When given the choice of multiple forms to tell, express, and explain John R. Searle’s “Mind, brains, and programs”, I immediately knew I wanted it to take the form of a blog. To me, blogs are a great form to put information and your opinion out in the world to your audience in a casual but still professional tone. One of the purposes of this assignment was, essentially, to translate and simplify a scholarly article into something that would be easier to understand for a general audience. I figured, what better way to make something so highly professional into more of a casual toned work than a blog. I thought a blog would be the perfect form for this assignment: re-telling and communicating information from a long and difficult to comprehend scholarly article in a way that anyone can understand. Searle’s work and article are about a subject that I find to be extremely complex, complicated, and confusing. Although I’ve heard about artificial intelligence a lot, I knew very little about the subject of artificial intelligence. With this page on my blog, I hope my audience leaves my page being more knowledgeable on not only the subject of artificial intelligence but also the importance of it. My goal was to present this information to my audience and for them to be able to make a conclusion about artificial intelligence after reading it. Of course, this page by itself does not include everything about artificial intelligence as it is focused on relaying the information I found in Searle’s text, however, I do hope the reader is able to at least know what artificial intelligence is, what the Chinese Room argument is, why knowing about something like Searle’s text is beneficial, and why role artificial intelligence plays in our world. I chose to use the timeline feature on Edspace because, although I was not doing an actual timeline, the timeline feature served as an aesthetically pleasing format to organize the information. I was able to divide up my information and section them in order to make it less difficult for the reader. I know that many times if I see something that is too long, I will be less inclined to read it. While I still wrote a lot, using the timeline feature to break the whole text apart was really beneficial in the sense that it made it more pleasing to the eye.
I didn’t choose to do a podcast, timeline, or vlog, because those forms couldn’t convey what I wanted to convey. When I think of a podcast, I think of interviewing people or conversing with others. While it would be fine to do a podcast on my own as well, I didn’t think it was best suited for this assignment or me because it didn’t allow me to have the visual organization of my text. I had a vision in mind and thought it would be best to see something instead of listen. I would’ve chosen a podcast if I was trying to converse with something else and have a discussion about artificial intelligence with them. I didn’t choose to do a timeline because, to me, Searle’s text doesn’t really need a timeline to be expressed. The text is more philosophical than historical so it seemed like his whole article, other than his Chinese Room experiment, was showing different perspectives, ideas, claims, and arguments to further prove why his argument stands. I could not think of how I would structure my writing into a timeline form to communicate general information about artificial intelligence and Searle’s work. Lastly, I did not want to do a vlog because other than the fact that I am not super familiar with video editing, I thought it might’ve been boring for me to speak to the camera (audience) for so long.
Personally, the idea of using a blog to communicate this information was what jumped at me first. Whenever I want to know more about something, the first I do is type whatever it is into Google and find an article about it. Thinking about my process of finding information in a casual setting, I wanted to present the same for my audience. Professors and highly educated individuals of the artificial intelligence world are definitely not stopping by my blog, however, it is not meant for them. The goal of this blog page using the timeline feature was to teach the general public about artificial intelligence and to be specific, I wanted whoever read my blog to leave knowing these things: what is AI, what is the Chinese Room argument, why was it created, why is it important to know about. I also wanted my readers to be capable of making their own conclusions and decisions about the Chinese Room argument and AI after reading my blog. I tried my best to keep my personal opinion out of the blog for the purpose of solely communicating information. In conclusion, I hope the format and aesthetic of my blog was able to entice my audience to read my blog and that my blog was able to tell the general public a thing or two about AI and Searle’s Chinese Room argument that they didn’t know before reading my blog.
