Week 1: After reading Frankenstein

I read "Frankenstein” in junior high school, and after that, with the accumulation of my knowledge, I always treated it as a problem of philosophy of science and technology. That is, human beings make machines, but they can't control them. Instead, they are recriminated by machines  . It wasn't until recently that I read the full edition that I realized the book is not just about science and technology.

Frankenstein originally made the weirdo with great effort just out of his deep love for the beauty of life. But he found that the life was so ugly that he could not accept it. As a matter of fact, the weirdo was originally ugly in appearance, not evil in heart. However, his ugliness made people  abominate him very much and he was pushed step by step onto the road of revenge on society... Finally, Frankenstein could only become the victim of the evil consequence of his creation.

In fact, how many people are there finding that the result is what they wish after realizing the dreams ? You study social theory with pains, but the result is unilaterally used by politicians to incite the ignorant masses; you launch an uprising full of sympathetic feeling, but you find that the new regime is as dark as before; you are full of bright hope to have a love affair with the most lovely person you think in the world, but in the end, you guys quarrel with each other  and both sides suffers great losses.

My biology professor once said there was a turning point in the history of life. The first billion years of life, there was only nitrogen  on the earth，all living things on the earth were anaerobic. Later, cyanobacteria "discovered" that it was more efficient to use oxygen to metabolize, so they changed their products of photosynthesis to oxygen. The global massacre began afterwards. Most of the living things were  oxygen intoxication. They were dead. Therefore, from the moral point of view, cyanobacteria should be punished by hacking process. But at the same time, just because oxygen makes the utilization of energy higher so that multicellular organisms can survive and so do the human beings today.

The moral I get from this story is that, all you can do is to pursue a change and open the lid of the next box of chocolates at the most  time. You may be able to choose the box that you think looks best, but you don't know what's in the box until you open it .

Kevin Kelly said that creation is always separated from the creator. Human beings are separated from God, and one day machines will also be separated from human beings. Even if you know that you will become the victim of your evil deeds, there will still be people doing evil deeds. Every change is Pandora's box; but you won't lock it there forever, because even if you struggle with pain, you're alive, and if you don't do anything, you're dead.