Silicon Dreams
The name of this blog was inspired by my time in university pursuing an engineering degree. Back then, I was full of optimism about how technology could be used to improve our quality of life, but at the same time wary about technology’s obvious shortcomings and pitfalls on humanity and the environment. Armed with self-taught programming skills from my high school days and an unhealthy dose of overconfidence, I tackled my university courses head-on, only to slowly realise the limitations of what I could actually do with technology.
I’ve always had a complex relationship with technology. On the one hand, it has made us ever more connected thanks to the internet, social media and smartphones. On the other hand, we are ever more physically disconnected from each other, stuck in our own bubbles as we doomscroll on our own devices. As technology improves with each new innovation, we seem to be less incentivised to use them to their fullest potential. As a power user who easily switches between Windows and Linux, I sometimes take my tech literacy for granted.
Silicon Dreams carries with it connotations of a cyberpunk dystopia, with allusions to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and transhumanist undertones of combining the artificial and the biological. However, it didn’t take long for me to find out this term wasn’t entirely original: a quick Google search showed me, among other search results, 1980s to early 2000s surrealist CGI, a cyberpunk interrogation game and an update to a mod1 for a strategy game.
To me, Silicon Dreams hints at my aspirations for a better future, while at the same time acknowledging how far we are from achieving said aspirations. With that in mind, I envision two contrasting worlds. The first is the dream world of a bustling metropolis of innovation, where electric cars are fuelled by green energy, humans and androids coexist peacefully and quality of life is at an all time high. The second is the real world of rampant commercialisation, where cars are powered by fossil fuels, people ignore each other as they look down at their phones and everyone struggles to make ends meet.
Almost 10 years ago, I predicted that data would become a valuable resource. I just didn’t foresee how AI would use that very data to take over the world. With the rise of generative AI and the ever increasing danger of AI hallucinations, I seek not to avoid AI, but rather to understand it. I’ve always known the current generation of AIs, namely LLMs to be glorified auto-complete. Even now as OpenAI, Meta and Google release newer versions of their AI models, my opinion has not changed.
Not a single word of this blog has been written or edited by AI, and I intend to keep it that way. Maybe my words will be fed into an AI as training data, mimicking my style, cadence and subtle quirks. No matter what happens, I still have my unique emotions and lived experience that have led me to writing these words. AI can never take that away from me.
While writing the first draft of this essay using pen and paper, I realised that I might have veered too much into the negative aspects of Silicon Dreams. That wasn’t my intention with this blog. Rather, I want to focus on the positive aspects, where technology works in tandem with human creativity to enrich our lives as a whole. As with any tool, we have the choice of using it responsibly for good or abusing it to our detriment. To that end, I want this blog to bring a positive impact to the world, no matter how small. After all, I have to start somewhere.
So what exactly are Silicon Dreams? Perhaps they are dreams played out over neural networks, a complex orchestration of electrical signals that form a series of disjointed imagery. Perhaps they are utopic visions of a far-off future where the human race has ventured into the cosmos. Or perhaps they are just the musings of an introspective tech geek who thinks too much.
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