Blog 12: Last Blog
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My Final Post… For now
Looking back at all of the blog posts I’ve written over the semester, I decided to go with blog 5 (databites) for being the most informative, blog 6 (implications of a tech focused society) for the most shocking, and blog 3 (exception to data driven rules) for being the most monotonous. Blog 5 was really interesting for me I think in part because we got to choose the topic, but even going in I didn’t expect to get as much out of it as I did. Hearing different experts from fields that were quite different from eachother offered lots of unique perspectives on AI ethics, especially regarding data workers. It also provided me with information that I’ve referenced in my case study, so it’s proven useful even beyond the one assignment. Blog 6 was the most shocking because of the subject matter; hearing about the psychological effects around using AI got me to think more about why regulations around this stuff aren’t taken more seriously, and I could tell through writing it that I started to get a lot more personable in my blog posts which was for the better. Blog 3 was monotonous not necessarily because the subject itself was uninteresting, but because I don’t think there really was a way to present it in an interesting manner, so it was a long read and my post about it was less interesting/opinionated and more just a restating of facts from the case study. Because of this, it was actually the only blog post that I had to revise, and talking it through with Gordy helped me figure out how to write like it’s for a blog post and not an academic paper.
I used this experience going forward with my blog posts to be less boring and more expressive, not being afraid to show my opinions in them. This was a great change for me since pretty much everything I’ve had to write for school beforehand was not at all like this, and it was pretty refreshing to not have to hide my real self in my work. Blog posts worked super well for this class, and I imagine would’ve been better than essays by a mile; they’re a great chance to let the students read about a wide variety of things happening in the field and be able to reflect on all of it in a low stakes environment. I saw this a lot with myself, as the blog posts became more fun throughout the term as I got better at expressing my views effectively, and by the end I felt I was pretty good at writing them.
As for subjects, I really enjoyed reading and writing about machine learning and AI (which I know is sort of broad since like half of them were about that in one way or another), since it’s honestly a field I’m pretty unfamiliar with. Every one was an opportunity to expand my knowledge further in more than just a technical sense. It felt like I was actually absorbing real information that I could then relay onto others in discussions about the technology, which is great because it’s something that very few people are actually familiar with at all. I do think that something that would’ve been cool to touch on (if there are any case studies about this kind of stuff) would be the impact of (potentially excessive) technology use by younger generations, since we’re at a time where it still feels relatively unexplored and mostly speculation.
For the future of this website, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll continue to update it yet. At the very least, I’m going to take a well-deserved break from writing new content since I think I’ve done my fair share of that the past couple of months. If, beyond that, I don’t continue updating it, I still at least plan to include it in my portfolio because it was a lot of work that I would be proud to show off. It’s also a lot of work that I can’t imagine many other CS students have done since ethics don’t seem to play a large role in the education of it. Whatever I do with it, I will carry forward the personalised writing into everything I do in the future because I think it made me so much more interesting as a writer. I probably won’t be able to be as personable as I have been in these blog posts when writing academic papers, but I’ll still try and at least be more interesting and less of a slop generator. In any sense, that’s about all I have to say for now. Thank you so much for reading my work; catch you on the flip side!
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