the Party. Winston confides in a character that he believes is on his side. The same character that he believes that he can confide in, gets him caught. While Winston smith is being punished for going against the Party, he remains true to his beliefs. But in the endf, his strugles to break free puts him into a place taht he did not want to be, down with Big Brother.

George Orwell uses power struggle to enhance the meaning of the work in several ways. First he uses power struggle to prove a point. The point is that the Party is stronger and smarter than anyone person and no matter what that person does, he or she will get caught. Another way in which he used power struggle is to demonstrate the fact that there are individualists in a society that try to rebel and get they get so far and think that they have made it, but they did not. They are already caught by the Party. In all, George Orwell enhances 1984 with power struggle so that readers will be sympathetic for Winston Smith and be drawn into the novel.

In all that Winston Smith has been through, George Orwell made it a point to show him that he Party is smarter than what he was thinking it was.