Lit 80, Fall 2013
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Black Mirror of the Future

September 6th, 2013 | Posted by Xin Zhang in Uncategorized

As a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre, Neuromancer shows its negative attitude towards the digital age in the future. The cyberspace or Matrix makes me think of the movie Matrix, as they both shows a picture that in the future human can send his/her into the cyberspace to do all the things we now can do in reality and also things we cannot do in reality. I believe this is possible as what we the world is just what we feel. Our brains get signals from the outer world by our eyes, ears, noses and so on to and it is these signals that make us feel that we live in the reality. For example, the feel of our breath makes our brains know that we are still alive. However, for a dead man, if we can keep his brain alive and give the brain all the signals a alive man can get, then the brain will still believe that he is alive. Even someone told the man the truth, he may not believe he has dead just as Neo in Matrix cannot believe that he is just a virtual man in the beginning. So I agree with the opinion in the article “There is Only Cyberspace”. What we live in is just cyberspace consists of our signals our brains receive.

In my opinion, Neuromancer is an alert to tell us to take care of the social problems coming with the development of technologies such as hacking, AI, privacy protection etc. There are many of these movies that shows that advanced technologies could be disasters without control just like Terminator. But the AIs in Neuromancer very far from us as what we can do now to AIs is just make them do what we have write in the codes. Now we know little and almost nothing about how our brains works. So it is impossible to create AI like Wintermute in several thousands of  years as nature spend billions of years to create the intelligence of human. What I believe is that things like terminator will not happen but they are an alert to make us keep thinking about the relationship between technology development and human.

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