This is Florida Gulf Coast University.
OTTO: It is 2022. The blackout of 2012 presented us
with many challenges, and we now face another one.
We know who is responsible for the global EMP attack:
super-intelligent robots.
Welcome to the singularity
and good luck.
This course is a
Themes in the Humanities course,
and the theme that we focus on is
apocalyptic themes in the humanities.
This is a 140-student course. We have
four professors that teach the class,
and each professor takes a unit of the course
where they focus on their apocalyptic theme.
On day one of the class we have them
divided into twelve different tribes,
and these are the groups of people that they're left with
after the first apocalyptic scenario happens.
We do breakout sessions
where we have four scenarios.
WILKINSON: Should we let them help us out
at the cost of sharing resources with the robots?
WALCH: They have offered to share all their
digitized information with all the humans.
They have to implant transmitters and receivers
within us. All the tribes have to agree to this.
OTTO: I did an issue of robot rights.
So should we consider robots to be humans?
It gets students thinking about rights issues in general:
what does it mean to be human, and so forth.
This is not a class where we're
teaching you to prepare for the apocalypse.
But it's really the idea that
when we think about the robot apocalypse,
or robots becoming super powerful entities,
and all a sudden they demand rights.
That's not a question of,
"Oh no, do we give robots rights?"
It's a question of, "Let's sit back and think
what rights are in the first place."
STUDENT: I think the issue
we should talk about is
if I'm not considered a human,
would I be considered second-class?
STUDENT: I think that they should be
treated as humans in the aspect that
if they do something wrong
they should be punished as humans,
but they shouldn't be given, like,
the status as a human, because they're not.
STUDENT: So you're saying that, like,
we're separate but equal,
but you still want to use them
as a labor force.
OTTO: Sam Walch, our first professor,
focuses on war.
Andrew Wilkinson focuses on
time travel and resource issues.
WILKINSON: We're thinking we could go back in time,
pre-EMP, to save the planet.
But we can only send
three people back,
and the mission would be to destroy robot technology
before the robots became self-aware.
STUDENT: Our resources are being depleted.
We don't have a future ahead of us.
So, like, the option is: either go back and get rid
of the robots altogether or just kinda die off.
STUDENT: Tribesmen sent back may drastically
alter the present, creating worse scenarios,
or erode the present entirely.
STUDENT: When we're fighting for survival
and our quality of life is that low anyways,
I wouldn't, I wouldn't be afraid to risk it, no.
MANCINI: Ten nos and two yeses.
We are not using the time machine.
OTTO: And Miles Mancini does
the ever-popular zombie apocalypse.
MANCINI: We think about disease
[Unintelligible] all the time.
What if a wave wipes out everyone,
but not just wipes them out,
changes humanity, changes society.
What if the dead stop staying dead?
Most of the authors will say, the creators will say,
it's not really about zombies.
You're missing the point if you think that
the zombie story is really just about zombies.
The issue that we have with a zombie narrative
are these ethical choices that we have to make.
How do you survive?
What are the rules that you follow to survive?
That's always an interesting aspect
of the zombie narrative.
OTTO: We have created robot tribes
and we have created zombie tribes
so that we inject different interests. And I should add
that that's really the focus of this course.
When you're reading H.G. Wells's
War of the Worlds and the aliens take over,
it's a metaphor for how humans treat other humans.
And so that's really what we're trying to do.
When Sam Walch talks about war, is he
seriously considering the EMP attack happening?
Maybe to some extent, but more so
he is considering: why do we have wars?
MANCINI: We have selected five of the
most outstanding films from our class.
Twelve films were submitted.
Only five made the final cut.
[Power down sound]
STUDENT: Do you have any idea
what's going on?
My car is dead, my iPhone's dead.
There's absolutely nothing. Everything's out.
OTTO: This course is super exciting.
Students are into it.
I was talking to a student
on the way back from the debate,
and I asked her if she talks about this course with her
roommates. And she said that's all they talk about.
If it's capturing students in that way,
and if we're able to teach them critical thinking
and able to teach them problem-solving skills,
teach them the idea that there's difference in this world -
not everybody sees issues
in the same way that you do -
and we're doing it using a fun
scenario-based learning strategy.
And that's really the number one thing
about teaching this course.
