I know this isn't quite following the form I want this blog to go in, but I thought I would share the essay I had to write for my final project in English. May as well be read by someone more than my teacher. Sadly I was forced to argue one side of this rather than explore the whole idea but I liked how it turned out anyways. So here it is!

Also, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this! Comment or tweet me: @Sabin2k

Humans strive for perfection. We are all brought up with that idea that gaining more knowledge is vital to our success. I think it is very important for us to evolve naturally. While there are many benefits to artificially increasing the intelligence in humans, I am going to explore some of the dangers and downfalls of how we might progress if this became plausible on a large scale. A few main ideas I would like to focus on are how this may have affected our natural evolution so far, what it would mean presently both socially and technologically, and the many dangers it could create for us in the future.

Around 200 years ago, in 1812, English mathematician Charles Babbage created what is considered to be the forerunner of the modern digital computer. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that computers started to become actually viable for practical uses in everyday society and today have, without a doubt, totally changed the way our entire world functions. This is a great example of how quickly technology can advance naturally, but with such quick advancement comes many problems. If such advances are not able to be controlled, are abused by the wrong people things can quickly get out of hand. Fraud, content rights violation, illegal pornography, privacy rights are only a fraction of the problems we see with our current state of technology. If we were able to simply create more intelligent people advances like this would be even more rapid and uncontrolled and consequentially more prone to disaster.

Now how might the ability to artificially increase human intelligence affect us socially? One of the first problems is cost. Who will be able to afford it? How do we choose who gets the increase? Does everyone get it?  “The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor” as the saying goes. This could become a problem if only the rich and powerful have the ability to increase their intelligence as greed and corruption is the biggest flaw in our society at present. Artificially increased human intelligence could compound this problem by giving the corrupt more tools to carry out such corruption. We would become even more socially separated then we already are.  Most of the people who would use this increased intelligence would not be in a position to receive it.

So will artificially increasing the intelligence in humans help our evolution in decades to come? Possibly, but once again, how do we control it? It is very unlikely that advancement like this would stay out of government control.  The movie “Repo: The Genetic Opera” explores the idea of a future of leasing organs. If you can’t make your payment, they send someone to reacquire their “product”. Something similar could be argued for increasing human intelligence. Who owns the ideas that are created from an artificially enhanced person? A discovery like this could bring up a huge civil rights issue with governments trying to use citizens as tools for innovation and advancement.  Another thing to note as I mentioned about the past, is how this could affect our future evolution. As a race most nations and powers are allocating more resources to war than anything else. Undoubtedly this increased intelligence would be used to create the next wave of weapons of mass destruction, creating an unprecedented arms race as well as similar races in space and aviation technology. We have had enough trouble handling these things at our natural growth; speeding up the entire process could be devastating.

So while at first you might find many benefits in artificially increasing intelligence in humans, some of the drawbacks and consequences that would arise are not worth the risk. He we made this discovery centuries ago we may not have lasted this long to begin with. The world we might be living in now may be a much more dangerous place than it already is, separating us in another way beyond race, religion, sex, wealth or class. We are already driving towards a very dangerous future for our planet and the power struggles and corruption that could arise from trying to control this technology would expediate this future. Allowing ourselves to evolve naturally is the safest way to ensure these things don’t happen. While striving for perfection is an admirable goal for us as a species, it needs to be done with caution and foresight. This is why artificially increasing human intelligence would not be a wise technology to aim for. 

Native Americans in Video Games

Here’s something I wrote a few years ago. I’m not going to bother editing it or changing anything, but if you are curious about how Native Americans have been portrayed in video games you might find it interesting.

Native Americans have and continue to be very under-represented in video games. Back in the 1980’s, there were almost virtually no indigenous characters in video games. Things were a lot different back then as they were not in many other veins of popular culture. Besides the oh so familiar Mario Bro’s, this wasn’t a huge trend. There was one game in the 80’s, Custer’s Revenge, which features the apparent rape of a Native American girl. It sparked a lot of controversy from woman’s rights groups and Native American activists.

In the 1990’s, we had one of the first games to have a centralized Native American hero character. “Turok: Dinosaur Hunter” was released for the Nintendo 64 in 1997.  The game play itself was highly praised and was a huge selling title on the platform, but it also held all the stereotypes we usually give to Native Americans, feathers, mystic powers, ECT. I can’t really decide if that should be considered bad or not, as that IS a very important part of their culture as far as I understand. There was also some other Native American characters in games but they still were not very dominant.
Between 2000 and 2005, the Native American presence in videogames had completely dwindled. But in 2006, we had a new game coming out with a Native American hero.

It was titled “Prey”. Prey is a First Person Shooter revolving around a Cherokee hero. The game begins on a reservation in Oklahoma at a casino (okay, THAT’s a stereotype). The game then jumps into a sci-fi alien story that is very compelling from what I have heard. I haven’t played the game for more than an hour. It seems to, on the most part; fairly represent the Native American culture. A few stereotypes might include the use of a bow and arrow, and a spirit form where you exit your body. From what I remember, these were both used as very defining game play elements and weren’t simply tacked on to support the native theme. Two voice actors, the main lead and another supporting role, are both Plains Cree and it felt like 3D realms did a great job of representing the culture.

Other than what I’ve posted, there have not been many more titles to truly represent Native Americans as a culture. Not sure what the reasons are behind this, but game companies DO know what sells and what doesn’t. I will be keeping an eye out from now on in the games I play to take notice of Native American characters and how they are portrayed.
*Much of the information in this article was derived from THIS ARTICLE.

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