Harper J's Blog

  Ethics Reflection: Thank You for Smoking (2005) When I first started watching Thank You for Smoking (2005), I thought it was going to be more of a comedy than a movie about ethics. It definitely had funny moments, but as the movie went on, I realized it was really about how powerful communication can be and how people choose to use that power. The movie follows Nick Naylor, a spokesperson for the tobacco industry whose job is to defend cigarettes, even though everyone already knows they are harmful. Watching him argue his way out of almost every situation made me think about whether being good at convincing people is always the right thing to do. The biggest ethical issue I noticed was how Nick used persuasion. He almost never answered questions directly. Instead, he would change the topic or make people focus on something else. Even though he wasn't always lying, he also wasn't being completely honest. To me, that is still unethical because people deserve the full truth, e...

     After watching the second hour of In the Age of AI , I realized that artificial intelligence is a much bigger part of our lives than I ever thought. Before this documentary, I mostly thought of AI as ChatGPT, Siri, or the videos that show up on my TikTok page. I knew it was becoming more popular, but I did not realize how much it is already being used in healthcare, businesses, and even national security. Watching the documentary made me see both the good and the bad sides of AI.      One thing that really stood out to me was how much AI can help people. It can help doctors find diseases earlier, make businesses run faster, and even do jobs that are too dangerous for people. I think it is really cool that technology has come this far, and I can only imagine what AI will be able to do in the future. It is exciting to think that it could solve problems that people have been dealing with for years.      At the same time, the documentary ...

     Before this class, I had never heard of confirmation bias, but after learning about it, I realized it is something that affects me almost every day. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that supports what we already believe while ignoring information that challenges those beliefs. I think everyone experiences it at some point, even if they do not realize they are doing it.      As a college student, I spend a lot of time on social media, especially TikTok and Instagram. I have noticed that once I watch or like a certain type of video, my feed starts showing me more content that is almost exactly the same. After a while, it can seem like everyone has the same opinion that I do. Learning about confirmation bias helped me understand that social media is not always showing me every side of an issue. It is mostly showing me what I am most likely to watch.           I also see confirmation bias when I talk...