Zander Rayna's perspective on our Futurecasting project was extremely insightful and helped me understand everything that goes into future casting. For him, future casting is a little more focused on the realistic and useful technologies that can help whatever area he is interested in. This was something that helped me refine what I was looking at in my future casting project to aspects of the future I was interested in. This could even be aside from the traditional big futuristic topics (i.e. technology, climate change, etc.) and include smaller topics such as comic books (which I added this week to my future casting project). This decision was also influenced by Zander's remark that "Research and life experience, yields a better forecast." and "Accuracy increases with more knowledge." I hold a lot of knowledge within the umbrella of comic books (mainly DC and Marvel comics) so I decided to add that topic to what I was focusing on in the future casting project. 

I found Zander's idea of synthetic reality replacing the real. Especially the notion of "you" within that synthetic reality. In relating this to the Alter ego project Zander brought up, does the ability to represent yourself in a fully synthetic space liberating for some who were possibly born into a body that they did not feel fully showed who they were? Or does it increase the risk of telling people they are imperfect and the only way to live the way they want is to create the perfect version of themselves? And is that character really you or just a lie? These are the new psychological questions we must ask ourselves before falling too far down this rabbit hole. 

Another thing to note about Zander's ideas within the topics "What is 'you'?", "objective reality", and "does tech increase interaction". All of his subtopics are seen from the eyes of a consumer. In other words, his ideas are very business-oriented probably because he has been trained to think that way while working for a bigger company. For example, better accuracy and a seamless experience is something most businesses want for their customers so their customers will want to continue using whatever software the company puts out.

On an unrelated note, a few years ago when I was taking a VR/AR class at The Cooper Union, I came up with the idea to create a fully AR Solidworks/Fusion 360 program where engineers could create 3D designs within a real world space. The TAs for that class grilled me with questions about this (because they didn't think it would be a useful invention). The question that stumped me was "what makes this different from the normal program?" After watching Zander's talk I was thinking about how he said "the best UI, is no UI". If I had thought through my idea enough I should've said it would be more intuitive and involve more gestures than key commands. This is a project I might come back to if I take your (Carla's) VR/AR class (my inspiration for what I'm imagining can be found here 0:08-0:36: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmmyDjxMg5Q).

The Uncanny Valley is a strange place to be, between the real and the unreal. Right now it might not be worth it to spend so much money to create something that has to look photorealistic otherwise it might end up in the uncanny valley, however, computer graphics technology has advanced so much in the last few years, it would make sense to think that cheaper technology should become available in the near future. 

What are the applications of this technology and some of its upsides and downsides? Zander talked about how the technology could be used to recreate a baseball match so the viewer could watch it at any time from any viewpoint. However, this technology could be used against the players to analyze weaknesses. Zander also pointed out the use of this technology in fake news and propaganda where people literally stole a real person's face and made a video that seems believable. This is scary to think about because we have come to the point where we can't trust everything we see. 

This technology becomes even more malicious when other companies start to use facial recognition to analyze a users information to create a personal profile of them that can be sold to 3rd party companies. While this information is technically public, it results in a profile that could contain some potentially private information.

These new emerging technologies raise interesting questions, new ways of thinking about our own privacy, and a possible need for regulations. The future may hold many advancements, but just as there are advancements, there comes a new philosophy we must take into consideration before technology knows more about us than even we, or some of our closest friends, know about ourselves.