Module 13

Ryan Williams

April 18, 2015

Module 13

            I have really enjoyed this course. Reading from the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman has been a real eye-opener for me. Never have I thought about how much the world is flattening. Industry has changed in many different ways. Companies today rarely do every single thing with a product. One company could design a product and order materials from another company while a third company is the actual seller of the product. These companies do not even need to be on the same continent. You can have your company in the United States where you design and put together the product while getting the materials from China and then sending the finished product to England for a company to sell.

            In the book, Friedman brings up an example for the flattening of the world. One of the examples he uses is his Dell Inspiron notebook which he wrote the book on. He talks about many of the parts of his computer and where they came from. He says that the memory came from a Korean factory, the cooling fan from a Taiwanese factory, the battery from an American-owned factory in Malaysia, the hard disk drive from an American-owned factory in Singapore and other parts of the computer from many other different places too.

            We did reading other than from the book too.  One thing we read was a short story written in 1946 called “A Logic Named Joe”. The story talked about “logics” being everywhere and people having access to them at any time to do anything. It also talked about how this would turn out bad because people knowing how to do whatever they wouldn’t ever need to get help from anyone else and this would be bad. Another thing we read was an article on Wired called, “Why the future doesn’t need us” written by Bill Joy. In the article, Joy talked about how technology is evolving enough that in the future, technology will have out-evolved us to a point where we are not good enough for technology itself. One example he talks about is robots. We are improving on robots more and more and he talks about how we will evolve them too much and they will begin to work on their own and to succeed they will need to get rid of us. This brought me to talk about I, Robot. In I, Robot, almost the same thing happens as what Joy talks about, but to an extreme.

            Overall, I enjoyed taking this course. The reading was never very dull. At some points it may have been a little slow but for the most part, I was very into the reading and the subjects the authors went over. The writing was never bad either. No one writing was ever “too hard” or “too easy” but seemed to have a balance of not taking a long time to write, but still making me be engaged and having to think about what I had read.