Robot? Human? or Cyborgs?

If you can choose, will you choose a robot to be your surgeon, or will you still prefer a team that involves only human to perform your open heart surgery?

Before you answer this question, think about the advantages and the disadvantages. Human makes mistakes, but robots are not as capable as human beings to deal with unexpected things. So will you be more worried if the doctor's hands are shaky and accidentally cut off the wrong part of your organ? Or will you be more afraid that the robot does not react as accordingly as human doctors when anything goes wrong?

I"ve never had any huge surgery, but my relatives had, so I know how important the doctor's skills are. If your surgeon does not have mature skills, you not only have longer healing process after the surgery, but also have higher risks during the surgery. Also, the surgeon's condition on that day makes a difference too. Furthermore, if you are one of the poor people in the developing countries where surgeons treat patients differently based on the money they receive, you probably won't be recovered from the surgery as fast as those who pay surgeons a lot of money.

Adding all the factors up, not many people can be sure that the performance of their surgeon is absolutely the best, and no one can guarantee that the patient receives the best care. Compared to human surgeons, robots seem more reliable in some perspectives. First of all, they do not get tired as human doctors. Also, because of the way they are programmed in performing such task, they can probably perform a better job in a shorter period of time than human doctors.

On the other hand, I will be worried if there's no human involves in the medical team that is going to remove a tumor in my body. I believe a lot of people are thinking about the same thing too: What if anything goes wrong? Will the robots be able to respond just as human doctors? Will they be able to stop the bleeding and save my life?

These questions brings up a perception that is commonly shared with people nowadays. No matter how fast the technology grows and how well those robots can perform human tasks, we still trust human beings more than robots. Why? Because they are not us.

People's perceptions about technologies is not static. It's always changing. Today not many people trust the medical team in which no human is involved, but hundreds of years later, perhaps our perceptions of the same thing will move toward the opposite end. I don't know how the future technology will be like and how people in the future will cope with all the ethical problems and the lack of trustworthiness that come with the technology. But one thing I'm sure now is that I still prefer a team that involves both robots and human to ensure the high quality of the surgery. Maybe hundreds of years later, when robots can totally replace human surgeon's job, I won't even notice that my doctor is actually just a robot. Who knows?

When you don't expect to see yourself on the magazine cover

"How do you define privacy?" This is a very interesting question that I've never thought of. I've always thought that if anyone uses any of my information that makes me uncomfortable, that is an invasion of my privacy. But in our discussion today, I realized the term "privacy" deserves a deeper thought.

The presenting group told us a little story of a couple engaged in some romantic activities in the public and was taken photos of. Those photos later appeared on national magazines, but the couple felt that their privacy had been invaded. I understand why the couple felt that way. If you don't expect to see your photos appear on national magazines, especially photos in which you engaged in romantic activities or pictures that make u look bad, you probably will be shocked and pissed. On the other hand, I totally understand the photographer's point of view of using those photos. People usually do not expose certain parts of life in the public if they don't want other people to see. The photographer's perspective is simple: If you show it to the public, you don't care about letting others know, so it won't be a big deal for me to make use of it.

Well, both are correct, but at the same time, I feel that both parties fail to put themselves in each other's shoes. I would not dig my nose in a department store to begin with if I don't want others to see it. But if I were the photographer, I would at least notify the people that i'm taking pictures of before I use them on magazines.

This reminds me of my experience in China last summer. I went to China with friends. While we were taking photos of the Forbidden City, other Chinese tourists were taking pictures of my white friends. Not "with", but "of" my friends! They didn't come ask us if it's ok. Instead, they just took the pictures right in front of us, and some of them were so close that I was worried their camera would hit our faces. My friends found it interesting of how curious Chinese people were to foreigners. None of them got mad because people were taking pictures of them without asking first, but I believe they would be shocked if they saw their pictures on Chinese national magazines the next day, especially if those pictures made them look bad.

As our guest speaker said today, it's very hard to define privacy. An incident that some people think as an invasion to the privacy might seem just normal to others, just as some couples won't mind their pictures being posted on magazines while some got mad. I'm not an expert of this issue, and I don't know how to give the most complete definition of privacy, but one thing I learned from my experiences is that it's better to ask first than being accused of invasion of others' privacy. As for the difficult part of defining privacy, I'll just leave it to those cybersecurity experts then.

Cultural Imperialism and Ladakh

We're so used to having access to the Internet in our homes and schools, and now thanks to the iPhone, I can even go online without a computer. Because everyone in this nation has Internet access, it's really hard for us to imagine "the outside world" where people have to walk 3 hours to an Internet Cafe, and pay his or her whole month salary to use the Internet.

It sounds unbelievable? But that's what I saw in Ladakh, a province of India that is located near the Himalayas and the border with China. The capital city of this province is called Leh, and that was the only place that I could possibly get Internet access. Aside from Leh, every other villages were separated by mountains. In the American way of thinking, you might think every household has a car. However, it was not happening in Ladakh. Cars were usually too expensive for a typical Ladakhi family, so they either walk for hours or sometimes even days to go to Leh, or they had to take the bus which was available only once a day, or for some areas, once in a couple of days.

The incomes of local Ladakhis are very low. They are probably not as poor as the migrant workers in China, but having the Internet access is definitely out of what they can afford. The younger generations might have seen computers a few times in schools, but many old Ladakhis have never seen a computer in their entire life. This comes to a question of whether or not people from the developed countries like us should offer them some devices to eliminate the digital divide.

As a person who lived there for weeks and adopted their way of living while living there, I say we should not force them to change the way they live. We might think we have more money, we have the Internet access, and we can go online and search for whatever we want to know. But before we claim that helping them to have better lives is the responsibility of us, the rich people from the rich country, how many of us have ever thought of what they really want?

When I lived in the local temple with many of my little lama students, I realized we can never judge other people and their culture by the standard we have in the US. They may not be as rich, they may not know what Google is, or they may not even heard of the term World Wide Web, but they are just as happy as we are, or even happier and more satisfied with their lives because they are not as greedy as many of the Americans.