• 
• 7 min
• Slate
• 2019

Discussion of Facebook’s massive collection of human faces and their potential impact on society.

• Data Privacy
• Civil Surveillance
• Biometrics
• Social Networks

• 
• 14 min
• Kinolab
• 2008

After his family home is destroyed and his father is killed, Memo must become a part of the global economy. He is expected to do this at the Sleep Dealer Factory, where citizens of Mexico who are implanted with “nodes” connect to a brain-computer interface which they use to remotely control robots in the United States. This was meant to be a solution to the “migrant problem” to the United States in this imagined future, allowing the United States to contract labor from immigrants without actually having people cross the border. However, the wages payed by the Sleep Dealers for the exhaustive labor are incredibly low, thus most laborers there live in unlivable conditions. The technology is shown to not only be exhausting due to the menial labor, but also dangerous if someone is connected during a short-circuit.

• Technology Based Economic Disruption
• Digital Divides and Inequality
• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Robots

• 
• 7 min
• Wired
• 2020

As different levels of the U.S government have introduced and passed bills regulating or banning the use of facial recognition technologies, tech monopolies such as Amazon and IBM have become important lobbying agents in these conversations. It seems that most larger groups are on different pages in terms of how exactly face recognition algorithms should be limited or used, especially given their negative impacts on privacy when used for surveillance.

• Civil Surveillance
• Tech Monopolies
• Computer Vision
• Biometrics

• 
• 7 min
• Wired
• 2020

After student members of the University of Miami Employee Student Alliance held a protest on campus, the University of Miami Police Department likely used facial recognition technology in conjunction with video surveillance cameras to track down nine students from the protest and summon them to a meeting with the dean. This incident provided a gateway into the discussion of fairness of facial recognition programs, and how students believe that they should not be deployed on college campuses.

• Data Privacy
• Civil Surveillance
• Computer Vision
• Biometrics

• 
• 12 min
• Kinolab
• 1973

Simulacron is a virtual reality full of 10,000 simulated humans who believe themselves to be sentient, but are actually nothing more than programs. The identity units in Simulacron do not know or understand that they are artificial beings, and they behave under the idea that they are real humans. “Real” humans can enter this virtual reality through a brain-computer interface, and control the virtual identity units. Christopher Nobody, a suspect whom Fred is trying to track down, had the revelation that he was an identity unit, and that realization led to a mental breakdown. In following this case, Fred meets Einstein, a virtual unit who desires to join the real world. As Einstein enacts the final stages of this plan, Fred discovers a shocking secret about his own identity. For a similar concept, see the narrative “Online Dating Algorithms” on the Hang the DJ episode of Black Mirror. 

• AI Emotions and Rights
• Edited Humans
• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Virtual Reality

• 
• 9 min
• Kinolab
• 1995

In this world, a human consciousness (“ghost”) can inhabit an artificial body (“shell”), thus at once becoming edited humans in a somewhat robotic body.  The Puppet Master, a notorious villain in this world, is revealed not to be a human hacker, but a computer program which has gained sentience and gone on to hack the captured shell. It challenges the law enforcement officials of Section 6 and Section 9 saying that it is a life-form and not an AI. It argues that its existence as a self-sustaining program which has achieved singularity is not different from human DNA as a “self-sustaining program.” The Puppet Master specifically references reproduction/offspring, not copying, as a distinguishing feature of living things as opposed to nonliving things. Additionally, it developed emotional connection with Major which led it to select her as a candidate for merging. It references how it can die but live on through the merging and, after Major’s death, in the internet.

• AI Emotions and Rights
• Singularity
• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Robots