Tamra Headrick-Bell
Bs
March 5, 2018
Chapter 5 Oppression
Question #1. Which three (3) concepts, issues, ideas, or facts do you think are the most
important and why do you think they are important?
“Human evolution is a story of survival, but once physical survival is assured, human
beings create culture. The struggle to maintain one’s culture while living in a new homeland
with its own culture is no easy task, especially because physical and cultural differences have
been used to create the concept of race (Koppelman, 115).
Early European settlers extinguished the culture of one civilization to implement their
own. The same will be true during the arrival of A.I brain emulations, or EM’s. A.I stands for
“Artificial Intelligence”, however I like to think of them as being of “Altruistic Intelligence”. An
EM is engineered from taking the brain of a human and recording particular features of it to
create a new being which is connected a vast neural network. Their arrival will be much like it
was for indigenous peoples as the Europeans flooded their shores; first in trickles, then in waves,
finally a flooding inundation. Many parts of our culture will be absorbed and our world-views
will be compelled to change by the arrival of new-found intelligence. Will non-scientific ideas
such as race compute with an EM? Will EM’s value religious preference in lieu of the ability to
source resources that enable their operation? I am certain they will be free from such error of
thought and “folk logic”. Ambiguous language in law, social order, and within our institutions
will slowly be forgotten in favor of definitive language and terms.
Many groups, whether radical liberals or right wing will find it difficult to adopt this new
form of diversity and pluralism into their daily social and cultural lifestyle. How will they be
able to transform staunchly held beliefs to accept a new race of intelligence? strategies. As the
most multicultural society in the world today, we must realize the advantages of diversity and
embrace pluralism to capitalize on our advantages (Koppelman, 151).
There was one important outcome from America’s diversity that attracted the greatest
support: Americans will learn more from one another and be enriched by exposure to many
different cultures (Koppelman, 151). The culture of EM’s is not unlike our own. They work,
they socialize, they go to school, they develop relationships, clans, family units, and they value
the birth of children. As human is story of survival which leads to the development of culture,
EM’s will also value their own survival and their own culture. As the A.I neural network along
with its EM’s grow in structure and population, it will affect our own culture, economy, and
population much like the early influx of European immigration affected the indigenous peoples
of the Americas. Our focus will shift to adaptation as wealth is shifted to new found prospects of
innovation, sustainability, and security. This progressive burst will inevitably lead to a rapid
degeneration of our own culture. The highest paying jobs will shift away from Investment
banking & securities, portfolio management, weapons manufacturing to Semi -conductor
engineering, coolant systems development, and strategic neural warfare and security. Our
human social structure will evolve around our new technological achievements and our
entertainment, fashions, organizations, and institutions will follow suit.
“Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own race, nation, or culture is superior to all
others (Koppelman, 87).” No doubt, there will be hostilities that arise from the arrival of a new
type of intelligent conscious being. Koppelman indicated that colonial place-names were an
indication of this hostile attitude, however, there are thousands of indigenous names given to
rivers, mountains, hills and valleys, and cities and towns across America as well as across the
globe. In Future past, it could be said that our place names are an indication of our own Human
ethnocentricity, however, I fear that they will put aside such arbitrary, superficial, and whimsical
fancies for the sake of sustainability and viability of the biosphere itself.
“According to Spring (2001), European descriptions of Indians as “filthy savages” had
nothing to do with hygiene but with their “seemingly unrepressed sexuality” (p. 10). American
Indians practiced frequent bathing while Europeans did not (Koppelman, 88). I had to laugh at
this because of our present culture of definite “unrepressed sexuality” which has resulted in a
massive elevation in STD’s and STD related deaths, as it is well known. We can only hope that
