CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - The Machine Stops Writing Prompt (10 Points)
Assignment Goals
The goals of this assignment are:- To reflect upon the course texts in preparation for thoughtful discussion
- To organize thoughts into a concise and cohesive response to a targeted question
- To consider multiple viewpoints about ideas
The Assignment
Please read the questions below and answer them in a letter addressed to the author, about as long as a 1-2 paragraph response. Write back to Forster in your own voice, quote the story at least once in support of what you say, and raise one respectful counterargument, supported by a quote, that he would have to answer. Submit your letter through Canvas before the start of class.
The letter is the default form here, and it applies to Question 1, where you may swap in any of the other four genres (analytic, letter, dialogue, marginalia+aphorism, or the Four A’s) as long as your response still carries a quote and a counterargument. The remaining question asks for a specific artifact we use in class, so please submit that one in the form described.
If you want help with the reading itself, How to Read Hard Texts in CIE is the place to start.
Writing Prompt
-
Forster published this story in 1909, and yet it anticipates video calls, content feeds, and lives mediated entirely by machines. Which prediction unsettles you most, and why? Quote the passage. What has Vashti lost, and why does she not notice the loss?
-
Kuno warns that the Machine stops. Draw a Personal Machine Map, which we use in class: put at the center the system whose silent functioning your daily life most depends upon, radiate three dependencies out from it, and write one sentence per dependency naming what would fail if it stopped. Beneath the map, answer in prose: what would its stopping reveal about you, and is Forster’s ending a warning, a hope, or both?
Submission
Please submit a word processed or PDF document.Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.