"This is the end, my friend the end"

All things come to an end. It has been a good semester but all things good or bad have a time limit were they all be over. Reading the book the world is flat has opened my eyes to many things.  The first is the extremes that Wal-Mart has gone thought to create the greatest supply chain that other companies study and copy. The way that people have started their own small companies that compete with the giants with the Internet to be able to connect to millions that was not available before. That one man was able to start his own news blog that had thousands of reads with a small voice recorder and his cell phone camera. The book also shows how little companies need to act big, with the service that they can offer or the way they offer them. At the same time it explains how big companies need to act small and provide the customer support and service that you would come to expect from a little guy try to keep all the customers. Another major point that I personally found interesting is how other countries are taking huge advantage over this small flat world we live in today. India’s college student working overnight at call centers and taking class during the day. Iceland restructuring it self completely in order to be the home of Intel, making it easier to hire and fire works and improving the populations education. Something I think that our government needs to do, our public school system is lacking and other countries are producing better graduates. Graduates that are willing to work for less than the average American with the same degree.  Overall the book bring to light many things that were right there in front of us but no one really gives any thought to or care to even think about as long as it didn’t effect them.

The future doesn’t need us is an interesting article to read from Wired Magazine is a good read and I'm sure its something that has crossed many if not everyone’s mind at least once. The rate of computer advancement is a bit alarming. If they continue at the current rate we will build the first wave of micro or nano machines that would be able to self reeducate. While this currently happens now on computer systems with files, the only damage done is the computer or the network goes down and has to be wiped clean and restarted. But these new micro machines could create so many that they could use up all resources and become a problem for the whole world. If that wasn’t bad enough, programing is also getting better to the point that sooner or later computers will be able to think for themselves and see the flaws that humans may have put in or propose or from human error/oversight. So each generation would be better than the next. They would end up taking over, either by force like in the Matrix, or people wanting to live the life of leisure and let the machines do everything. One way or another the world will change and when it does there will be no going back. The gears have been in motion for to long now to stop.  The only real question left to ask is when this great change is going to happen and if enough of humanity is able to come together and realize the danger of what is happening before its to late to be able to up a fight worth fighting for. The birth of AI would be a crowning moment in world history that would be great to experience, at the same time it could be the beginning of the down fall. A moment that would be a double edge sword to experience.   

Follow the white rabbit

For this week I choose assignment I decided to re-watch the Matrix. It’s a good movie that makes you think about how powerful computer have got and what their potential could be. With that its still a science fiction movie. The idea of connect our brains to a computer seams to be the direction that we are moving to. The idea of controlling and being able to enhance our learning with a chip in our head. To be able to have this chip in our head and connect and learn things as fast as downloading a program to a computer. We could advance society by having a smarter population. But before I get to far off track this is what is happening in the movie, Neo gets unplugged from the Matrix and about the ship he learns Kun-fu in seconds. Then continues to go on for hours. Then learns that the matrix is like a computer game that some rules can be broken while others only bent. Also that “the one” has admin rights and can rewrite all the rulers. As shown in the end when he flies away. The part of the movie that also seems real is the way we as a society continue to integrated computers in our daily lives as they advance and get smaller and smaller. This integration comes at a cost though, the more we interact with computers, tablets, smart phones the more we depend on them for even the simplest tasks that may have only taken a minute for us to do. We are moving to make life easier for humans by making computer do more and more for us. Its only a matter of time before someone can figure out how to make a computer think on its own and learn new things. Once that happens humans will no longer be the supior spices. While computer wouldn’t be living things they will be able to out think us and create machines that could do anything better than the human body can. This tough process is the bases for the movie. Computers learn to think and they start a battle between them and us. They plug us in and use us as slaves without us even knowing. They lead us to think that we are living our lives and have control of what is happening. But they have networked us into a system like we have done with them for so long now with the internet.

1946 or today things do change

So after read this old story it funny to see that even back then society had a problem with over sharing. While the computers or as they are referred to by the story Logics made it easy to find out useful info on anything you wanted to know much like the computer have today for our generation. These logics are connected to a tank that connects them to all the other tanks, sound a lot like the internet and Google. Want to find something today just up on a computer and open your web browser and search Google and you can find almost anything you want. Even things that you want to keep hidden from other show up, just like the wife showed in the story. She was  part of the problem, she told her husband to fix it but while he does she was going to look out other before it gets fixed and hopes that no one looks her info. She like most people in our society today wanted to find all the dirt on everyone else but didn’t want anyone to see anything about them. Its much like social media today, everyone laughs and makes fun of others, while only posting a select few thing here and there that make them look good, and un-tagging themselves in anything that makes them look bad. So now to fix the problem is to restrict and censor info but that takes time to sort though and see what should be allow to view and what should be hidden from the public eye. While shutting down the system and figuring out all this would work, society has become to reliant on computer/logics. Shutting them down would also stop everything else at the same time. Its like the creation of anything that came before. Power for example, people were able to live and get thing done before, but now that we have it we can see do thing the old way.

The building of a dell and its supply chains have worked together with others (HP and IBM) in the creation of a collaborative unified code of social responsible practices of manufacturing around the world. While supply chains with a scenes of responsibility is a great thing for the world consumer. Not all supply chains are a great thing for the open market the world has come to enjoy. Al Qaeda is a supply chain of death. They work like any other supply chain only they provide chaos and death. Their beliefs are shared and create new bombers as the last one is used. This supply chain works on the openness and trust that the world as come accustom to, attacking this creates a fear that hinders the advancement of the open shrinking flatting world. Supply chain are the key to advancing the world. They allow companies to get thing as needed. The better the chain the cheap a finished product can be created. This also allows for new countries to advance and meet the needs of the new supply chains and be part of the flatten world. But for this to happen those counties need to be on they’re way up. But for this they need power economic, political, and electrical. For this there is a cheap way to do this till they can advance to something better. This cheap source is oil. But oil is also a curse.   First there is the limited supply of it and everyone trying to get it for this reason. Then it’s a cheap fuel that can power any nations regardless of its technical advancements or lack of. But unfortunately it has a major draw back of harming us and the planet with its pollution.