I’ve been scared of snakes in the past, so I went into this event thinking that I would be facing my fears. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m not really frightened anymore. Of course I was still wary of the snake that was almost as big as me, but I was fine with the average sized snakes. I even held a cute little hog-nosed snake. And I learned some fun facts. Apparently when hog-nosed snakes are scared, they puff up and flatten out their heads so they look more like a cobra. Then they hiss at you and immediately after fall backward and pretend to be dead. I don’t think that it’s the greatest defense mechanism. I mean they literally try to be scary and don’t ever wait to see if it worked. They just immediately bail and try to play dead. Still, a they’re very cute snakes that are a lot of fun to hold (unless they decide to regurgitate on you). I don’t think I’ll end up playing with snakes much in the future, but I do think they’re a lot more interesting than I did before.
Tag Archives: animals
Can Machines Feel Emotion?
Friday’s film Ex Machina unexpectedly took me back to my Freshmen Writing Seminar. My Freshmen Writing Seminar about vegetarianism. At the surface, the two don’t seem to connect. But in the film, Ava (the AI) gets help from the main character by generating empathy from him when she starts to get emotional about her situation trapped as she is in her creator’s house. But when she is finally freed, her empathy seems to stop as she leaves the main character trapped in the house like she was. So, the question becomes did she actually feel emotions, or was she just mimicking what human emotion looks like? This is where my FWS comes in. In that class we debated weather animals had feelings, if they deserved to be given empathy and rights. This movie made me go one step further in that questioning. If we create an AI that feels like we do, what really differentiates us from machines? Why would we be more deserving of rights if we all act and feel the same? And how would be be able to tell if they could actually feel or were just more perfect pretenders than humans? I’ve concluded that just like with animals, we can’t really know for sure. And that is a scary thought.