Good Morning!
I’ve been spending some time rewatching old Hawaii five-0 episodes lately. My dad and I used to watch it when I was little and I always loved it. The drama, cases, characters, style, and cars! It’s such a good show and there’s not an episode that goes by where I’m bored. This morning I watched the episode about the computer killer. It was so interesting to see parallels between the times then and modern struggles in regards to computers and morality.
There was a software engineer who was feeling used by the company he was working for as they asked for more work and only really delivered praise to him while the owners made tons of money off of his ingenuity. He ended up making awful decisions and using his expertise to go out and murder people in order to get someone off a murder charge in exchange for a lot of money to get out of his job. Although I can’t support his actions there was definitely some sympathy for the devil as we see this all of the time. People being used by big tech companies and nothing to show for it other than meaningless praise and often times now they’re being replaced by the technology that they helped to develop. It’s a mess.
In the end Steve McGarrett said something that I feel on a deep level is still relevant now, maybe quite a bit more than it was at the time. “You know, all we can expect from a computer is information. It is just a piece of hardware, no values, no morality. But our society is concerned with people, and we expect much more from them.”
That really made me think. It’s something that is so human to express and I’m sure has been expressed over and over again through history as technologies develop and change. It’s a struggle and where do we draw the line between using technology at the expense of our morals as humans? I think about this a lot and the push of society that put people into situations where they are comfortable forsaking morality for advancement and ease of access to information. Especially now that generative ai is at the forefront of so many advancements. There’s not any oversight on the information that it’s compiling and I’m seeing so many people willing to just accept it as truth since it came from a computer versus looking into the sources. Maybe it’s an ignorance is bliss thing.
Anyway, definitely give Hawaii five-0 a chance if you haven’t watched any. There’s a lot of overlap in themes that relate to modern issues and the characters really are interesting with lots of fun cases to work through. It’s dated but clearly has a heart to it that makes me come back time and again. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
I hope you all have a great day and stay curious!
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