Virtual Reality Development - Assignment Example

ESD1 GRAHAM Student’s Name Class Instructor Institution of Affiliation City Date Task 1 Mark Bessoudo is a sustainability and green real estate Canadian specialist who works with municipalities and organizations in the private sector integrating sustainability inside performance management. As an engineer he holds a bachelor’s degree from Halifax’s Dalhousie University in biological (environmental) Engineering and an engineering Master’s degree from Montreal’s Concordia University in Applied Science in solar buildings. He currently resides in Toronto. As an engineer, Mark Bessoudo has and continues to contribute articles for publication by leading publication journals and newspapers such as the Canadian Architect magazine, The New York Times and Building and Environmental journal. He also owns a website developed for the purpose of collecting his letters to the editor and currently uses it for organizing his opinions and thoughts. Mark Bessoudo has a lot of wide-ranging interests in culture (politics, comics, books and religion), science/philosophy, sustainability/environment and design/urbanism (graphic design, architecture, typography, cities and their link with human experience). Task 2 A comprehension of human ethics and ethical decision-making will bring about a big enterprise in the technology industry. Engineers have been entrusted with tasks of solving the trolley problem through diverse real-world solutions and provide its software. Also, Virtual Reality (VR) is changing our assumptions regarding composition of the self and personal identity. According to David Chalmers, a cognitive scientist and philosopher, VR is reshaping philosophy’s questions regarding nature’s reality and epistemology. There is another possibility of the invention of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - a system capable of performing intellectual activities better compared to humans. This needs solving of old moral philosophy issues. Engineers are entrusted with the task of programming benevolence, morality and goodness concepts into the AGI. According to Jose Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, he wishes that engineers could realize that for one to be an engineer it is unsatisfactory being an engineer. Mark Bessoudo hopes that they can think clearly regarding what being a human means. When asking cost and efficiency questions they must also ask questions like goodness, contribution to well-being, standards and for whom. It is an approach that engineers should lead the way. Engineers no longer uses pen and paper thus, the iron ring does not serve the similar purpose it used to for they nowadays use technological devices such as desktops that do not remind us of ethical obligations. No one knows whether in the end in spite of our efforts technology will in the end find a way of obstructing our efforts of causing humanism to become part of engineering. Task 3 Answer #1 The author engages the readers by employing foreshadow where he implies that change is eminent and coming. He achieves this by using words like change is evident and the world is increasingly becoming technological and exponentially intricate. The author uses choice of words (diction) as a writing style aspect and to employ literary devices like truism and to speed up the rhyme by omitting the conjunction “and”, a literary device known as asyndeton. Answer #2 The author continues to grab the leader’s attention by giving them facts. Despite the readers knowing that the world is becoming more technological and greatly complex, he provides facts that helps show readers how technologically advanced the world is. The author also provides a controversial claim regarding change been evident and justifies it in the next sentence. The author also provides the reader with a curious connection between flushing a toilet, intercontinental flight and the smartphone. Answer #3 Individuals can either be passive or active participants in their social environment. By being a passive participant, an individual avoids doing any act that can be harmful to the social environment or does not make any valuable contribution to the social environment. On the other hand, an active participant engages in activities that advances the social goals directly through positive contribution or performs activities that influence the social environment negatively. Answer #4 The described landscape is conducive to the well-being of humans. Technological advancement has made life simpler for the increasing human population in terms of providing better medical care through advanced medical equipment, improvements in the industry sector leader to increased productivity and most importantly better ways of conserving the environment, lastly, technological advancement has facilitated the growth of the agricultural sector making it possible for the world to maintain its population in terms of food through the increased agricultural production (ButtePatil, P.R. 2012, 1). Answer #5 It’s the engineers who are creating the landscape. The current geological era might be called Anthropocene because it is a period that the earth is influenced by humans. This means that human activities have begun having a major influence on the earth’s ecosystems and geology. This period can be identified by archeologists of future generations through: Biodiversity where human activities impact the existence of biodiversity forms leading to their extinction, biogeography where human impact influence the distribution of organisms permanently and climate change caused by an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced by human activities (Crutzen, P.J. 2006, 13). Answer #6 In the course of engineer’s education, there is no single point where the engineers are provided with good intellectual tools that they can use to ponder in any way that is meaningful on either each other, themselves or their enterprises that are world-transforming. This makes them never to ask themselves whether they should continue doing their enterprises just because they can and whether what they are actually doing is good for bettering either the planet or humanity. Answer #7 Questions such as virtue, value, justice and beauty traditionally belonged to the philosophical academic discipline (ethics). The questions are relevant to building and architectural engineering in that they bring about social responsibility where engineers become morally responsible for the negative impacts resulting from their activities and innovations. It also provides ethical guidelines for the engineering discipline which must be adhered to (sustainable design and buildings). Answer #8 The fusing of tactile and intellectual in architectural engineering helps in reminding (such as the iron ring) or teaching architectural engineers that they should maintain ethical standards and that they have a social responsibility to the safety of the public. Therefore, they should learn from past engineering mistakes and avoid negligence, making faulty calculations and looking out for structural deficiencies in building designs and correcting them. Answer #9 All the technical and technological innovation achieved by engineers is done using the building blocks laid down by other engineers who existed in the past. Despite the fact that it’s the past engineers who laid the foundations of engineering, engineers should not depend a lot on the work done by past engineers instead they should focus on making their own inventions and depending on their work. This is reinforced in engineering education where students copying each other’s work is considered cheating, students are made to develop their own unique projects from ground up in order to successfully complete their coursework. Answer #10 In all the activities that architectural and building engineers engage in their main end goal is to create new innovations. To them, the end justifies the means. In order to strive for nobler ends, engineers should try to treat innovation as a means to an end of bettering human life by treating people as ends in themselves. Answer #11 The internet technology is a second hand smoke that causes internet bullying and invasion of privacy. Secondly, weapons engineering creates peace instability among nations and also leads to the death of innocent people when the weapons fall on the wrong hands. Thirdly, nuclear technology which leads to the creation of nuclear weapons that can lead to nuclear accidents and radiation damage. Fourth, genetically modified maize which sometimes has adverse effects when consumed by humans. Lastly, Artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to laying off of workers and replaced by AI systems. Answer #12 In order to educate engineers who are wisdom loving, technical training in the current engineering curriculum that exists must be complimented with philosophy. This will assist in making the relevance and importance of philosophy to engineering more evident creating to a greater degree a humanistic approach to the discipline of engineering. Answer #13 Philosophy 101 is a subject studied in classes that involves ethics and morality. The technological innovations happening daily requires an understanding of ethics and morality in order to be able to make moral decisions regarding human values and ethical standards. Therefore, students who have studied philosophy will have a chance to apply it practically in real life. Answer #14 Because an autonomous car system will be functioning as an AI and it will get into situations where it will be needed to make moral decisions that can impact human life either positively or negatively. Therefore, engineers must program concepts such as goodness, morality and benevolence into the vehicles control software (Jo, K., Kim, J., Kim, D., Jang, C. and Sunwoo, M., 2014, 1731). Answer #15 The impending doom and the fat man where a fat man leading a group on a coast gets stuck in a cave thus trapping everybody inside. When the tide rises it will kill everyone except the fat man. The only way out is by blowing up the fat man using a dynamite stick to save the rest. Second is a fathers agonizing choice where a father is an inmate in a concentration camp, a guard wants him to kill his son who was trying to escape failure to which his son will be killed by another inmate. Third is of a crowded boat where a ship gets shipwrecked and 30 survivors get into a boat intended for seven people. A storm comes and in order to survive the storm the boat had to be lightened for some people to survive. Answer #16 Virtue reality changes how humans define and comprehend what is real and what is not. It sheds new light on questions regarding epistemology and the nature of reality in that unlike what they say reality is, which is the state of things in regard to how they actually exist rather than how they may be imagined or appear. Virtual reality provides a virtue realism that holds that virtual reality is not an illusion and objects viewed virtually are real and experiences one gets virtually are valuable as what can be called real reality (Brooks, F.P. 1999, 16). Answer #17 Virtual reality (VR) changes the aspects of how architects communicate and design buildings before their actual construction, this is achieved by VR HMDs (head-mounted displays) like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift where an individual is immersed in a 3D environment walkthrough virtualization of an entire representation of how the actual building would look like. It also helps architectures and building engineers in identifying structural and design errors therefore enabling them to iron out the serviceability and construction problems before actual construction (Hilfert, T. and König, M. 2016, 1). Answer #18 By being an intelligent system performing intellectual tasks, an AGI can at any time become out of control and pose a risk to humans. Engineers in order to avoid the AGI becoming an existential risk must program humanity into the AGI in terms of concepts like goodness, morality and benevolence. This will make the AGI to value and respect human life (Laird, J.E., Newell, A. and Rosenbloom, P.S. 1987, 1). Answer #19 To be able to appreciate what being human means, engineers according to Mark Bessoudo should not stop at questions regarding cost and efficiency. Instead, they should also try and ask themselves questions regarding whether what they are doing is good, whether it contributes to well-being and if yes then for whom and lastly they must ask themselves whether their activities are adhering to the set and acceptable engineering ethical standards (Harris, C.E., Pritchard, M.S., Rabins, M.J., James, R. and Englehardt, E. 2013, 138). Answer #20 It reflects the author’s pessimism. Instead of anticipating a desirable outcome in the future for success in instilling humanism into engineering, he anticipates that possibly in the future technology itself will obstruct our efforts in trying to instill engineering with humanism despite our very best efforts. He believes technology will in the end outweigh humanism and reveal the worst of engineering where engineers will ignore the direct impact their activities or enterprises have on humans and the environment. References Brooks, F.P., 1999. What's real about virtual reality? IEEE Computer graphics and applications, 19(6), pp.16-27. ButtePatil, P.R., 2012. Technological Advancements and Its Impact on Humanity. B. tech-agricultural engineering, pp.1-4. Crutzen, P.J., 2006. The “anthropocene”. In Earth system science in the anthropocene (pp. 13-18). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Harris Jr, C.E., Pritchard, M.S., Rabins, M.J., James, R. and Englehardt, E., 2013. Engineering ethics: Concepts and cases. Cengage Learning. Hilfert, T. and König, M., 2016. Low-cost virtual reality environment for engineering and construction. Visualization in Engineering, 4(1), p.1. Jo, K., Kim, J., Kim, D., Jang, C. and Sunwoo, M., 2014. Development of autonomous car part I: distributed system architecture and development process. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 61(12), pp.7131-7140. Laird, J.E., Newell, A. and Rosenbloom, P.S., 1987. Soar: An architecture for general intelligence. Artificial intelligence, 33(1), pp.1-64. Read More