CLASS TASK
The in-class task was to choose a piece of technology that I often interact with at uni and consider the below questions:
- Consider the birth, life and death of this piece of technology.
- What is involved in its creation? (e.g. earth’s resources, labour of miners)
- What is its material cost during the cost of its life (e.g. is it drawing from information in the cloud, is it feeding information to another system, is it employing any AI?)
- What happens to it after ‘death’. Where does the data go? What happens to its physical components? How long will it take to break down?
I am going to choose a Bluetooth mouse as my piece of tech, but I am going to rely Chatgpt program to collect information quickly for me:
- Creation:
- Resources: The creation of a Bluetooth mouse involves the extraction of various raw materials from the Earth, including metals like aluminium, copper, and plastics derived from crude oil. The mining and extraction processes can have environmental impacts and involve labour-intensive work.
- Manufacturing: Assembly lines in factories transform these raw materials into components like the mouse body, circuit boards, buttons, and battery components. Labour, energy, and resources are expended in this stage.
- Technology Integration: Bluetooth technology, sensors, and microprocessors are integrated into the mouse during manufacturing. This involves skilled labour and the use of specialized equipment.
- Life:
- Usage: During its lifespan, the Bluetooth mouse interacts with various devices via Bluetooth connectivity. It sends and receives signals, translating physical movements into digital commands for the connected device.
- Data Exchange: The mouse may store some data locally, such as user preferences or settings. However, it primarily serves as an input device, relaying information to the connected device (like a computer or tablet). It doesn’t typically draw from the cloud or employ AI unless it’s a particularly advanced model.
- “Death”:
- Disposal: When the Bluetooth mouse reaches the end of its usable life or becomes obsolete, it is typically disposed of. Ideally, it should be recycled to recover valuable materials and minimize environmental impact.
- Data: If any data was stored locally on the mouse, it’s usually erased during the disposal process. If not, there’s generally no data retained on the mouse itself.
- Component Breakdown: The physical components of the mouse undergo breakdown processes once discarded. Plastics may take hundreds of years to decompose in landfills, while metals can persist indefinitely. However, recycling can significantly reduce the environmental impact by reusing these materials in new products.
- Recycling: Proper recycling involves disassembling the mouse, and separating materials like plastics, metals, and electronic components. These materials can then be repurposed for manufacturing new products.
Another in-class task was visualising technology but that was group work, ‘Explore art as a tool to visualise the intangible.’ using art to visualise an aspect of tech
PRE RECORDED LECTURE
The pre-recorded lecture was about evolution data and data storage, here is my notes from the lecture:
Video: The Evolution of Data Storage Devices
- 1890: Punch cards used in tabulation machines.
- 1951: Magnetic tapes were introduced for storing data on computers.
- 1956: IBM invents the first hard drive, weighing one ton and storing 5MB of data.
- 1963: Philips cassette tapes were used to store audio files.
- 1971: IBM introduces the floppy disk.
- 1982: The 3.5-inch floppy disk is released, with a capacity of 1.44 MB.
- 1982: Sony and Philips develop a compact disc to store information in digital format, especially audio, with a capacity of 700MB.
- 1991: SanDisk launches the first commercial SSD with a 20 MB capacity.
- 1994: Iomega Zip drive released, with capacities of 100, 250, and 750MB.
- 1995: Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, and Philips collaborate to create the DVD, with a capacity of 4.7GB.
- 1999: Panasonic, Toshiba, and SanDisk introduce an 8MB SD card.
- USB: Universal Serial Bus becomes a standard for data transfer.
- Blu-ray Disc: High-capacity optical disc format for video and data storage.
- Cloud Computing: By 2025, it’s projected that over 100 zettabytes of data will be stored in the cloud.
- Current Largest SSD: A 100TB solid-state drive, priced at $40,000.
Surveillance Capitalism This term describes a market-driven process where personal data is the commodity for sale. The capture and production of this data depend on mass surveillance of the Internet. This practice is often carried out by companies offering free online services, such as search engines and social media platforms, where users may not fully understand the extent of the surveillance.
Data Feminism is A movement highlighting that the data sets currently collected and used often do not represent diverse demographics equally. This leads to trained models having preferences for majority groups. When diverse audiences are not included in data sets, biases are created in AI models, which can result in discrimination, sometimes referred to as ‘racism by proxy.’ Unregulated and untested AI technologies have put innocent people at risk of being wrongly convicted. While a common counterargument is that these results are always reviewed by a human, there is an unconscious bias towards suspects identified by technology, leading investigations to focus on reasons why the identified suspect is the culprit rather than finding other possible suspects.
Cambridge Analytica Scandal This incident involved the breach of 50 million Facebook records.
Digital Dark Age A scenario where humans are unable to access data and literature from previous generations due to the rapid obsolescence of storage media, rendering older storage methods, such as floppy disks, inaccessible.
Digital Data Storage The ongoing evolution and challenges associated with storing digital information.