Another week has gone by far too quickly and looking at  the content in my lifestream this week the main theme “putting it all together” seems rather fitting as I’ve been collecting interesting material that covers not just block 3 of algorithmic cultures but topics from the whole course.

The first post this week was an incredibly well done sci-fi short film I saw on Vimeo, called “Sight” on how augmented reality and gamification might drastically change the way we live and interact with each other in the future.

Next I linked to an interesting article I found on Twitter in the International Business Times that discusses the influence of content-curation algorithms and their inherent biases. It shows that people are often unaware of algorithms working in the background and when learning about it they often exhibit quite “visceral” reactions, followed by a change in their behaviour to accomodate for the algorithms.

Another great longform article I found on the Verge discusses the possibility that memories might be able to survive outside of the brain which reminded me of the discussions we had when we explored posthumanism in the earlier weeks of the course.

The following post was an in-depth reflection on last week’s tweetorial where I looked at what we can learn from tools like Tweetarchivist and Keyhole which algorithmically analysed the conversation we had on Twitter.

This week a couple of new talks from the latest TED conference showed up in my YouTube newsfeed and one of them in particular caught my attention as it was a new talk by neuroscientist David Eagleman whom I had previously talked about in this post. While his main talking points were the same as in his previous video he offered some new results that look very promising. His sensory substition vest, for example, seems to work very well in teaching a deaf person to hear. I am still just as excited as the first time I heard about this research. Maybe sensory addition really is just around the corner.

Finally I linked to a short animated TED-Ed video on whether robots can be creative. This video explores algorithms that to come up with pieces of music which they then iteratively compare with music that humans consider to be “beautiful”, discarding the patterns that do not match and keeping the patterns that do. The results are remarkable to say the least. To an outsider the music these algorithms create sounds very much like it has been composed by a human being.

Now that the end of the course is drawing closer it is time to turn my attention to the final assignment. In the meantime I would like to say thank you to our exceptional course tutors Sian and Jeremy and my wonderful colleagues for the many thought provoking and highly engaging discussions I’ve been blessed to be a part of over the last 3 months.