Journal Entry 13: Yamamoto: Intermission 6 - Story 6 (Sara Loughran)

One particular thing that struck me in this story was Shion's observations about humans and how they do "illogical" violent things. Kasukabe tried to argue that those were outliers who were "crazy" people, but Shion pointed out how many of them are considered mentally sound, they are just driven by their own beliefs of what is right. This reminded me a lot of an argument that has been very prevalent in the United States, which is that mass shooters are outliers who are mentally ill and don't reflect all people. However, it's been found that a very small portion of shooters are actually mentally ill (14.8%). Many of them are just hateful and have prejudices, and believe those prejudices are what is right. And being hateful and prejudiced is not a mental illness, or else all humans would have some degree of mental illness, like Shion concluded with her idea that all humans have dementia.

This story was heavily based around morals and what is considered an ethical decision. While the other chapters touched on ethics somewhat, this was one of the central focuses in this story. Having Shion logically and analytically explain ethics and morals to Kasukabe immediately feels sinister, because it isn't taking into account human emotions, which is something Shion acknowledges. It becomes a question of whether or not human emotions are actually beneficial or not when it comes to making logical and ethical decisions, because Shion is still able to do what is "right" even with out human emotions. When it comes down to it, as Kasukabe said, it seems unlikely that robots would ever actually rise up and try to kill or fight humans, because it isn't a logical decision. Logic and ethics are more entwined than meets the eye.

All of this relates to my topic for my presentation because it is going to be focusing on children growing up with "substitutes" for human interaction, ranging from dolls that do very minimalistic things, to actual virtual characters that can somewhat interact with the child. The fear is that when children don't interact enough with others, they become antisocial and more prone to cruelty. However, it is just as possible that interacting with AI or machines could keep them from being cruel because it isn't logical.