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Ethical Dilemmas Related to Technology
Anonymous Coward writes "I have a relative who will be teaching a college class on the topic of ethical dilemmas brought about by new technology. Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are. For example, 'If robots came alive, would we be justified in killing them?' is one that might come up if nothing more relevant were suggested. (OK, it might not be that bad, but you get the idea. He was using Netscape 4.76 on system 9 until last week.)
So, what are the most relevant ethical dilemmas brought up by technology? Note that I am looking for ethical dilemmas, e.g. 'Is Activity X moral?' rather than legal dilemmas like 'Is the DMCA constitutional?' Now is your chance to guide the young minds of the future toward stuff that matters."
How about the moral responsibility of scientists for the repercussions of their creations? Several things come to mind, the first being the developement of the atomic bomb and the subsequent massive loss of innocent life. And when does biotech evolve from improving genetic flaws to customizing a person as a whole?
But the coming rise of nanotechnology should also not be overlooked. Sure, the grey goo problem is largely hype, but what if something like that really does happen? Should the scientists working in nanotech be held responsible for an epidemic on a massive global scale?
These are all issues I would like to see addressed in a class on ethical dilemmas in technology.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
What if the artist encourages it?
What if the artist is pissed off by it?
Is violating the license less morally wrong if it's easy?
What about if the copy is of a lesser quality than the original?
What if it's a license that you like?
Carousel is a lie!
How about, "should somebody who isn't familiar with the issues be responsible for teaching them?" Seriously, this could also spin off into "should the largely technologically illiterate Congress be making laws about technology?" and other topics that shine light onto the pressing concerns that have been the cause of umteen YRO articles.
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
use of cloning technology on humans, obviously.
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Is ActiveX moral? I think the answer would be no, unless implemented right.
It is commonly held that a species becoming extinct is bad. Does it therefore follow that creating a new species through genetic engineering is good? If not, why not?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Your relative is teaching a class about which he/she knows nothing? How very sad for the students!
By stating that the DMCA is not constitution, that is certainly a legal issue. But one can look at the DMCA as an ethical issue as well. Is it ethical that the government has the right to determine how someone in this "free" society can view material in which they have purchased the license or copyright to. Certainly other ethical issues come up regarding technology, DNA databasing being one. Almost every issue I can come up with regarding technology seems to revert back to other ethical issues concerning liberty of self. Ultimately that is what we base our ethos upon though.
Spam is such an easy ethical problem.
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap. And it annoys 99% of all recipients.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
The TIA of course... Mr. Poindexter and his crowd...
how about the morality of agreeing to teach a technology oriented subject at school without having a clue about technology
Word game?
How about the ethical dillema of people teaching things that they don't know enough about?
Activity X is more of a security and architecture question than one of morality. Besides, if he wants to look 'current' he should focus on the ethical questions about .net....
(/me ducks the shower of rotten veggies headed my way)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
A very simple ethical dilemma - if a machine can do what ten people can, is it unethical to take away their jobs in the name of saving money? I mean, these are real humans we are talking about!
On a side note, I'm an information systems specialist, and the systems I design do flatten organizations and often eliminate people's jobs. This issue is one I often think about.
Is there a balance between how much machine replaces man?
Just my 2 cents..
-6d
Using biometrics (or bioinformatics - I can never keep the two straight) for profiling or matching facial images with those of known criminals.
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
MOD PARENT UP!!!!
One of the areas of most concern to me is the patenting of genetically modified foods.
I don't have a problem with genetic modification, as this occurs naturally everyday. I just don't like the idea that somebody owns the rights to grow certain foods. The potential exists for companies to effectively hold people to ransom for "licensing fees" so they may feed themselves.
Is the DMCA moral?
The book description:
What is music when you despise all sound?
That could be your base...
It is a truism in ecology that it is good to preserve ecosystems from invaders. This argument has been used against genetically modified crops and introduced predators.
Somewhere down the line, we are going to run into a situation where we have a completely new life form, engineered by humans, that is competing with existing species.
Is humanity obligated to value existing organisms over new ones? Should scientists live in fear of upsetting the established "order of nature?" Why?
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
Is it ethical for colleges to be shaping the future minds of America with a bunch of unrealistic hippy liberal bullshit, and to substitute an educational curriculum with left-wing brain-washing bullshit?
Is the use of technology to make missiles smarter morally justifiable if it saves lives? The weapon still kills after all.
Here are a few I've pondered lately... and per your writeup, I'm not asking if these are legal, but whether these are morally justifiable.
Is it moral for a government to confine a human being (citizen or not) without charging them for any committed crime? Is it moral to confine someone without telling them a definite fixed criteria for their release? Is it moral to confine a non-criminal and disallow any contact with family, representation, or Congress? Contrast with current "material witness" statutes.
Is it moral for the reading records of civilians to be collected by the government? Is it moral for a government to disallow librarians from discussing whether surveillance has been underway? Is it moral for a government to disenfranchise librarians from their First Amendment guaranteed right to go to Congress for redress? Contrast with USA PATRIOT (v1.0).
Is it moral for the government to strip a person of their birthrighted citizenship, to reclassify the person as a non-citizen so as to prosecute under different criteria for detention and punishment? Contrast with the proposed USA PATRIOT (v2.0).
[
Screw the proletariat, I say they're fair game for anyone!
is Google. "ethical dilemmas" technology yields some good ones, and some false positives; here's an interesting paper.
The first hit and one of my favorite questions, which I've debated to some length with friends in the past, is to what extent you can observe your workers' use of the Internet. After all, their traffic runs through your servers in a manner akin to a person shouting cell-phone conversations; but should you accept that those 8 hours a day will not all be spent filling TPS reports, or should you employ Draconian tactics to monitor users' porn-site usage?
Another interesting one, less IT-related but also interesting, is the economic issue: if the application of certain expensive technology can save human lives, should it be used, to whom should it be offered, and who should have to pay?
Perhaps one day SETI will present us with another dilemma: If you know a religion to be false, should you tell its followers? Some would say this is already an issue in the modern information-enabled world.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
So this relative of yours is going to be teaching a *college* course on a topic of which they know absolutely *nothing* about?
Tuition well spent, I'm sure.
- Napster/music stuff and the idea of copyright.
- Privacy issues. Can email be examined? Can one "tap" a network to discover information? Can a disk account be examined. What are the conditions. Are they any different than mail/phone?
- Ownership issues. If I work for a company/university, do they own all the code I write or only "some" of it. What are the conditions?
- Hacking. Should "innocent" hacking (non-damaging, no gain by hacker) be prosecuted. What about someone identifying security problems.
Also, what is unusual, in general, about technology unique in comparison to previous work in ethics? Anything?Example: 50 years ago, most people considered it OK to kill whales. Now less people do.
Example 2: Traditionally, Eskimo people left their old folk out to die in the snow. Then came the white folk and charged them with murder. Who is ethically right here?
There is no right or wrong, there is only opinion formed from one's value set.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Some time this century we'll likely be able to produce artificial intelligent creatures, be they machines or tailored organisms. Where do we draw the line between "person" and "non-person", and how do we assess this in practice?
If the previous point is a concern, this one will be too.
E.g. works of art, algorithms/code, ideas/concepts, pictures of people, medical records. Justify from both a moral/ethical and a practical viewpoint.
We arguably have this _now_.
All of these are going to have to be dealt with sooner rather than later, and none have cut-and-dried answers, no matter what position you take. Enjoy.
"under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Thoreau. If a technically sophisticated person recognizes an act as being immoral is he justified in using his techical skills to combat it. Is he required to do so? Can he do so anonymously?
"very like a whale..."
Is spying legal?
Seriously, you could make a course out of slashdot ethics alone!
Is it ethical to link to some poor little site without asking permission or mirroring?
Is moderation censorship?
Should advertisements be passed off as "news?" How ethical is the extreme bias in slashdot reporting?
Is it proper for Cmdr Taco to have a mouthfull of big black cock and a belly full of cum? On Sunday?!
Its always about is it moral to kill an A.I robot, what I want to know is if its moral to 'love' an A.I robot love, not war!
What code of ethis should system administrators operate under? Should there be an external code, agreed upon by some standards body or should a sysadmin simply do whatever the policies of the company she works for dictate?
Some examples:
1) A person in management who is not the boss of employee Jane Doe asks the sysadmin for files in Jane's network space. The person asking is above Jane in the heirarchy, but not in the the org chart path to Jane. Say a manager in another department. Should the sysadmin just give the files to the manager or ask that the request come from either the sysadmin's boss or from Jane's boss.
2) Should a company that doesn't actively close ports used by file sharing programs be liable for employees that use those programs. The company provided the bandwidth after all and could easily have blocked the ports.
3) Jane brings her computer to you as a professional repair person to fix a part. While fixing the computer, you browse through her files to make sure everything is working correctly. You notice some files have interesting names and discover that Jane is having an affair. Do you tell her husband? Should Jane be able to sue you for breach of confidentiality if you do?
4) Should tech people be made mandatory reporters? School teachers, doctors, and counselors can be made mandatory reporters of child abuse. What if we aren't talking about kiddie porn, but the parents are drug dealers?
What if it is "just" pot?
5) What responsibility, if any, do users/resellers have for groundwater contamination by the dumping of old computers?
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
And that's just a few off the top of my head.
This was a good one brought up on /. recently...
The Ethics of Stealing Wireless Bandwidth?
If the music industry has screwed us over for many years - remember "now that compact discs are available and cheaper to manufacture than cassettes, you will see a reduction in prices" (paraphraised from a record company exec) - is it ethically acceptible to rip off the music industry like they ripped us off? Compressing music files and file sharing software enable this type of approach. Is it ethical?
What happens to the artists represented by large companies and small companies in this scenerio?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I can see a strong ethical dilemma here. Putting aside the science fiction/horror aspect of AI, is it ethical to try to be "God"? If so, how would AI be treated from a Human Right's point of view? What could this future technology do, are there advantages? Disadvantages?
If I, as a technology specialist, continue to field random tech support phone calls from freinds, family, and friends of friends and family, what are the ethical rules surrounding the beer they rightfully owe me? Should said beer be handed over before or after services are rendered? What about an "all you can drink while you're here" policy for housecalls?
These are important ethical dilemmas that need discussion and input from the academic community.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
A couple of posters have already alluded to this - the field of information privacy is full of ethical issues.
To begin with, the pedagogue might ask the students to try and define why privacy is valuable - that in itself is a tricky question. Different models could be proposed, such as universal anonymity or, by contrast, Brin's universal openness. What are the reactions? Is privacy about your one big dark secret, or about a myriad of little factoids about you that you don't mind sharing with others, but which, when collated, help large organizations (commercial / governmental / NGO / terrorist) manipulate your desires and fears?
Once the class has reached some sort of compromise argument as to why privacy might be valuable, the pedagogue could go on to try and measure that value. Is it worth money? How much? How many students have given a factoid about themselves in return for "10 e-credits"? This can branch into a discussion of public awareness of the ability of modern IT to spin numerous factoids into a detailed profile. Should people be saved from the consequences of their ignorance? What if they know but don't care, like someone who chooses to take up smoking these days with knowledge of the dangers - should the state prevent that? (Note that I didn't specify smoking tobacco - an example of disparate treatment of different types of voluntary addiction by notionally autonomous and responsible citizens).
How about lives? Should we trade security for privacy, and how much? This can develop into a political argument, in which the role of privacy in enabling resistance to oppressive government is discussed (with real world examples, of course). The idea that liberty is worth spilling blood for is generally accepted - so, connect privacy to liberty and see if the students would agree that privacy is also worth spilling blood for.
Privacy is, IMO, a good testing-ground for many ethical issues in that it touches so many facets of our lives - economic, social, psychological, political and military. The different ways in which technology raises these issues - through web bugs, ubiquitous cameras, face-recognition technology, thermal imaging and massive datawarehousing - can provide enough material for an entire semester...
How about "what does the copyright bargain really mean, if authors use technology to grant or deny access in perpetuity?"
[
Take a look at A Gift of Fire by Sara Baase, which explores social and ethical issues of computing technology. This was my textbook for my computer ethics class in school, and is a good read whether you need a textbook or not. It discusses, for example, the Terac-25 incident, where a software probem in a radiation-therapy machine gave truly massive overdoses (over 100x intended) to cancer patients, causing severe injury and death. This was one of the first cases where poor programming (in conjunction with other design flaws) directly caused death and injury in the public sector. It goes on to discuss both ethical benefits (such as revolutionizing business by providing information technology, reducing paper usage, etc) and hot ethical topics (privacy issues, safety issues, freedom of speech, computer crime, etc).
How about taxation of CDR's. a lot of people will use them to copy copywritten music, but should everyone who buys a blank CD be forced to pay a few cents to the RIAA? Not to mention sony, the corporation that produces the cd burners and cds, then complains that people can use them to copy the music created by artists under sony's label.
What about the ethics of a hypothetical individual who has an idea for software that could save lives, perhaps a medical program. But this individual is employed by a company that claims ownership to any ideas/inventions/patents/etc of this person during their employment. Is this person obligated to start work on the idea for someone else, or should they take the time to develop the idea on their own. The same could apply to people in the military. Do you wait four years to start saving lives? or do you let the military take all the profit.
Speaking of the military, what are the ethics for creating machines that kill. Military weapons and all that. Computers have become an integral part of warfare.
Ethically, if software has a bug/flaw in it, is the developer ethically supposed to fix it. What if this software is depended on by other people in very sensitive ways. Is the developer allowed to only fix this flaw in a newer version that the developer charges for. Can you legally charge someone to fix the flaws in their software? Why does this whole paragraph remind me of microsoft over and over.
Oh, and drop the "if robots came alive" thing. That's like teaching a philosophy class and asking "What if garfield came out of the newspaper and he was real".
American companies selling the hardware/software responsible for the Great Firewall of China. Or those men working for the government building Carnivore and its replacement?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Here's a question: is any intelligence truly artificial?
I mean, if a robot, toaster, or what ever has sentience, intelligence, and all the thinkgs that we think make us special, even if it was manufactured, is that intelligence truly "artificial" or is it "real"? If not, then at what point does it become real? When did it stop being just semi-programmed responses and boolean algorythms and become something more? When do we say that you can dismantle that car, but you can't disassemble that robot (without its expressed permission)?
If someone were to slowly turn themselves into a robot by, for example, slowly (over several years) replacing their biological brain & body with a machine surrogate, at what point would they cease to be 'human'. Would they still be alive and sentient or would they only have the appearance of such?
On a similar note is a question of rights to one's own labor. If an artist creates something which can be easily mass-produced who should profit by it, the artist or the manufacturer? What if something is created by a group of people working together? Can IP rights be transferred, much less sold?
There's a few.
Never ask the lunatic if he's crazy.
* If you're take hi-res telephoto pictures of your 18-yr old neighbor each night when she's getting ready for bed, is it ethical to send them in to hot-XXX-teen-sluts.COM for the world to share, or should you just keep them to yourself?
* If you see an Islamic suicide terrorist nervously fiddling with a nuclear device, should you point out that he forget to press the button that arms it, or is it better just to mind your own business?
* If you've forgotten the the name of that leftist anti-government web site you were looking at last week, is it acceptable to call John Ashcroft at 3am to ask him what it was? Or is it more polite to wait until morning?
* If you're driving down the street with your laptop running Kismet, and you catch a few unencrypted packets of a steamy erotic instant messaging session, is it acceptable to re-broadcast the conversion in real time with a loudspeaker and speech synthesizer?
* If you're making CDR's of Metallica's entire back catalog and selling them at your high school for $8.50 apiece, is it right or wrong to ask people not to share them on P2P networks? After all, that's where you got it.
* When you're at an anti-war protest that turns violent, what the fuck is up with that? Aren't they supposed to be against violence?
Well, that's all for now.
.. how would we know, anyway? I presume by "came alive" he means "attains sentience". But looking at a robot from the outside, there would be no way to tell if it was sentient or not, since its actions would still be based on the physics of the machinery it is built with. We could ask it "are you sentient" and just go by its answer, but its answer would still just be the result of the computing machiner which forms its "brain", and that might give an incorrect "yes" answer based on some reasoning that it thinks and therefore exists, or something - this answer still wouldn't reveal if it was "alive" (in the sentient sense), or just a sophisticated machine. Since we don't know what sentience is, we cannot measure it. For all we know, a Pentium CPU has some sensation of "sentience" on some primitive level. Essentially we're asking, "what is the fundamental difference between a biological organism and a machine" that "makes the former be considered 'alive'". It surely isn't self-awareness; we consider plants to be 'alive' and its unlikely they are self-aware. Its a bit like asking the question if spiders or insects or rats or whatever are sentient or "have souls" etc. At some stage we would probably have to make decisions about robots based on unknowns, i.e. not being sure what the truth is, but taking the robots word for it, or pondering if the robot can "suffer". If we so readily kill animals we know are alive (e.g. for hunting/sport/food etc), why would we feel more about a robot anyway? We'd feel more sorry for the robots than "actual" living animals?
Suppose there's something (like heart disease) that afflicts 10% of the population. Faced with an uncertain future, Joe (and his 9 cohorts) buys insurance so that he can pay for treatment if he is the unlucky 10%.
Now suppose that improving technology (like DNA sequencing) allows us to predict the future: Joe will get heart disease (and his 9 cohorts won't). Since the future is certain, the insurance market vanishes. No one will sell Joe insurance, because he is a known loss, and his 9 cohorts won't buy insurance, because they know that they won't need it.
Now when Joe gets heart disease, he can't afford treatment. Do we as a society institute some kind of welfare system to pay for Joe's treatment? Or do we just leave him to die?
I had this discussion over a large quantity of red wine with my Parents and a group of their friends. I have a degree in IT and work in the industry, and they see me as a guru because I know how to connect to the internet an fix their email and that kind of thing. The ethical issues they came up with were: 1. When the only way to access a service is via technology (eg internet), are we creating a class of people who are denied access to services because they don't have or understand the technology involved? Particularly of relevance to government services. Disclaimer: i don't want to buy into the pc's in libraries debate, this is about the ability to use the tecnology, not just have access to it. 2. Why do computers use so much electricity? In terms of pollution are computers to the 21st century what cars were to the 20th century, amazingly transforming society but at what cost? This is not just the electricity, but the lack of recycling, the use of polluting products in manufacture etc. 3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
lounge around on the blue couch
Is it more important to get technology such as the Internet into the hands of residents of the 3rd world, or to use more traditional approaches to increasing their welfare, such as food donation, education, transfer of farming tech, etc?
The same college has assigned its janitors to teach brain surgery.
Honestly, if he's teaching a college class he ought to either know what he's talking about, or at least be able to research it without a post to "ask Slashdot"
This sounds exactly like a class I am currently taking. We chose a topic and researched it for the entire semester; now we are presenting our research and writing a paper on it. Perhaps most relevant to the slashdot community (and incidently my topic of research) is the issue of privacy and technology. While my research was to initially focus on how technology is affecting privacy, it has begun to look at how legislation is regulating privacy. Now I won't bore you with the details of my research, but some other topics that are being researched in my class include:
The implications of nanotechnology.
The consequences of embedding microchips into humans.
Is genetic engineering ethical; to what extent?
Will gene therapy lead to ethical problems?
There is a ton of stuff that could be done on A.I. (should it be pursued? what if it becomes too smart?)
There is of course always the cliched cloning debate.
There are countless topics, many are in the field of biology but they extend into other fields as well. I would recommend looking into science fiction literature (Frankenstein, 1984 etc..). This can lead to some good discussion on the ethics of science (in fact, that is a large focus of my class).
Several years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article in
"Wired" called "The Future Doesn't Need You." In it
he outlined what he thought were the three biggest
areas of ethical ambiguity:
1> Artificial Intelligence
2> Nanotechnology
3> Bioengineering
Because he quoted the Unabomber in the article, that is all anyone ever talked about and his very valid ethical concerns were swept away by media hype. If your relative is teaching a class, this article might be useful.
Given the current concern/scare tactics regarding
"weapons of mass destruction" Joy's piece is as
relevant now as the day he wrote it.
(the truth, revealed slightly below the post)
< - Fishing for Ideas
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Isn't part of the problem - and possibly why so many Old World 'thinkers' (bureaucrats. politicians, Metallica (?)) get the Net, and associated new technologies, so very wrong - that some of these new technologies need new paradigms, new ways of looking at the world?
'Stealing' was easier to condemn when it involved an actual physical *loss* and the surveillance of people who encrypt their correspondence made (slightly more) sense when only spies encrypted.
Applying an 'old' view of what is ethical and what isn't is like judging modern trains by the standards of the 19th Century, when the idea that trains could travel at more than 15 miles an hour was absurd, dangerous and comical
That isn't to say that all old morals and ethics go out of the window, but doesn't *teaching* how new tech. relates to ethics require a knowledge of the tech. itself?
http://milkshake.dexy.org
I'm serious, it's not another joke about how this guy shouldn't be teaching the class.
What I'm really talking about is the lack of technology knowledge in our school systems... Our children are being taught and disciplined by people who don't have the slightest clue when it comes to technology. Example: Student downloads TightVNC, an open source remote viewing client, to access his home computer to retrieve a piece of homework. Student is subsequently suspended for 'hacking'.
The school's are not the only place this happens either, it's quite prevelant in the workplace too. How can someone direct a company that deals with technology when they themselves hardly know how to turn on their laptop...
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
- does the fact that a computer makes it easy to make a copy of a digital work make it less wrong to make an unauthorized copy? (I tried to get someone thrown out of University for a VERY gross case of large scale cheating - he got off because the (very non-technical) review panel decided that the fact that it was easy to cheat with a computer somehow made the act less wrong (I kid you not)).
- does the fact that the "owner" of a work isn't deprived of the work when a copy of it is "stolen" make the act less wrong (assume that the "owner" of the work is not deprived of any real or potential income and the "theft" is never detected)?
- does the fact that it happens to be easy to break into a particular computer make it less wrong to break into the computer?
- does the fact that I don't do any harm to a computer system make the act of breaking in and "having a look around" less wrong?
That should be enough to keep things hopping for a while. All of these questions have, in my opinion, obvious answers. Unfortunately, I've discovered that, like many ethical questions, what is obvious to some isn't obvious to others (and that even the folks who think that the answers are obvious can't always agree one what the answers are).http://www.extropy.org/exi-lists/ Bunch of very smart people who have talked about this sort of stuff day in day out for years. Reason
I took a similar class, and an interesting topic came up. While most engineers need to meet some quality standard, when it comes to software engineering these standards are very fuzzy. While civil engineers who want to go and build a bridge need to be certified before working on that sort of project, software engineers that work on very critical systems have no certification/standard.
i am not sure if this is exactly what u are asking for but i think its an interesting topic that isnt really far away from what you are looking for.
1) Is it moral for a government to stand idly by and allow the small business firm get crushed by legal action by the larger fish with more cash than they know what to do with? We've got lots of reports of incidents lying around slashdot's archives especially if you add the word "Microsoft" to the oppressor list (Lindows ring a recent bell to anyone?). Isn't a (to continue the metaphor) safe reef needed?
2) How far can you milk a patent till it becomes a crime?... Can anyone remember (and if I search the slashdot archives enough I'm sure I'll find it) the guy who tried to patent the predecessor to the hyperlink and tried suing all the big online providers? Or perhaps the more recent attack (bullying tactic) on IBM's assistance to the Linux community?
There are many other variants of these two questions especially when you get into specifics... hope that helps.
Is it ethical for a school to charge tuition for a class taught by a teacher that knows nothing about the subject?
Hi Slashdot. I accepted a programming job paying in excess of $100,000. I start tomorrow but have never programmed before. Can you give me some tips to help me fake it? I really want this job, but I'm scared that my lack of programming skills will get me fired! Please help!
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap. And it annoys 99% of all recipients.
Actually spammers do act ethically.
Spam is never going away until there is a solution to it. You can't stop humans behaving annoyingly when there's money to be made.
That solution has not arrived yet. When it does arrive, it won't be trivial, or someone would already have thought of it. Instead it will be something that takes real behavioral changes to make it work (eg, new standards and protocols, new software, new contractural arrangements between carriers, new legislation, etc).
History shows that humans never make such significant behavioral changes until they pass some kind of pain threshold - which can be very high.
To this end, spammers help. They proactively increase the level of pain in the Internet community. This brings forward the day when some kind of solution is put in place. So they are making the world a better place (or at least they will, some time soon). So I would say they are acting ethically.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are.
Sounds to me like he's not really qualified to teach the class. We've all had teachers who were fairly far behind teach us a subject in engineering school - everybody remember how little they got out of those classes?? Hmm???
Just a thought.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
How about those dilemmas:
:)
If you find a severe online security hole in a new important software application, is it correct to contact the programmers first (so they may release a patch) before warning the public (risking that the patch will be too late and other have already exploited the hole) or would it be correct to warn the public at once (risking that your warning will be abused as a pointer to the hole)?
Is it acceptable to make aviable for download / download software that is no longer distributed by its owners?
Using new biotechnology, would it be acceptable to create (via cloning or otherwise) new bodyparts to replace old/lost ones? Would it be acceptable to perfectly replicate a human's brain this way (if it were possible)?
In a hyperthetical situation, with gross lack of resources (food, raw materials, energy), would it be acceptable, given the appropiate technology, to convert human corpses into these resources to increase the chance of survival of the whole? Cosider the same situation where the conversion would not be vital, but still would greatly benefit the whole.
I hope you find them usable
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
What about the professor that uses a post on, lets say /. for example, to gather enough material for his ethics/technology class and then uses the material without giving credit to its source?
Of course this presupposes that enough usable material is gathered and that credit in not given.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
If we can choose the sex of a baby, it's moral to do it? What about the color of the eyes?
If we can know the probable lifespan of a person by looking at its DNA, should we allow an insurance policy based on it? Even if it's presented as a "discount" for sturdier people?
If we can exterminate an entire species, are we morally allowed to do it? Well we did it (almost) with the variola virus, but you could argue if a virus is alive. We'll soon be able to do it with mosquitoes, the tse-tse fly. Those are pests, but should they be erased from the face of earth? What about rats?
Some day in the not too distant future, all nations of earth will have an infectious pathogen agent with 98% fatality rate, six weeks of incubation (of which three in contagious state), and a safe vaccine for their own population. The nuclear arms race will look positively sedate in comparation. Should we (whoever this "we" is, soon it will be everybody) strike first?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
A priate with a peg leg is technically a cyborg, even some relgious sects won't take pace makers. I can't find the article right now but I remember awhile back there was a guy who bypassed the ethics board for permission to use human subjects cause he used himself.
What happens if we can exchange data though a cybernetic medium? What will emcompass personal idenity? What about knowledge theft? or Hacking other people's minds?
Furthermore, is it ethical to try to prevent these things? For instance is it ethical for the US to ban clone? What if another country (China) devlops
it anyway, and at that point it's out of our hands?
I thought...
No Active X is not moral.
We have the same class at our university. It's probably one of my favorite classes that i took here.
issues we discussed:
-liability: if you write software for a heart machine at a hospital and the machine causes someone to die, who's responsible? You? The company? The hospital?
-If porn is illegal in your community, and you buy online from somewhere outside the community, can the seller be charged with a crime? Should you be charged?
We also had several papers. Some were technical. I wrote a product review of XM radio and a paper describing how MPEG compression works. Other weren't technical at all. I did an essay on the Unabomber and his views on Technology.
Of course we also talked about the DMCA, MP3 swapping, Bill Joy's wired article on nano-tech, and Microsoft-opoly
Whether virtual threats constitute a real threat. Is it moral to threaten someone's persona online?
Search for ethics and MUDs, or MOO's.
Specifically, Julian Dibbell's A Rape In Cyberspace is a great topic.
barzelay.net
Presume a world where a massive amount of information can be gathered on every individual, whenever and wherever they are. This is in the real world, not just cyberspace (think billions/trillions of cheap, miniscule, networked sensors). Where are the ethical boundaries on the use of that information as it relates to our privacy, safety, personal freedoms, etc?
I would _HATE_ to be the student that takes the technology ethics course where the teacher has to rely on Slashdot for the curriculum. UGH!
In an attempt to be helpful, here are the textbooks that I had for my technology ethics course in college:
A Gift of Fire
and
Computer, Self, and Society
Both are excellent and will be about a thousand times more useful than an 'Ask Slashdot'.
[Seriously though, there are college professors that haven't even bothered to crack the standard textbooks for a given subject before teaching them? No wonder that our education system is so brutally fucked up.]
Who reads the spam and actually buys the shit?
I mean, really! Penis creams and secrets to date raping are not very saleable products.
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology. Some points he brings up or alludes to:
- Should we, as a society, curtail research on particular branches of science? Human cloning is the obvious one, but researching superbugs and genetically hand-made viruses might have enormous benefits--at a cost of extreme risk.
- Where do we draw the line between human and (for lack of a better word) robot? Nanotech, implants, and genetic mods are all coming to meet at a common point, and that point is SOON!
Some other interesting technological dillemas come to mind. Should we sell or aid the development of technology to 'enemy' nations? How do we define enemies for this purpose? I happen to work for a company that's substantially responsible for getting much of the US military aircraft into the air--am I partly responsible for the use those aircraft are put to? The same question could be (and has been) asked of the Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors--safe, cheap, efficient, reliable, and the easiest way to produce weapons-grade material.
This last one is actually a dillema as old as the hills--dealing with the enemy--but technology is becoming an important factor because it's drawing the world together. (Not to mention the HUGE role technology plays in any conflict these days)
Other issues: Technology eats power, consumes resources, produces waste--do we have a moral responsiblilty to drive as much technological innovation as possible towards cleaning up some of our messes?
The media is now able to modify live broadcasts--how do we control that behaviour? Pasting over footage of billboards with the station's advertising is pretty reprehensible, but what about when they start adding nonexistent people to war scenes?
But the real question may boil down to this simple one: How does technology actually change any of our present moral or ethical states? Does technology actually change our ethics, and should it?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
1) Is technological progress inherently good? Who does it benefit and who does it hurt (if any)? If technological progress is inherently good, are scientists ethically or morally responsible for their inventions? Are consumers responsible for their use of technology?
2) We are seeing that technology is making the world increasingly dangerous in the form of "asynchronous threats" or rather individual empowerment through technology that cannot be foreseen or prevented. (briefcase bombs, artificially engineered diseases, computer viruses, etc.). Is this a threat to human interdependence, or an inevitable feature?
3) Technology is making the world a lot smaller, and eroding private space and information. Will the ability of people to be in constant contact with each other, and perhaps in constant surveillance of each other, be a good thing or a bad thing? How will this affect human society and culture?
4) Lastly, are we asking these questions too late? Will humans ever be able to control the path of discovery and uses of technology? If not, should we?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Is it morally right to work for a professor when a grad student could be getting a stipend for it?
When photography was invented, Charles Darwin's cousin Frances Galton decided that this new technology could provide the perfect tool for detecting criminal disposition as a genetic trait... (After all, since composite photography progressively blurs out physical differences and leaves only similarities, a composite photo of 100 criminals should produce an image of the typical criminal, right? And if we superimpose the photographs of 100 Jews, then we'll finally get a pure image of The Jew...)
Fast forward to 2003: racial profiling per se may be frowned upon, but that doesn't stop security companies from designing photo-recognition systems that look out for... oh... "traits correlated to terrorism." Security companies, however, don't have to reveal the details of their programs' algorithms to the public since that might supposedly provide terrorists with the knowledge to circumvent those very security detection techniques.
So what's an airport / business / government to do?
If it was possible to achieve "teleportation" by completely replicating a human at the destination end, and then killing the original source, would this be morally acceptable?
I think that clones should not be able to vote
because, if they could, all the millions of
Ross Perot clones would vote for him. Also,
thousands of Saddams could immigrate and be
elected Senator.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
The most important ethical concerns nowadays deal with biotechnology I think. Cloning, genetic engineering, even animal rights. The other big thing nowadays is urbiquitous surveillance technology; plenty of real-world examples of that to bring up in class. The free software issue is unimportant at best.
Agreed,
If I could get away with murder. I would gladly kill spammers. These people have worked hard to deserve it.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news
Maybe your relative (okay, admit it... it's you) isn't quite qualified to teach on a subject he knows little about?
Just a thought...
Silly boy, it's a business ethics class and there are no business ethics. There are Software Ethics, Engineering Ethics, Medical Ethics, Legal Ethics and Sales Ethics is "caveat emptor", but there are no business ethics. All "business people" have to do is spit out their marketing and say what a great thing it is they are doing to the consumer. The teacher knows this, but tuition is already paid before the students learn it.
In big general terms he might look into the morality of NDAs, perpetual copyright through encryption and the future of the free press in a consolidated or even nationalized electronic network. That's how all those business folks get their best ideas. Business school is sort of like prison that way. It's cheaper to keep students than inmates, but they can do much more damage when they get out.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Nobody is going to go after you for relaying a few emails through a server. But when you relay thousands of emails through a server, it becomes a denial of service attack and people DO occasionally get prosecuted for these.
And `other unsescured resources' often means exploiting security holes in a system, and that's definately illegal too.
Here's a common ethical dilemma to us programmer: A pointy-haired boss (PHB) left unchecked:
1. Allowing projects to start without defined deliverables.
2. Allowing time-and-materials (TMA) projects to run wild with no schedule, since the company will eventually get paid regardless of the outcome.
3. Allowing marketroids to lie to the customers and public about your company's capabilities in the hope these can be acquired on the run if a project is signed with a big enough down payment.
4. Forcing people to keep billing on a project when it is a TMA with a "not to exceed" cost. If the cap is $200,000 and so far you have billed $175,000, you will be forced to find something to keep you busy until you hit the $200K or else.
5. Allowing customers to sign on a project without the buy-in of their technical people. Case in point: In a previous job my company got a huge defense contractor (127,000 desktop users) to sign on an intranet project that required IE 5 or Netscape 6. Small problem: The standard for this monstruous organization is Netscape 4.7, and overseeing the upgrade of 127,000 desktops to Netscape 6 or IE 5 would have cost twice as much as our project's budget. This could have been fixed had these people checked with their IT folks.
My fix was simple: I left. I got to see the company shoot itself in the foot, and went thru layoff rounds every 90 days. The day I was going to be handed over my pink slip I was interviewing across town. That afternoon I was told that I was spared at the last second. 2 days later I got offered the job across town and I jumped ship. I still program but only internally, my customers are my own employers so it is in their best interest to not lie to themselves!
We laid off a lot of good people at that previous company, and most of them by now have better jobs elsewhere. The few that are still working there are living thru pure hell every day of the week.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
"Basic biomedical research has long been heavily subsidized by United States taxpayers" the New York Times business pages observe, and "high tech pharmaceuticals owe their origin largely to these investments and to Government scientists." funded by billions of taxpayer dollars. But drugs funded by public subsidy are priced beyond the reach of those who pay for their development, let alone the bulk of the world's population.
Protection of "intellectual property" is designed to guarantee monopoly profits to publicly-subsidized corporations, not to benefit those who pay; and the South must be denied the right to produce drugs, seeds, and other neccesities at a fraction of the cost.
On similar grounds, the US refused to sign the treaty on preserving the world's biological species. The Assistant Secretary of State for the Environment, Curtis Bohlen, said that the treaty "fails to give adequate patent protection to American companies that transfer biotechnology to developing companies," and "tries to regulate genetically engineered materials, a competitive area in which the United States leads", the Times reports.
The US International Trade Commision estimates that US companies stand to gain $61 billion a year from the Third World if "intellectual property" rights are protected in accordance with US demands, a cost to the South of somewhere between $100-$300 billion when extrapolated to other industrial countries, dwarfing the debt service flow of capital from South to North. The same US demands will require poor farmers to pay royalties to TNCs for seeds, denying them the traditional rights to re-use seeds from their harvests. Cloned varities of commercial crops exported by the South (palm oil, cotton, rubber, etc) will also be commercial property subject to increased royalties. "The main beneficiaries will be the core group of less than a dozen seeds and pharmaceuticals companies will control over 70 percent of the world seeds trade," and agribusiness generally, Kevin Watkins observes.
While the US seeks to ensure monopoly control for the future, the drug companies it protects are cheerfully exploiting the accumulated knowledge of indigenous cultures for products that bring in some $100 billion profits annually, offering virtually nothing in return to the native people who lead researchers to the medecines, seeds, and other products they have developed and refined over thousands of years.
---
pgs.114,115 from Year 501, South End Press.
(c) 1993 Noam Chomsky
There is always the thought that technology change sports, and where should we draw the line?
I have heard about tennis-players using contacts to enhance vision so they can see the tennis ball better, also the use of gloves to cool players blood allowing the players an advantage. This is because the blood can go to muscles instead of the hands to cool down body-temperature. The use of vests to track players vitals. These are mostly add-on's but when getting a "robotic" arm or people bred with enhanced gene's all of these possibilites are a byproduct of technology.
Technology allows more people who do not have any idea about the subject... To get access to teaching this subject. It may become easier, for example, for a substitute who has no idea about calculus to "teach" it using some problem-generating and problem-checking software such as .
I once had a paranoid CEO that wanted to bang his executive assistant.
He had me share her exchange inbox, I didn't do much else other than that. He said it was because she was filing a sexual harassment lawsuit (untrue) and was just trying to find out if she was dating anyone from the office.
She was a nice lady, and having to look her in the eye daily knowing that I set it up so the CEO could spy on her (out of jealosy) made me sick, sort of depressed really.
There are situations where you know doing this for management is just, such as a corporate spy's or what not, but to find out who's bangin who is just detestable.
As science pushes boundaries, especially ones that directly involve human organisms, lawmakers are getting involved before they even know what science can do.
For example, cloning. Cloning, at its most basic, just creates a twin. There are no harvest-organs or implant-brain implications that don't involve other laws (murder) already. Yet, somehow, the ones who are deciding what we should or shouldn't do, the politicians, are looking at it from a movie-plot perspective.
Another, the space station. A public relations project, but not one endorsed by any true space enthusiast I know of. We'd all like projects that get us closer to a manned presence on the moon, or better/cheaper/faster/safer orbital access. The shuttle is a massively wasteful, unsafe, way to get to orbit.
Why don't we have a hydrogen economy *already*?
So how can we as a society pick a better way to influence research? How can we pick better people to draw the lines of where we should go or not go?
Anyway, cloning is just plain stupid. It is dis-advantageous for an organism to exactly replicate itself. Mother Nature figured this out a few hundred million years ago and invented sexual reproduction (and there was much rejoicing). Genetic variation allows for more flexability in a species so it can survive in a forever changing environment. Cloning goes directly against this concept.
So, listen to your Mother. If cloning should be banned, it should be banned because it is stupid, not because of morality.
IMHO. ;^)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Oh please. There's no reason to criticize the teacher just for not arrogantly presuming that s/he already knows everything there is to know about the intersection of technology and ethics. Seems like asking /. is a good place to start.
Sure, I agree that lawmakers shouldn't blindly limit freedoms... but we're talking about a school, not Congress. To disregard that distinction is to mistake apples for oranges.
But this raises an interesting ethical question in itself... Just who do you think would be qualified to teach such a course? A computer programmer? A tech company CEO? Kevin Mitnick?
First, here's an article by Bill Joy in Wired that may serve as a good starting point.
I've since condensed the argument like this. There are three general inputs into the future: science and technology, education and the spread of information, and war and violence. If we increase the first at the rate we're going, it will be totally catastrophic, since the destructive capability of technology has always outpaced the defensive capabilities (bullets before kevlar). Imagine the collusion of nanotech, biotech (esp. genetics), microprocessing, networking, robotics, organic computing, artificial intelligence, self-replication, etc.
You can try to control the spread of science and technology, but to do this you will also have to control/regulate the spread of information and education so that certain information is only available to a few "trusted" sources. If you start to restrict education to certain classes of people, this will likely inflame racism, and will also limit peoples' sense of opportunity and thier ability to participate in something productive to keep them out of trouble.
Another possibility is hoping that increasing the education in certain disciplines (such as ethics) will reduce the amount of violence. One problem with this, is that ethics cannot really be a specialized field, as otherwise people will still pursue technology and leave the question of its use up to those "qualified" to determine it.
If you ask my opinion, the most realistic solution is to reduce the amount of violence in the world. This is what Dr. MLK meant by choosing not between violence and non-violence, but between non-violence and non-existence. Simply put, if all people of the world do not start to get along better at an exponential rate, we will destroy ourselves. We've already destroyed and polluted a bunch of the ecosystem, and the rate of its destruction will eventually catch up to us. This is only to say that violence is not just physical against one another, but a general state of mind.
I just think that the whole paradigm of world society needs to change in light of this. We should look at it as if a gigantic meteor is going to crash into the earth in about 75 years. We can see it with the telescope, and we know for certain that it will destroy the earth unless we make a drastic change. The one difference is that with the "meteor" we're looking at, the solution is not just to blow the thing up (war) or ignore it (prison), which is our dual solution to everything at the moment. The problem is one of the spirit and of numerous forms of mental slavery that cripple us.
As Bob Marley said, we must emancipate our selves (not everyone else) from mental slavery, as none but ourselves can free our minds. Even though I'm optimistic, it currently looks as if patriotism, a form of racism, has embedded itself strongly into the minds of many. We should start to recognize our own shortcomings in others, and thereby choose to overcome racism, chauvinism, nationalism, patriotism, classism, tribalism, and the many other isms making the meteor bigger and bigger each day.
...ethical dilemmas, e.g. 'Is Activity X moral?'...
Did anyone else read this as "Is ActiveX moral?"
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Here's one that I have yet to figure out for myself:
Should we, as a technological society, share all our creations with other cultures?
As the inventors and producers of various technologies, we are somewhat ready for any given technology (though not always). However, sharing this "progress" with others leads to inevitable imbalance and has a steamroller effect on other cultures and societies.
For example, introduce a given technology in third world country X. This modern wonder saves 2/3 children and extends their lifetime by 30 years (a good thing). The problem is that in order to deal with the ensuing population explosion, progress must be made in terms of food production and other areas (housing, hygene in densly populated areas, waste management, etc. etc.). The obvious solution is to import yet more technology, to cope with these issues. Each of these additions causes their own social upheavals, which must in turn be dealt with...
In the end, you wind up with a duplicate of our own society (you've successfully integrated/eliminated another culture) or a disfunctional mess. The choice becomes "should we let them be (with high mortality, etc) or introduce a trojan horse (that will eventually destroy their culture) in the form of helpful tech?"
This is something that will blow the students away. A lot of you have heard this several times, but it is at the heart of the Microsoft vs. Torvalds debate.
Is it ethical to write software that must remain free?
Is it ethical to write software that cannot be copied in any way, and has limits put on its use?
Is it ethical for government to regulate the import/export/creation/use of software?
Should software be copyrighted at all?
The ethics of software is much more interesting than the legality.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
One area that might be covered might have to do with filtering practices and the Internet.
- Who controls the filtering, and what is filtered?
- Is it ethical for companies to monitor email / IM / etc. If so, who should be responsible for it? How are they themselves monitored to prevent abuse?
- While the answer to filter / not filter may be clearer in a corporation that owns the connection, what about libraries, schools, and even gov'ts? A recent example would be Pennsylvania's attempt to filter child porn. Why is this a good / bad idea?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The dilemas haven't changed since sentience was achieved. All that has changed is the subjects to which those dilemas are applied. The idea that the material must be specifically applied to bleeding edge material is ridiculous. A better plan would be to show the same dilema applied to situations 3000 years ago, 2000 years ago, 1000 years ago, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 25 years ago, etc.
Here's one that often comes up in computer security discussions:
DDoS worms, rather than directly attacking other computers from the worm creator's computer, take over other computers and then use them to perform an attack. If you're the one targetted by one of these attacks, do you have the right to defend yourself? Is it right for you to hack into an innocent person's computer because their technological ignorance is actively causing you harm? Would you and the people that depend on your network just having to sit there and accept the attack without any real defense be preferable to that? And if you have the skill to not screw it up (probably a rare skill, but still), would it be right for someone to create an "anti-worm" that deinfects computers that have become unwitting DDoS zombies?
Computer security is a field that is absolutely soaked in real life analogies, but this situation doesn't have one that anyone would ever encounter in their lives. "If a hypnotized/possessed person tried to kill you, would it be moral to hurt them in your self-defense?" isn't an analogy that provokes an instant pre-prepared answer.
There are two fine books that investigate this kind of thing from a broad academic perspective, _The Golem_ and _The Golem at Large_.
Its probably important to keep in mind that understanding bleeding edge information technology is not necessarily going to be more enlightening in a study of ethical dilemmas.
Things as simple as stairs *are* technology too!
I could moderate you today, but I'm feeling like responding, even if you are trolling.
The ends justify the means? Whether I agree with that depends on the ends, and the means; in this case, I don't agree with you. The ends, in this case, will be a more restrictive Internet and an e-mail system more hardened against spam. The solution won't fix anything more than spam itself. Why should I have to put up with spam now if the only solution spam causes is its elimination?
What a Utilitarian point of view. Needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. What if you are one of the few? What if you were desperately searching for a way to enlarge your penis?
Surely the need of those few outweight the need of the many due to their high level of suffering!
First off, I'd like to say that as someone who works for a university, and still takes classes (not quite free, but they're damned cheap), it pisses me off to see people teaching classes who shouldn't be.
However, it pisses me off even more when there are people expecting an education, and they don't get it...
So well, as we've already had the obligatory 'we want free music' post, how about spam? But then of course, it depends on how you word the questions --
And well, at this point, you start to realize that if you don't understand the concepts, debating these questions won't be possible, as well, there is no 'right' answer.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I work at an ISP that doesn't support Linux.
Me and my army of penguins are waiting till we can tell customers "sorry, we don't support MS windows, you'll have to call your OEM for assistance"
that day will come.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
I wrote a paper about a year ago about ethics in software project management, and found a couple useful articles. They may not be perfect matches for what you need, but might help.
/ sweden.htm
Rogerson, S., and D. Gotterbarn. "The Ethics of Software Project Management." The International Computer Ethics Conference. Ed. Göran Collste. Sweden: Linkoping University, 1997. 278-296.
http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/staff/Srog/teaching
Collins, W. Robert, et al. "How Good is Good Enough?: An Ethical Analysis of Software Construction and Use." Communications of the ACM. N.p., 1994. 81-91.
http://www.bunkmonkey.com/p81-collins.pdf (personal server, will be deleted in a couple days)
Should people be allowed to geneticly engineer or screen their children? Should they be allowed to make sick children healthy? Should they be allowed to make healthy children super children? If yes, what will happen to people whose parents didn't have the money to make their children superhuman?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
About the ethics of searching for and plagarizing other students' papers found on the Internet.
I would also suggest, like others, that the students consider the ethics of warez and the downloading MP3s, and examining the motivations of all parties who have weighed in on the issue.
And I'm not sure that "new technology" has affected the patent situation in this country, but the prof could examine the issue of patenting technology that later becomes used in industry standards (Rambus) or selecting an obscure patent and trying to enforce it upon the rest of the industry.
This is one that has come up and been eating away at my mind ever since I started a project [That I can't give too many details on], we're developing a new type of AI that actually thinks.. It originally started as a project where the computer learns whatever language you speak and can speak back naturally (Language acquisition in humans is an extremely fascinating topic for research), but it blossomed into much more when we decided to begin to develop it into a much larger platform, what is now the current scope of the project. The ethical dilemma is one that makes some scoff and some others think that we have large egos, but this tugs at us night and day; exactly where is the line drawn between artificial life and true life? We are not simply building a reactionary mechanism as seen in games today, but actual minds, we're more or less reverse-engineering the human brain; not coding what it thinks, but rather /why/ it thinks that way.. It is in an environment where there will be many interacting, and we are actually worried about some things... Where the line is drawn of what is what.. Where we actually have to decide what consciousness is and risk bestowing it to our own creations. Most would think that a fabulous accomplishment, but those creatures can and will die; if not by their own doing, what happens during a power blackout where the computer system is shut off? Where is it decided what true life is? When you feel pain, it's just an electrical impulse and your brain saying 'bad'.. It is the exact same with them.... I'm probably rambling by now, but I'm sure you get the idea.. I just hope someone gets to read this since it is so far down in the comments, I'd gladly continue a conversation in this thread or in E-Mail
Of course, alive or not has little bearing on ethics it seems (and as you pointed out). We kill animals and plants for food and sport all the time. So, as you mentioned, the real question is probably "at what point is something to be considered 'sentient'?".
Cheers. :^)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
what about the ethical dilemma of teaching a class which one has no idea about?
Technology doesn't have any unique attributes that give it more privlidge than any other subject matter.
.orgs (eff, aclu, etc) who w/o have done just as much as the big bad corperate wolf.
Congress, as a whole, doesn't know that much about farming or road work, or labor unions or pretty much anything.
Congress often *cant'* be the expert on subject matter X that any given group wants it to be. There are just too many laws and too many subjects.
So what congress does instead is listen to intrest groups and their constituants. Indivdual members/groups then write and sponser a Bill dealing with the concerns raised.
Each Bill is there for everyone in the nation to read and learn about (http://thomas.loc.gov) and if they do have a problem then it's their right to call up their congressman and say so. It's even their right to go to DC and address the subject matter. They can even start their own lobying group to try and changes things or pass laws addresing their own concerns.
It's just about who has money and who doesn't (though it would be naieve to think money doesn't help). Groups like the AARP have huge sway in congress. And there are thouslands of other such
And the real beauty of the system is that even if you say, "I don't like the system it's croupt and doesn't work as well as it should," you can go out and try to change it.
The only thing that never does any good is to complain about the state of things and not try to change it or even offer an alternative.
In short, it's our job to try to educate congress and others to the issues we feel strongly about.
Is it ethical for /. to link to a tiny server when /. know it's traffic will bring the site down, causing problems for the owner and possible extra expense to the owner? Does /. have an obligation to warn the owner? And if the owner says no, then what? Can /. not post the article? And can a person sue /. because /. knows it will cause a problem for the server?
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
If a teacher soliciting information to teach a course they have no clue about is acceptable(and it obviously is since they took the job and must now find material) then why is it unacceptable for student to solicit information for a class they are taking?
10) The invasion of "native americans" 40,000 years ago into North and South America.
9) That Chex Mix bear climbing that pretzel tree.
8) The elephant exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo by... elephants.
7) The forceful occupation of the sniping platform by the War Cow.
6) The spontaneous genesis of protolife on planet Earth roughly 3.5 billion years ago.
5) Mexican killer bees expanding into beer commercials in the early 80s.
4) The conquering of Asciipenisland by a battalion of strange character-based birds.
3) The outright theft of reptillian habitat by a small furry shrew-like creature awhile back.
2) The infestation of the Quatrotritcale seed storage by tribbles.
And the #1 apocalypse crazy nutcase ecologists would like to have prevented but couldn't is...
The infiltration of CmdrTaco's rectum by a trio of gerbils in Novemeber '99.
Without CDs, the RIAA would be forced to charge you at least $72.50 for a casette album!
Then again, they're using the same accountants that also project federal deficits...
Gentically Modified Organisms (GMOs)
Is it ethical for us to push the envelope of genetics and create our own made to order creatures? It might seem like and easy "no" or even "yes" but it isn't.
-Imagine if scientists discovered they could splice a few certain genes to create some special breed of monkey that would live its life in pain but would offer guaranteed universal matches for organs in humans. Is that ethical?
Bionics
The abicore heart has shown that we are well on our way of having artificial organs. Is this ethical? The first inclination might be yes. I am envisioning extending life of people by an extra 50 years or so.
This might sound great but if all thing were equal and everyone could reap the benefits then that could cause serious population problems as people would live MUCH longer.
Besides, this kind of technology will probably only really be available to those that can afford it which brings up a whole other ethical issue.
Something that's timely is the debate about personal privacy vs. the need for public security.
Some talking points could be:
- cameras watching public streets and their effect on crime (percentage of solved crimes and/or reduction of crime since implemented) - examples include London, UK
- Echelon (eavesdropping on telephone calls by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) - effectiveness as an international crime/terror reduction tool - the TV shows "24" and I think "Alias" as well have used Echelon-like systems as plot devices in the past, its existance has been admitted by the AUS defence minister a few years ago, and the EU set up a special committee to study its impact (including the fact that most EU countries weren't a part of the intelligence-sharing arrangement, yet there was very good chance their citizens could be eavesdropped upon without their knowledge)
- the recent plan by the US gov't to track all airline data in a national database (special food choices included)
- targetting of certain ethnic and religious groups for heightened surveillance, aka "racial profiling"
Netscape 4.76 on system 9 until last week is an immoral!
Sindri Traustason.
Premise 2: Exploiting that power to maximize profits could, taken to extremes, do significant damage to the overall economy's prospects for growth, and to efficient distribution of income.
Premise 3: The government in power will take no action under the antitrust laws, given considerations of political expediency or ideology.
Issue: Given these premises, does Microsoft have any ethical obligations to constituencies other than its shareholders?
Distinguish between a weapon and a tool. Give examples. Then argue the other side, using the same examples.
-kgj
I'm sure a ton of people were thinking about Napster and other p2p's and 'stealing' content from the artists, but what about the bandwidth side of the issue? Bandwidth (primarily upload) is the only true resource on the 'net, and yet it doesn't follow the laws governing a natural resource (you can't really run out of it). In a world where information is valued in and of itself, and the economy is based on how quickly that information can be moved around, what ethical issues come up within the community?
Bit torrent and other social engineering
Why are people more likely to leave that window up? Is it right to induce selflessness through selfishness? Does its simplicity detract frome the community?
Bandwidth management (and cheating)
Limiting is a good thing IMO. There are arguments that bandwidth limiting can be abused, but would anyone really care if it didn't affect them and could help others? There is also the issue of hacked clients (I'm a DirectCconnect user, and it is nearly impossible to use it w/o a hacked client)
Giving vs. Trading
Are ftp's with ratio's a good thing?
Does the one-sidedness of IRC send the right message?
Usenet slant
When upload bandwidth no longer becomes an issue, other things come into play like retention time, side effects of flooding (e.g. modem users cant download in time), etc.
ISP's
capping, quotas, throttleing, Terms of use, Async connections. Are these the right tools to use now that p2p has become the killer app for the internet?
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
Are copyrights moral, do they have any ethical realtionship to real property, is incentive really a moral foundation for a property right? do they really help artists and creators or just 1 out of a million? Is someone who coppies a pirate, like those who board ships and murder people, or a thief who deprives people of their limited resources?
Is it right to build nuclear weapons?
Is it right for psychologists to use their advanced knowledge to assist in the creation of advertisements aimed at children?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I heard a saying once... "Those who will not govern themselves will need a tyrant to govern them"
Example: The recording industry's backlash against Napster where the tyrant is DCMA and Copy Protected CDs.
Now you have to authorize the purchase of some model of computer and the software for it. You know that Microsoft makes shit software that costs a lot, and that authorizing the purchase of that garbage will take money away from important things, like education. Furthermore, you'll need 5 sysadmins for every computer, and they'll constantly run around retrying, rebooting and reinstalling because the computers are always malfunctioning. Which will, of course, cost more money that would otherwise go to education.
On the other hand, if you get Linux, the computers will be put into operation and they'll never have to be rebooted or reinstalled. Everything will work reliably. You won't have to pay for every license... one CD for 39.95 covers the entire campus, and you'll need about 3 sysadmins for the whole damn university, whose job will mainly involve patching for security updates and air-blowing dust out of computers once every six months. This will cost less, making significantly more money available for education, which will in turn make this country stronger, wiser and better. It will improve life and society. But, a shitload of sysadmins will be out of a job and they'll likely starve to death because everybody is going to throw away Windows in favor of Linux, putting all those MCSEs out of a job.
So what do you do? Choose the better, cheaper, smaller, faster operating system, save shitloads of money and improve education? Or choose the worse, more expensive, more bloated, slower and shittier operating system, waste enormous amounts of money in the process, but save the lives of some MCSEs and their families?
Should a programming language allow you to create an object you can't destroy ?
graspee
Just something that comes to mind.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
How about a more generic question: If you had a machine which would make you money, but it would also inconvenience, disrupt, and frustrate the lives of a million people, would you use it?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One large collection of technological issues is "Risks Digest". Many ethical issues scattered about in there.
Another approach would be to go through the Unabomber Manifesto and see how valid each issue is.
Another approach would be to go through Al Gore's book and see how valid each issue is.
And has been for just how many decades?
Ok, so the article you point to is still relatively recent-- 2000. But the prediction is far older than that.
I'd say go for the killing intelligent robots thing :-)
Here's something which probably belongs in a class in a law school: What rights does a human in an artificial body have?
Around 2000, one well-known prediction is that within 50 years we'll be able to record every connection in a human brain. That will allow a computer to duplicate the behavior of that brain, thus there will be an electronic copy of that human in the computer. Is it murder to destroy it? Can it own property? How much of the original's property does it own? What if copies are made?
How about the moral irony of using technology to gather input from a huge number of people to substitute for your own deficiencies and personally profit from the feedback? Last time I checked, professors made good money, better than most linux geeks.
The classical ethical hypothetical is the ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic book IV: given a ring that prevents one from being seen or apprehended, would anyone behave? Or is justice/morals only extrinsic social convention, promoted by the powers-that-be (for their own self-interest)?
There are a host of modern-day examples: the ability to publish and copy relatively anonymously on the internet; limited liability organizational forms (read: corporations) that reduce one's risk to funds submitted and protect one's identity from disclosure; encryption; roofies dropped in a drink at a bar...
The issue is that technology that helps us do good things can be used to evade social feedback; the converse issue is that it can also enhance social control. But I would counsel an ethics teacher against going down the road of ethics as economics or politics ("IP" "theft" as exported costs or false property? "Total Information Awareness" (for those with access)? Do we rely for our level of freedom on de facto limitations on individuals and governments, limitations which might be assymetrically overcome?). Those questions are very pertinant, but mainly for promulgating and prosecuting laws.
Put another way: just because I'm anonymous, am I a coward?
(post 1 of two)
Of course Activity X is immoral, it's constantly crashing my browser and is a huge hole in IE.
Oh, wait.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/pir
(by Tim O'Reilly)
If your relative is looking for a good textbook for this type of course, check out Basse's A Gift of Fire.
It's been used in a couple of comp sci ethics courses I've taken, and it's got a lot of covereage of current ethical topics and lots of thought experiments/questions.
Overall, a pretty good textbook for such a course.
You know, this post really managed to get me about as mad as any post I have ever seen at /.
I am a student at Penn State University, in the IST program, and I have spent untold amounts of time and my hard earned money to "learn" from instructors who have no idea of what they are even teaching! Maybe if this person doesn't keep up with technology... HE SHOULDN'T BE TEACHING THE DAMN CLASS! Talk about ethics, this post is amazingly frustrating to me.
Doesn't anyone else see the problem here?Students should be learning about this topic from a professor who is schooled in technology and has a good understanding of ethics! Students are now going to be wasting their time in a class where the professor doesn't even know what the prevalent issues are to cover!
College tuitions have skyrocketed, and will continue to do so... however we, as students, continue to receive a rapidly diminishing quality of instruction. My only wish is that no one would help this moron.
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So why is he teaching a subject that he knows nothing about?
What college is this? Do you think I could get a job teaching the brain surgery class?
Speak for yourself, junior! Why, if it weren't for natural male enhancement products, weight loss pills, and low-interest mortage loans, I'd still weigh 400lbs, and have to bring hookers to my tiny apartment to impress with my 2 inch phallus!
'Twas a blow-off half-credit class taught by an archeology professor who kept a wide-eyed gee-whiz attitude throughout the semester, but a class in this subject it was nonetheless.
The best techno-ethical dilemma presented was the over-use of antibiotics. That is, we've come to depend on the heavy use of antibiotics -- even for things like insuring food safety. Yet this leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria. So what do you do? Do you legislate? Where's your cutoff point? Can you balance the number of deaths from antibiotic-use reduction (from food poisoning, increased infections, etc.) with the number of deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections?
And there's always the next-to-last chapter in the Tao Te Ching for you:
----
Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They'd have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They'd have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They'd enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they'd get old and die
without ever having been there.
----
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I recently (last year) took a college course entitled "Technology and Society". We touched on many of the tough issues in regards to technology and its use today. There are some really good case studies out there that should be viewed before even looking at current things that are going on. * Therac-25: Here's a case where, partially due to errors in programming, some people were seriously hurt and 3 people were killed. Is it morally right to publish software with known bugs just to meet a deadline? What if it could hurt people? How badly must it hurt people before you blow the whistle and stop it from being published? * IRS/public utility miscalculations errors: While the software might not control something that directly affects your body, how many people have had their lives ruined because good meaning people, who used a particular application, did something against them because the computer said so? In this case, I'm thinking of incidences when the IRS has scared and threatened people, ruined their credit, their jobs, and their families. * Moving to more recent issues, we can discuss inventing things that may have moral dillemas attached to them (i.e. Napster, file sharing, IM clients). I highly suggest getting a copy of the book A Gift of Fire by Sara Baase. I have an old version, but it should be in its second edition, recently revised (last year). Hope all this helps!
I thought it read:
;)
"Is 'ActiveX' moral?"
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I know I won't ever attend, if the teachers are not knowledgable in their fields.
That you've finally found a way to get rid of MCSEs once and for all?
Hot damn! Sign me up.
I have a relative who will be teaching a college class on the topic of ethical dilemmas brought about by new technology. Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are
In otherwords, a classic case of the blind leading the blind. Whats' next, will he be teaching MCSE courses? Writing secure programs for windows? How to install the Linux kernel? Come on, at least use people who actually KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE TEACHING! No wonder the US school is such crap.
Note: Not ment as a flame against MS or Linux
It does not even qualify for a Flamebait.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
The UC Berkeley Computer Science Department teaches a somewhat similar class - CS 195: Social Implications of Computing. You might find some interesting reading material in the publications mentioned in their Fall 2002 Syllabus.
There's sure to be some fodder for discussion on the web pages of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACM SIGCAS: Special Interest Group on Computers and Society, ACM Computing & Public Policy, Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference, and The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, to name just a few.
To a certain extent, the efficiency issue is one where advances are in line with the goal, not contrary to it. People want their laptop batteries to last longer, they want everything to be smaller (which uses less materials), they want to be able to recharge their devices rather than buying more batteries, they want their desktop machines to be cooler and quieter, etc.
I think the answer to this particular question is to find a way to make clean and efficient technology desireable, and then let the features drive innovation. People don't really care about the resources they consume, because it's not sufficiently obvious, but people do care about the resources they have to manage themselves.
(post 2 of 2)
Another standard ethical question comes up with parenting: to what extent, and how, do we let (and require) some people to take actions on behalf of others? Medical professionals today bear some of that as result of medical technology; should they bear more responsibility? less? What kinds of controls should their actions be subject to? What guidance could really help?
Medical technology can extend the lives of people who are in terrible shape and appear unlikely to get any better. Sometime these people want to halt treatment, and at other times, they lack the capacity for consent (being infants or comatose). Even if they want to stop, they might be much happier if they pull through to health; conversely, even if they want to continue, it may be cruel and costly to do so.
Right now medical responsibility is tied to protocols and involvement. You can "ethically" *not* start treatment, but you can't under-treat once it's started. These protocols don't seem to lead to the best outcomes; they're more intended to isolate the provider as a machine-like instrument of decisions, involved as medical options become relevant. With better technology, providers are being involved more and more often. Further, it's hard for them to participate in those decisions because medical knowledge ranges from statistical studies to simple hunches, making prognoses are extremely dicey in all but the simplest, best-studied cases.
However, if we consider euthanasia valid under any conditions, what kind of message does that send about doctors? That if you bring your sick infant to them, they might decide enough is enough? That a disabled life is not worth living? And if we can't say it with policy but the reality pushes in that direction, don't we force doctors into making decisions silently and without social support?
While the case of the ring of Gyges isolates the element of personal benefit/responsibility/soul, this case isolates the question of having ethical rules in the first place. (It also minimizes the issue of individual expression (which tends to swamp discussions). (Again, the economic/political dimensions don't address the ethical issues, though they provide defensible positions.)
Enjoy
If they're reached the age where they feel they must enlarge their penis, yet somehow lack the knowledge of how to do it, then I weep for them. It's not as if it's difficult.
I don't care if it's one of Wil McCarthy's Fax Gates, the Transporter on Star Trek, or the Stargate on...erm...Stargate...but when the matter that comprises your corporeal form is transported in a non-corporeal form, does it leave your soul behind? Are you really being killed, and reborn someone else? Or, does the soul instantiate itself wherever you happen to be?
Can't believe no-one posted this one yet (but I couldn't find it):
If, in the real world, soldiers with thermal vision and satellite targetting kill other soldiers that are armed with nothing but a rifle (sometimes not even that), does that make it OK to use wallhacks and aimbots on Counter-Strike?
RMN
~~~
I was on the help desk of a university. A staff member sent an email to his lover (ie, not his wife). Through a typo, it went to a third person's mailbox. He rang and asked if I could delete the message.
I did. Rationale: the 3rd party hadn't read it, and the putative adulterer's affairs weren't my business. One of my colleagues was adamant that sysadmins should NEVER delete mail from a user mailbox, that it violated that user's privacy, and that the mail after all was correctly addressed.
Ah, the difference between Simon and Simone...
I'm a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of my classes last semester focused on the ethical issues behind cloning. We used a recent book titled "Ethical Issues in Human Cloning" byr Michael C. Brannigan. From the back of the book: It is a collection of the most important essays on the subject, written by prominent specialists and presented in four sections: scientific, religious (western and nonwestern), philosophical, and legal. With a far-reaching appeal to a broad range of students and instructors, this new and timely anthology presents the material for sound assessment of the moral questions surrounding human cloning. I found the class very interesting and learned about things I wouldn't normally have been interested in. If anyone requires more info, just ask. -Brian
Well, there's a problem right there...
Is it ethical for an American-owned and American-operated company to outsource IT jobs overseas in order to take advantage of lower wages, thereby failing to create jobs stateside for IT workers who demand a higher salary?
This question addresses whether the practice is ethical, rather than symptomatic of a capitalist, employed-at-will society.
"He was using Netscape 4.76 on system 9 until last week."
If it ain't broke, why fix it? Is it ethical to make people conform to the endless cycle of 'upgrades' to keep the economy going when the same energy could be used to feed the world?
Biotech ishould we use it ? this is one of the more interesting ethical delemas. We could feed more people and use less pestisides which is good. The question is what happens when this polen cross breeds with natural strains. Do we want large companies controlling all seeds. ? Is it ethical for a company to sell plants that are genetically engineered not to produce seed (third world farmers depend on seeds from previous years crops..
All this and the fact that our society/scientist don't often consider the implications of things before they do them.. Should we..?
I had a class in college that talked about this exact subject. Our text didn't cover a lot of material, but it focused on one big issue: People tend to define themselves by the work that they do. What happens when we have automated all of the work that needs to be done?
"Note that I am looking for ethical dilemmas, e.g. 'Is Activity X moral?' rather than legal dilemmas like 'Is the DMCA constitutional?'
Wouldn't it be unethical, with respect to the people, to prevent a company from providing an ink refill for a privately owned lexmark printer at a resonable price?
I think everything is connected. The law, many believe, should support ethical living, and not the financial success of big business that lobbies for the laws that benefit them at the expense of people. People work hard, don't have much free time to collect themselves and think about things, and seem to be too drained or caught up in their own problems. When the day is over, they are too tired to take an active interest in the important issues that are shaping our future, such as the ones covered by the anti-dmca.org and the eff.org. Most industry has proven itself to be ethical where it makes good business sense to do so. When it doesn't, ethics and the rights of the people take a back seat to financial gain. How can we change this?
Of course, computing is a smal portion of "technology." A broad course like this should also cover other sciences.
Biology: Should gene's be patentable? Should parents be able to discern their child's genetic traits, like disease? What about gender? What about eye color? How do you enforce such a rule?
Physical sciences: Should we place Wind Farms near one of the last habitats of the prarie chicken, or should we move it further away from population centers to accomodate? Some interesting evidence may come from the Alaskan pipeline.
There's far more sciences out there, these are simply the ones I am most familiar with. I believe that any field has such dilemmas.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Perhaps the class should consider the ethical and moral implications of censorship and control of the new media.
For instance:
Compare these to the existing checks and controls on the traditional communication channels, especially with regards to telephones.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Here are topics we have covered over the past three years.
1) File sharing piracy? (was The Napster Dilemma) - A good one to start the year. Gets everyone fired up. Most students have no concept of copyright law or what happened when it was done away with after the French Revolution.
2) Technology's Role in Terrorism - Tool or Defense? - I first introduced this the week after 9/11. Are encryption, steganography, airplanes, cell phones, etc dangerous weapons that need to be controlled, or are they just tools like any others?
3) Internet Privacy - Do you and should you have any? - We review amendment IV to the Bill of Rights and discuss whether this should apply to the Internet. We touch on FBI's Carnivore, web cookies and spyware, the lack of legal protection behind "privacy pledges", future cell-phones with GPS, and the movie Minority Report. Big brother's vision is getting better and better.
4) Microsoft - Aggressive Competitor or Network Effects Monopoly? - Partially an economics lesson. Is MS just the winner of the inevitable consequence of network effects saying there can only be one dominant OS? Is this any different than ATT in the early days of telephones, or Intel with microprocessors, Cisco with network equipment, AOL with instant messenger, Ebay with online auctions or Visa/Mastercard with credit cards? Should these types of industries be managed as monopolies (eg the power and phone companies) or what?
5) Cyber-Relationships - displacing or enhancing our real world? - Do new technologies improve degrade, or displace personal relationships? If you can't speak to someone because they have a cellphone in their ear, is that bad? If you kids mostly know their grandmother through email, is that good? Can you really get to know someone you have never met? Can you know someone who shares their innermost thoughts anonymously through a blog better than their best friends do? Where might The Sims Online lead? (Have you read Stephenson's Snow Crash?)
6) Aibo, A Cute and Frisky Robot Dog - Can you form an emotional bond with a robot? Is this robot smarter than your dog? Is this the pet of the future? With the projections of Moore's Law, might a future Aibo be your child's calculus tutor?
7) Computer Games as Heroin-ware - "Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn't being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game "EverQuest," and that was all that mattered at the time." - My students debate this from a lot of personal experience.
8) The Digital Divide - Internet Haves and Have-Nots - About 1/2 of the US population doesn't have ready access to the Internet. Most are lower income, older or minority households. As the Internet becomes an essential tool in our daily lives as consumers, workers and citizens, are they being left out? The divide is even more dramatic on an international scale. Will this accelerate the trend of rich countries become richer and poor countries becoming poorer? Should anything be done to shrink the divide, or will it take care of itself?
9) Sealand - Rebel Outpost on the Fringe of Cyberspace - Does the Internet overturn the sovereignty of countries? Historically, countries have had sovereign authority over its citizens. The Internet cuts across national boundaries disrespecting all national laws. Should the Chinese government be able to block access to the exile government of Tibet website? Should the French government be able to block the sale of Nazi paraphernalia on the Yahoo auction. Should the US or state governments be able to block online gambling or c
"Actually spammers do act ethically."
So, what does the 10 year that sees the porn spam suggest to your ethics? I have yet to read _ANY_ spammer's code to insure this doesn't happen. Sure, most spam is not porn, but do you seriously think they give a rat's ass?
Off the top of my head:
Automated surveillance.
Teleoperated/Robotic soldiers.
Chemical weapons research in the interests of 'self-defence'
GMO's, Genetic engineering, cloning, etc.
Strong Encryption (more of a rights issue)
There are many many technologies that can be used for good or evil purposes. It's nice to know that *one* school is examining some particulars of the issue.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
go, they don't have a soul, so I see no dilemma. Now would I kill a robot that "came to life?" Probably not, because more than likely it'd serve no useful purpose (unless the thing was trying to kill me or my loved ones).
:)
Just my $0.02. Take it for what you actually paid for it
Here are a few:
1) Stem cell research
2) Cloning
3) Developing "Smart" weapons software
4) Developing "Carnivore"-type software
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
One that has floated around in my own head runs like this: suppose you come up with a cure for cancer. Suppose you decided not to share.
Are you not entitled to do what you wish with the fruit of your labors, or seeing how your work was base on the work of others (ain't no one independent in this world), don't you owe your work to the greater good?
What if you chose not to simply share your work, but went about destroying it (compare the burning of The Great Library in Alexandria as a reference point)? Are you entitled? Perhaps on a privacy point, does the gov. have the right to break into your house to retrieve said information? Exactly how far is is anyone allowed to go to compel you? Not sell any food or water to you? Threaten your family... Mostly the idea of destroying a technology sending mankind back into the dark ages; even if you invented it, do you have the right?
What if you decided to withhold your information in the hopes of stirring new approaches to cure cancer?
Citizenship, right to privacy, social contract, autonomy, etc. all come into play. And one that doesn't get enough press, the right not to use a technology.
It seems to me that the concept of ethics isn't so much a right/wrong/justification issue as much as simply noting which values apply and where/why?
And trying to derive some hierarchy from those values (personally, I put autonomy above all).
And I see these same ideas being played out from economic sanctions, drug busts, DCMA, WMD, socialism vs. capitalism, etc. It strikes me as absurd to wrap ethical questions in a context of technology when we haven't really adequately addressed the "old" ethical questions. Ghosts coming back to haunt us.
1.) Could machines ever be considered 'persons', complete with legal rights and deserving of the same treatment as people? Could it be just as cruel to send a highly-intelligent machine to do a dangerous, complex job as it would be to send a person?
2.) If humanity was to be replaced by supplanted (perhaps peacefully) by an intelligent, caring, communal robo sapiens, would this be a tragedy?
3.) Implications for personal identity, problem of other minds.
4.) Impact of cloning on our perception of free will, all humans being born equal.
Secondly, Robert Nozick (in Anarchy, State and Utopia ) raised an interesting issue about the value of actually doing an act, rather than simply having the *experience* of doing that act. Imagine living most of your life in a VR simulation of your choosing, experiencing a rich panoply of scientific insights, sporting achievements or charitable good works. At what point and why do these (cease to) have any value? This is related to the question raised in The Matrix of whether Neo should take the red or blue pill.
-
Greg
Is it moral to teach a college class on dilemas brought about by technology when you are ignorant of the subject.
regional legislation in a global economy: perhaps there's better wording for this. what i'm referring to is products that are made for a specific countries copywright, digital rights management, and other laws, and being released without changes to other countries.Should Canada, Japan etc have to put up with the consequences of American legislation (eg DMCA). This works both ways. Websites hosted in other countries that are accessed from places where the content of that website is illegal.
The same question could be (and has been) asked of the Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors--safe, cheap, efficient, reliable, and the easiest way to produce weapons-grade material.
Weapons-grade material? What are you smoking? One of the big advantages of the CANDU reactor is that in uses unenriched fuel. Most other reactor designs (including American & Soviet) use enriched fuel.
Of course, that didn't stop many countries from starting a weapons program using Canadian reactors, but it would have been much easier with other reactors.
How about the responsibility of our educators to actually know their material? Surely nobody thinks it appropriate for a college lecturer to be teaching a subject about which he quite obviously knows nothing?
And yes, I realise that most college lecturers are borderline useless, but why encourage it?
My advice to your "friend" would be simple - bugger off and learn your material. When you know more than your students, THEN you can consider teaching.
Here's one for ya.
In a job where I was the "IT guy" (with a couple of sidekicks).
Boss sumamrily sacks a few "uppity" employees.
Staff don't like the lack of process and start to organize (ie unionize).
Boss responds in many ways, but one of these included bringing in his own IT guy to start snooping on trouble-makers' PCs (going through emails, files etc).
*DILEMMA*
"Hey, this is wrong, and anyway I'm the IT guy here! What should I do?" (I was a direct report to the boss at that time)
Well, I joined the union (even though I was considered "management"), and went out on strike with the rest, but not before configuring all of the staff PCs to silently track all logon/file-access activity. I used this info to get "proof" that the boss was spying. Nothing was done with this proof, it was a "just in case" if things got *really* ugly.
Fortunately his IT goon was pretty weak and my own activities were not detected (to the best of my knowledge).
The story ends with all us trouble makers negotiating a new deal establishing some visible process. However we all made our own way out (finding other jobs and leaving) within months of this happening.
In retrospect, I am glad I joined the union and went out with the others. It was the strongest possible signal I could send to the boss that I disagreed with his management method. It also helped to maintain staff morale at a pretty bad time. They knew I didn't have to join them. I sometimes wonder how it would have turned out if I had taken a more "active/subertive" role eg snooping on HIS email...
Cest le vie.
Yeah I have heaps of relatives that just so happen to have done all those really embarassing things that I don't want to own up to. Who's really teaching this course ? It wouldn't be YOU would it ?
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Speaking ethically, not legally, how much can we borrow from the ideas of others to develop new ideas? For instance, all scientific discovery that I'm aware of before this century depended on large part on working from the ideas of others. Now, the notion of IP has provided an incentive to stop sharing ideas--but will this hurt human scientific development?
To exaggerate the issue--if you develop a cure for cancer, but its ideas depend on the work of another scientist, should you develop the cure? What if the scientist prohbits access to the information for personal reasons? Along those lines, how do you determine valuation? ie If one is to be compensated, does the scientist with the original idea get more compensation that the scientist that developed the idea? Why? What proportion?
--
$tar -xvf
The idea of "if it isn't natural, then it isn't good" is absurd. If I believed that, I probably wouldn't be at this computer typing this message. One of the other replies mentioned that they would not like to eat their cow raw. Me either. This 'unnatural' thing that we call cooking makes the food we eat easier to digest, allows us to draw more nutrients from it, and over-all is an advantage. They also mentioned central heating. I like it too. It allows me to survive through the winter.
The idea that I am kind of getting at is more like "if it is not advantageous, it is bad" (or perhaps stupid) but even that can be shot full of holes. For example, what is the advantage (evolutionarily speaking) of Homosexuality? Abortion? I can't think of any. But that does not make them bad things. That does not make them stupid things. HOWEVER, it does make the people who practice those things evolutionary dead-ends (and that is not meant to be an insult...just the simple evolutionary concept that if you don't reproduce, then you are a dead-end).
And cloning is certainly another evolutionary dead-end. If a gene pool stagnates then evolution stops, as evolution implies change. Then, once that happens, all it takes is that one dangerous thing (such as a virus, as mentioned by the parent) to completely wipe out a species.
Besides, even though I haven't mixed my DNA w/ anyone else's yet, I enjoy the process that is meant to do that. ;^)
I make no judgement on whether or not cloning is good or bad, just that it is stupid. IMHO.
cheers.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
since when does anti-war-on-iraq equal anti-violence-in-general?
It's not far away... there are already prototypes, and it will probably be widely commercially available any time now. It allows you to see through walls, clothes, etc. And with passive terrahertz imagers, it won't even require irradiating the subject with radio waves. The possible infringements of privacy are amazing.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
No doubt, reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer teaches a night class about marriage.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I don't remember the entire context, but a letter was sent from a senator to the president about the evil's of trains. How it would drive all of the canal workers out of business, and that God-almighty never intended men to travel at break-neck speeds of 35 miles per hour.
Kinda funny in retrospect. If anti-train people had gotten support, we'd have no trains in the U.S., still be using canals. The west would me almost undeveloped.
Kinda fun look at what the RIAA, MIAA might be doing to the future people, forcing them to use the musical equivalent of canals
This book can be had new for $11.17 from Amazon, or used for $10.59. The relatively high "used" price indicates the quality. This book entertainingly spells out the: -- Prisoner's Dilemma -- Dollar Auction These are two depressingly basic games, in addition to the "Utterly Dismal Theorem" Garrett Hardin likes to refer to( the quoted phrase Googles nicely ). If, having read this book, you like it, then I have an online rant I can point you to, but not on Slashdot as I fear bandwidth-charges.
Are the people running obsolete software and unmanaged systems, and connecting these systems to the Internet to blame for the denial-of-service and other attacks against truly innocent parties? Is ignorance an ethical defense? Is society ethically allowed or even obligated to quarantine these irresponsible people, in the same way that we take away (without even a court order) the freedom of contagious disease carriers?
A perhaps more interesting question than the morality of killing a sentient robot is the opposite: If we were to create a race of truly sentient robots to serve us, would they be justified in killing us as inefficient parasites on their society.
Perhaps the only question might be, does the ease with which something can be done make it more moral or ethical to perform that act? When making copies of books required a printing press, it was easy to decide making lots of copies was wrong. Not so today. When making a copy of a record meant getting your own record press, of course spending so much money to copy records was unethical! Now it's so easy it couldn't possible be unethical or illegal, could it? The only difference is how easy it is. How does that change the ethics of a situation?
I hope you're joking, or the post is a troll. Have spammers caused you that much trouble? Is it that hard to push the "delete" button? Have you not yet figured out how to use filters/rules? Since you're reading Slashdot, have you not checked out any of the various Bayesian filters? Do other trivial matters bring out this type of rage?
Look, if I could somehow give my preference to receive all my snail junk mail as email, I would. Junk email doesn't consume paper. Junk email doesn't consume that much bandwidth (and if it does for you, perhaps you should have your libido checked...one porn photo requires about 100x as much bandwith to send as a typical spam).
Take a chill pill, dude.
--Be human.
Where do we draw the line between human and (for lack of a better word) robot? Nanotech, implants, and genetic mods are all coming to meet at a common point, and that point is SOON!
Michael Jackson, Cher, and Joan Rivers -- we're too late, the line has been crossed!
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Is it ethical for us in the rich world to continually suppress the poor, to ensure that any money they do make flows into the bank accounts of our multinational companies (Microsoft et al.), and to ensure that they can only buy better crops by paying us money to use our patented crops, to prevent them getting educated enough to steal away our technology industries with their cheap off-shore labor (thereby putting us out of food, money, shelter) ?
I've tried to include relevant links as necessary or those that I could find. Topics we touched upon:
Here is a few moral problems (some of them pure speculation, some of them currently at issue).
Do you own a copyright in your DNA?
1)for the purposes of cloning?
2)For the purpose of creating drugs and gene therapy (say you go in for a check up, and doctors notice you have a genome immune to x, so they take samples, create a drug or a gene therapy off of it, and make millions. Should you get a cut?)
3)For the purposes of designer surgery (say you want Tom Cruise's nose, or Anginela Joli's lips--could the plastic surgeon grow you a duplicate from the original genetic template?)
Virtual sex machines
1)A suit or whatever that simulates sex with your favorite celebrity--would it be cheating?
2)What if that celebrity doesn't want their likeness to be having sex with you? Virtual rape?
3)What if it is with children?
Predictions of corruptions
1)before you go to law school/medschool/work for the government/military/police, you have to take a quiz to determine whether you will be likely to abuse your power, can you be denied access?
2)What if you haven't done anything wrong yet? What if you might not do anything wrong?
3)What if the test finds it likely that you will commit a violent crime--can you be incarcerated? Placed into therapy?
I took a course like this in my undergrad entitled Science and Society. Pretty cool as it was a discussion oriented class that met once a week for 3 hours at a time, and we'd focus on a new topic each week. It was a neat class since it was an "Honors" course and had diverse students (engineering, design, arts and sciences, musical performance majors, etc). We also tried to look at each case from various perspectives, using the IPCO model where one identifies the Issues, the Parties involved, the Consequences, and the Obligations of the Parties.
I've tried to include relevant links as necessary or those that I could find. Topics we touched upon:
How smart a bomb should be? To me, a real smart bomb is what was previously called a dud. But that's clearly not what their inventors are aiming for.
Is it ethical to genetically modify food using biotechnological techniques? Are there unseen side effects to the introduction of trans-species genes? This issue is real big in Europe, but not as controversial in the U.S. Why? If it tastes better and doesn't hurt you (or anyone else), can it really be that bad? :)
Stem Cell Research...this issue is extremely controversial right now. Is it ethical to use embryonic stem cells in order to find treatments for numerous diseases, including diabetes, cancer, Alzeihmer's (sp?), etc.
Or..if you're more interested in public policy & technology...
How about the privacy of information regarding one's genomic attributes. Can a health insurance company be allowed to examine your genome and determine whether you are more likely to have heart disease, cancer, etc? Should such information be stored in public databases (to be accessible by hospitals, insurance companies, and the government)?
Talk amongst yourselves.
Favorite
cel phones have GPS...
services are comming out follow your kid where ever they go....
Us and abuse of this and other tech...
How long before all camera are connected and can track you where ever you go???
just be cause we can does that mean we should?
Suppose a discovery were made that was too powerful for anyone to be trusted with; for example, the ability to see anything, anywhere. Suppose also that anyone with a good understanding of modern physics was capable of rediscovering this phenomenon. If the government was able to supress the initial discovery, what should they do? Should they work towards eliminating physics from college curriculum? Should they eliminate higher education all together? Would they be justified in killing those scientists who currently know enough to discover it on their own?
It is highly unethical for a teacher to take money and provide students with subpar teaching. Either the teacher is wrong for not speaking up as to his ignorance or the school is wrong for knowingly selecting the wrong teacher. I would be pissed if I took a course from someone who had to get his knowledge from /.
Is it ok to assume soenone is clueless just because they run an older system?
sheesh. If he can't think of ethical dilemas, then someone else might need to teach that class. OTOH perhaps he is just trying to motivate his class to think. It is much easier to get student involved if they believe they have some ethical dilema that is 'unique' to there generation. btw, there isn't.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
produce more garbage that we don't know what to do with. Been to China lately?
How about the ethical dilemma of a school putting a teacher in a class who is completely unfamiliar with any of the material to be covered whatsoever!
Actually, the original article is talking about ethics, not morality. There IS a difference, though very subtle, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain it in words.
I can give an example though: You mention about the "steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family" and ask if this is moral. Well, that really depends on your religion. Morality is often dictated and defined by religious principles. Many Christian faiths, for example, would say that it is still morally wrong to steal, even if you're serving a greater good (that of feeding your starving family), claiming that two wrongs don't make a right. Other faiths may believe that you're morally justified in stealing because you're balancing the moral wrong of a society that does not provide enough food to eat for all its citizens.
Now, is it ethical to steal in this case? That's a tougher one to answer. When I think of ethics, I don't think of the same things that I do when I think of morality. When I think of an ethical question, I tend to think of it in terms of the whole rather than the parts. For example, it might be ethical for the man to steal food if that same man later pays for what he stole when he and his family are back on their feet again, or if a third party takes pity on him and pays for the stolen food himself.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Then he wont pass on his defective heart disease riddled genes, thus contributing the the health of the gene pool and the species as a whole.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You've got a good point there... And have brought up another dilemma. Intellectual property right now relates only to nontangible goods; what happens when protecting the IP behind tangibles becomes more difficult in the future? Counterfeit goods have always been a problem, but what happens when anyone can make them?
Neal Stephenson tackled this problem in one of his books, too.
Did anyone else read that sentence as "Is ActiveX immoral?"
Heh.
These are all, of course, more specific instances of the general question: To what extent should DNA information and lifestyle choices (smoking, skydiving, riding motorcycles without a helmet, sitting motionless in front of a monitor consuming nothing but Doritos and Jolt all day) interact to influence insurance rates?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
You say that, if the consumer cost of a product is near-zero, then it won't be worthwhile for people to generate new ideas. I disagree. It only means we need a better method of paying for trivial dissemination.
The cost of disseminating an MP3 is practically zero; much less than a penny per copy. So, if there were a way to do so conveniently, would you pay a penny per download? Let's say you had a choice between grabbing the song off a P2P network, and risk getting a lousy copy that you'll have to take the trouble to delete -- or grab a genuine, tested copy off the band's own web page, paying a penny for the privilege, and to the band's benefit?
Yeah, there's no practical micropayment system. Yet. Eventually, though, we'll find one.
That's a moral question, not an ethical question.
Let me ask you, why is your "relative" teaching a college course on a subject he is not qualified to teach?
For example, was there really a subsequent loss of life, or did it save lives, even japenese ones, by encouraging them to surrender sooner than they would have otherwise??
C//
Is there an ethical dilemma in asking a website how to teach your college class because you are admittedly completely unqualified to do so but unwilling to forgo the meager wages?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
How about the "Should Slashdot cache articles?" Is it more ethical to mirror a website without permission, or to send a ton of traffic to their site costing them money?
--nw
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
Is it legal? No, plain and simple. Is it moral?
:(
:) :)
I sent this letter. My points appeared valid enough, so I got that ROM (thanks). Okay, here goes the letter:
> Ya know.. Emulation is illegal...
> I do have the Majora's Mask ROM, but I can't give it to you so easily...
> Send me by e-mail at least TWO good reasons why I should give it to you and
> I'll tell you where to get it, okay ?
Okay... First a few words against your reasons...
>- Because it's illegal, first... Unless you have the original copy, but if it
>is the case, then it would be stupid because all you have to do is putting
> your N64 on and play... Unless you want to take screenshots...
I don't have the original copy - and I can't have it in any near future. In Poland, N64 is a margin. Nobody sells it because nobody buys it - the roms aren't copy'able and 90% of the game market are copied games...
Reasons? Well, the main reason is the cash. People earn here about 5 times less than in the west, while the softwar prices are about the same worldwide. Add to that high living cost (worse salary:living ratio) and you get that the game REALLY costs 5-10 times more than for an average US folk. People DO buy originals here - as expensive gifts, as sign of extreme devotion to some kind of game and respect to the authors, as something luxurious for show-off - but only the richest can run on originals only - and nobody buys a platform, for which no pirated games are available... so no N64 here.
Illegal? For me, asking your whole salary for a game is thievery...
> - Personnally, I think it's far more interesting to play on a N64 and a TV
> with a REAL controller, than playing on a computer screen and the keyboard...
Sure I agree. Take my bursary (quite high) is $100. With a lot of effort I can save $30 from that, the rest goes for stuff like books, food, internet access bills etc. Now how much is N64? Add insurance, packaging, shipping (overseas?), customs, tax, voltage adapter, NTSC/PAL converter, the game cartridge itself...
How long would I have to save?
- And think about this : if you want to play Majora's Mask on your computer, you probably need a 3D Acceleration Card, right ? And I guess you paid for it, right ? So, if you've got enough money to buy a fast computer and a 3D Acceleration Card, then I don't know why you couldn't just buy a N64 and the cartridge to play on your TV...
The problem is, I've bought that PC with its card some 2 years ago, when my parents sold our 75 years old Mercedes, a really fine antique machine my Grandfather had owned - so I had a computer for working with my studies. I can't run MatLab, write projects in PHP, C and Perl, run networking emulations, write papers and all that stuff on N64. The gfx card is not wonderful. I preferred to buy more RAM and better CPU, the card was definitely of the "economy" class. Ocarina of Time on UltraHLE runs -almost- smoothly, when I overclock the CPU and the card seriously it almost never breaks the sound playback... I hope I will get it running smoothly on the computer students' council got at my school - not a tip-top box, but way better than mine.
If I was to buy N64 today, I'd still buy probably extra 256M RAM and a new Athlon CPU for my computer instead, maybe a bigger harddisk (40M?)... and MAYBE
some better gfx card (GForce2MX?)
Okay, for my reasons:
1) Ocarina of time is the only game I knew where horse riding wasn't screwed up and was actually a fun thing to do... And I heard Majora's Mask is the second. I'm a big fan of horse riding... $30 is about 8h of real-life horse riding, yet another reason not to buy Nintendo
Well, show me yet another game, with the element of horse riding better than in Majora's Mask and I'll move my obsession somewhere else... for now
2) I promise: when I CAN afford buying a nintendo, without critical impact on my finances, I will - just to support the guys fo
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Lots more people would be employed as scribes if we didn't have printing presses.
Lots more people would be employed as farmers if we didn't have combines.
Lots more people would be employed as telephone operators if we didn't have automatic
telephone switches.
Lots more people would be employed as candlemakers if we didn't have electricity.
Bottom line for individuals: If you don't want to be replaced by a machine, you'd better find something you can do better than a machine. During the industrial revolution machines replaced a lot of unskilled manual labor, and as we progress through the information revolution it's only to be expected that certain types of mental activity will be displaced by machines as well.
Bottom line for society: Technology will introduce ways to automate certain tasks and reduce their costs. That will have a deleterious effect for people whose livelihood depended on performing those tasks. But it will often have a positive impact on everyone else who enjoys the lower costs or wider availability of those technologies.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
"he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are."
Doesn't this about sum up the state of our education system today?
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Consider how easily we justify killing other *people* for various reasons. I don't think we'd guilt ourselves over killing sentient machines.
"Should we, as a society, curtail research on particular branches of science?"
If we do, and do it very much, the societies that do not will eventually squash us like bugs.
C//
The gist of the case is a man who murdered a child, imitating a child porn site. The site did not produce genuine children, but of-age models plus age-reducing software, and advertised with spam.
The delimas:
How about the ethics of this person teaching a class for which he is admittedly not qualified? Or the ethics of using /. to compile a course syllabus?
(The _wisdom_ of the latter is beyond the scope of this comment!)
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
For example, if it's just a "minor offense" to spray paint grafitti on a bridge, why can you get 10 years in prison for defacing a website? Seems a bit disproportionate.
C//
DOLCE may help out.
(Note that this is totally hypothetical and I am making no claim as to the relative skills or costs of American and overseas programmers in actual practice.)
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Modern medicine and agriculture have had huge impacts on society and the environment, much of it negative, primarily because of the population explosion. Of course, there's no way of putting the genie back in the bottle.
However, we should be more critical of the long-term impacts of even the most benign technology. Weapons technology is the easiest to label as 'bad' (the atomic bomb comes to mind), but we should also pay attention to other technologies. For example, modern highway systems have destroyed many natural environments, and have more or less destroyed the concept of neighbors and community. Just drive around on Pennsylvania highways and you'll see so many smashed dear and porcupines you'll wish you were on a dirt road riding a horse and buggy.
Technology is not really the source of the problem. The problem is people blindly believing that all technological innovations are good without thinking of the potential negative impact.
The impact of technology is usually not catastrophhic. Just look at the way television and the internet have affected news reporting. The quality of reporting, and especially the art of careful editing have been thrown to the wayside in favor of a non-stop glut of data. Just compare the superficiality of our public debates to the type of learned and detailed discussions which characterized politics before the information age.
An easy example: people today eat fast food and frozen food, and many have totally forgotten the taste of a meal lovingly prepared by friends and family. Though the technology makes food faster and more convenient, it turns the family process of meal preparation into a factory production line. Baby monitors are also a good example. Parents used to constantly watch and care for their children, not lock them up alone and wait for them to cry before attending to them.
In any case, there's no way of going back in time. What would help is some reflection on the good and bad of technological progress. In this age of rapid scientific advances, we need to better informed, more critical, and more broadminded than ever.
First, I was taught: Ethic is "The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession." Ethical behavior among salesmen means everything is accepted and promised. Moral is "Of or concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character."
You discover a flaw in your company's software that makes all data suspect. Your customer asks you about the accuracy of your software.
You chair a project. The boss orders that one particular brand of computer be used; however, it cannot do the job.
You discover your boss stealing from the company.
You discover your boss giving your compan's source code to your primary competitor.
You have unlocked the boss's desk and you are rifling through the boss's papers when you discover your boss is stealing.
Your company's primary competition accidentally leaves their source code in a meeting room.
Your customer contracts for you to do a project. You are progressing well. You discover several areas where the hardware and software could make significant, uncontracted improvements to the project. You visit the client. You observe that the client needs the improvements.
You are playing with some new tech in the lab. Your use of the new tech is on the fringes of legality. Using the new tech 'illegally,' you accidentally discover that someone is seriously breaking the law.
The law says you cannot make diagnoses. You use a new technique and discover the patient is seriously ill. The patient visits the doctor and is not told that they are ill.
You use someone's idea abd build upon it resulting in a new technology. The someone doesn't know. The boss doesn't know that the someone exists.
You log onto the customer's computer to update some files. You check the computer log. You discover that the customer hasn't even used the computer, recently. The customer's boss calls you and rips you a new one that your product is broken.
You have a job and you pay income tax. You are uncertain about your company's new corporate partner. Your state law states that taping conversations is illegal. You decide to make tape recordings of every conversation anyway. The corporate partner boasts that they are stealing from your company and stealing from the government to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
Your company develops a better product. The Federal Government needs your product because they are using technology that is 20 years old and inefficient and expensive and such. You approach the Federal Government with your new product. Since the Federal Government didn't develop the product, the Federal Government determines that your product is bad and NO ONE should buy it.
You are working for a DoD contractor which is bought by another contractor. The new contractor-boss decides to perform contrary to the DoD contract. This action will degrade DoD forces and possibly cost lives.
An arrogant branch of the Federal Government will neither give nor sell a piece of software that your customer wants. You have a copy of the software.
You develop a product that can be used to protect the good guys; however, it can also be used, illegaly, to protect the bad guys.
Great. I made myself sick reliving my Beltway Bandit days.
Let us ponder the future of ourselves as it relates to technology, and the ethics of it all...
So, nowadays mankind shapes the world around them to suit their needs, rather than dieing off until those that suit the environment remain. The problem in this is that it stymies the adaptation of mankind, at least as some see it. If someday all humans are fit to survive, then what's next? How do we change?
Assuming the environment no longer changes us forcably by adaptation, is it then ethical that we take our destiny into our own hands by altering ourselves genetically? Even assuming we know "good" traits from "bad" ones, I suspect so many people would change themselves in so many different ways that there would soon congeal many incompatible species of intelligent beings. From that, wider social rifts between groups of protocyborgs and enhanced humans with 15 inch dicks would happen. Dogs and cats, living together... etc etc.
On the other hand, we could all have the advantage of four asses! Somehow though, Natalie Portman does not seem like such a vision with four asses.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
Now, blacklisting isn't a new idea, and it doesn't require technology. But it also does... blacklisting, to be effective, is a bureaucratic process. Bureaucracy is very much enabled by technology, since the abacus on up. A large amount of technology continues to be used for bureaucracy (probably a considerable majority of computer technology).
Bureaucracy isn't all bad... we often don't notice all the effective bureaucracy around us.
And what's the moral for database manufacturers who are creating something that happens to be used for immoral purposes? I don't know, but I will argue strongly that they are not entirely without culpability. The greatest evils ever done were done by people who did not feel themselves responsible, supported by people who did not feel themselves responsible. I believe the ends justify the means, but I also believe the ends can be a condemnation of the means, no matter how benign or neutral they seemed at the time. Anyway, certainly a point for discussion.
A very good book on the moral implications of technology is The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. It's not about engineering particularly, but about technology (and a reaction against anti-technologists), building infrastructure, and very much about the moral responsibilities and questions of being someone who designs and builds the things that surround us, without being able to make many key decisions about those things. It applies very well to computer programmers.
Some years ago, I interviewed at what became WebTV, before launch. My concern with the service was that the client box they were selling into the customers' homes was too stupid - even if you added encryption to the system, the service provider could still snoop on everything each customer was doing because the transactions were happening on the back end (similar to using an X terminal to talk to a traditional multi-user UNIX system; even if you encrypt the link between the UNIX system and your X display, the UNIX system admins can still see all).
When I raised this concern during my interviews, I was told by the CEO, "I understand your concern, so come join us, and work with us inside to set up appropriate privacy policies!"
I viewed that response as a co-opting strategy (such policies can always be changed later, and I wouldn't have had the power to stop it), so I declined to work there, alas, giving up a chunk of the subsequent half-billion dollar buyout by Microsoft. Oooops.
I am happier with the more typical ISP, wherein if I use appropriate encryption technology on my full-blown, general purpose computer, all they can do is traffic analysis. I would be happier still if everyone on the Internet were using IP security in transport mode, but at least the possibility of that is still there (well, NATs aside). The WebTV system design didn't even permit that possibility.
So, the ethical question is: if you believe that a system you're building is structurally unable to protect customer privacy (i.e. as a matter of design), do you still work on it?
Also: beware "intelligent networks." Stupid networks are much better for your privacy, and your independence from your service providers.
It never fails to amuse me when I see the gray cloud that we tech users have drawn around ethics, morals, right, and wrong. IMHO, we've deliberately created this cloud in an attempt to justify things in the cyberworld that we couldn't justify in our real world. If you think about it, answering the "what is moral or ethical" question is simple. If it's wrong in the real world then why would the exact same thing, or some variation of the same thing, be right or ethical in the cyberworld? The line doesn't blur just because the locale changes. So perhaps a better topic to address is "What are morals and ethics and how are they defined?" It's more of a sociological question than a tech one. CaptainTux
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
What happens if a computer passes the Turing test? Furthermore what happens if it can pass an audio (speech synthesis/voice recognition) Turing test?
If a computer can fool you into thinking it is alive, which is the basic premise of the Turing test, and then it makes the argument that turning it off, or dissasembling it is like killing it, well where does that place us?
Consider this, many people consider the basic difference between people and machines (or animals as some would argue) is self awareness. How do you define self awareness?
I am sure that PETA people would say that killing anything self aware is wrong.
Well...?
Cloning is highly advantageous to the individual who is cloned biologically speaking and at the same time disadvantageous to the population.
It is advantageous to the individual because he/she increases the proportion of their specific genes in the population. This is the goal of an organism, thats why most males animals fight savagely for the right to mate with many females.
It is disadvantageous to the population because genetic diversity of the population becomes diluted. The old loss of adaptability to changing environment/pathogens. With a population the size of humans it would need a lot of clones to cause any appreacable effect though.
That said a clone won't be you although it will have the same genes. You can't harvest body organs from it, because it's a human just like you and humans have rights. So there is no real strong reason for or against it, unless you are a religeous nutter of course.
Uh, I can think of one. How about the delimma of how technology evolves so quickly that we often have teachers teaching things they know nothing about.
How about the ethical dilemma of a professor teaching a class that he is not qualified to teach?
Or the ethical dilemma of taking students' and governments' monies for teaching a class that everyone has the expectation of learning something, and the fact that the professor's relative is asking a message board for the material to be taught in the class?
I had a professor who cancelled classes, and left classes on their own, and when I arrived at her office to talk to her about something one day, thinking that the class was canceled, I opened her office door that she forgot to lock, and discovered her taking one-on-one instruction on how to use a laptop. She asked why I wasn't in class. I asked her the same thing. She didn't have an answer for me. I found her in her office taking more instruction on the laptop the following weeks. Bitch.
Your relative is teaching a class on ethics? And you are helping him/her by searching for course material on slashdot?
Tell him or her to look in the mirror when describing someone who performs unethical acts. Your relative is a thief.
Your relative is the perfect example of what is wrong with education in the US today.
How does technology influence ideas like "freedom of speech", "freedom from unlawful search and seizure," and other supposedly inalienable rights? An example: If a government writes a virus that infects a computer, looks for illegal material, sends a warning back if it finds anything, and then deletes itself after infecting a few more computers, have you been illegally searched? Remember that (ideally) only those who actually possessed said material would get any notice from the authorities.
has written some great books on these matters (my example was actually ripped off from "Code and other Laws of Cyberspace").
The question is often asked, "Can a robot have a soul?" Being an atheist, I would rephrase it to ask whether a robot could have those qualities which we value in ourselves and other human beings. Creativity, flashes of inspiration, hopes, fears, emotions, and dreams. Further reading: anything by Daniel C. Dennett.
A lot of questions you could formulate simply take a classical ethical dilemma and uses technology to highlight some aspect of the problem. For example, say that we created an artificial intelligence. Now, say that the intelligence took a staff of fifty people and half the electricity from a hydroelectric dam, but was only about as intelligent as a normal human being. Assume further that it has passed the Turing test.
Question 1) Is this machine as valuable as a human life? Why or why not?
Question 2) Given the vast resources that the machine consumes, are its creators obligated to keep it running once its scientific value has been exhausted?
The second question is basically a reformulation of the well-explored question, "When do the needs of the many justify the taking of a life?"
"What do other people have a right to know about you? What information do you have a right to keep private, and from whom? Technology gives the people around you unprecedented abilities to keep track of your history, your likes, your dislikes, your behavior patterns, and your associations. If a government develops a technology that can take this information and use it to determine which people are likely to commit serious offenses, where does the government's obligations lie? In protecting the potential victims, or in respecting the rights of the suspects (who haven't actually done anything). How well do current laws fit both the current and future problem space?
Doomsday tech: With every advance in science, things get easier. Advances in chip manufacturing happen, and suddenly you have game consoles that cannot be shipped to hostile nations. Advances in materials technologies suddenly make it possible to build 400-story skyscrapers. So what happens when a technology suddenly pops up that makes it very easy to do serious, unspeakable damage to those around you?
For example, a new chemical process suddenly makes it possible for someone to enrich uranium in his basement? Or, in a worst-case scenario, imagine that someone figures out how to create a device that would destroy the world, and knows that it could be built without leaving your local Radio Shack?
The ethical thing would be to not build the device. That's simple enough. But what if such powers were a natural result of a discovery in physics? Would it be appropriate to outlaw entire branches of scientific inquiry to avoid the things we could inflict upon ourselves if we had the knowledge?
There's a lot of science fiction that could be used to illustrate ethical dilemmas. For example, The Measure of a Man is probably my favorite Star Trek episode of all time. I also remember an excellent story by Isaac Asimov, where an archaeologist builds an illegal device that can be used to see into the past. He simply wanted to do some research on the worshippers of Moloch, and ends up distributing plans for the ultimate privacy intrusion device known to man. Does anyone remember the name of the story?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Is /. doing a good thing by providing links?
For educating the masses or killing the source?
Preview! Preview!
On the upside, it's a link worth clicking.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
IE: cracking, (as opposed to hacking) picking locks, how to pick pocket, building bombs...
Knowing how people go about cracking into systems could be harmful if one does it and it could be useful when building a defence for said crackers.
When you learn how to pick locks, you gain an understanding of what makes a good lock and what doesn't. Nice to know when buying locks...
Pick pocket? Walking through the airport and get bumped? No big deal right? Unless you know how these people work.
Building bombs? Surely this is a terrorist only thing right? How about knowing what is a bomb and what is not? What if you are in a position to disarm one?
Crypto. Same as locks really. How does one know what is going to be effective and what is not? The DVD guys sure didn't. (Heh Heh) For that matter, using the crypto knowledge to solve a simple problem like playing the DVD under Linux? Legal? Not in many places. Moral and ethical. I would say yes, provided you own the thing and have a clear right to use it.
So is the knowledge itself bad? What about the teaching and access? Should everyone be able to know and decide for themselves or not?
Each of these things is under attack right now. Why?
Blogging because I can...
What about money? It isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Why does it have value?
1. Uncle S@m says it has value
2. You believe it and accept it
Would it be ethical for Uncle S@m to use any technology to imperceiveably alter that value for the country's benefit?
I can't be the only person who has always heard that we import much more than we export...
To me, the biggest question that comes up in regards to technology is; Just because we CAN do something with it, does it always mean that we should? Aren't there plenty of other issues that are far more worthy of our attention than making our appliances all talk to each other over the Internet?
How is our own growth, as a people and a culture, going to be better served by having such appliances, or blowing zillions of tax dollars on bridging the "Digital Divide" as opposed to feeding ourselves and other needy countries (and what better way to make insane dictators in other countries look unappealing to the local populace than to feed, clothe, and help said populace become literate enough to decide for themselves who should lead them? It sure works better than being the playground bully, like the Shrub seems to want).
How are our kids going to stand up, in terms of education and in terms of being this country's future leaders, against the kids of other countries when the teaching of reading, writing, math, and -- most importantly -- critical thinking and social skills is neglected in favor of corporate-sponsored sports scholarships and pep rallies?
How are the sciences and engineering fields ever going to be made appealing if those that choose them know that their future jobs are just going to be outsourced to foreign countries?
What's the motivation to even enter those fields if it comes with the knowledge that one will, just because they've chosen to use the brains that God gave them, be bullied and socially ostracized throughout one's entire set of primary and high-school years?
Can someone explain to me how having your refrigerator send you E-mail when you're out of milk is going to solve problems like those?
Technology is nothing more than a tool. It is a neutral tool that can serve the forces of Creation and Destruction equally well. How it is made to serve, and which side, is a reflection of the priorities of those who use it.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but, based on what I'm seeing of our technology use alone, I really think our priorities, as a culture and as a country, could use some double-checking.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are.
This reminds me of what happend at the begining of this semester. The professor walked into the classroom and asked us what subject was he supposed to teach us! And the first thing he said after finding out it's "prosessional ethics" was: "Oh... That's not really my area...".
Generally speaking technology has raised the standards of living, lifespan, comfort level, and freedoms of the societies that use it.
But what about the lost opportunities, the times we fail to use technology to make the world a better place.
Suppose I have used my technological advantage to create a vastly superior military force. Wouldn't it be wrong for me to just sit back and not use it to wipe out inferior societies such as those that insist on remaining in medevial times? By killing them off, I have raised the standard of living of the whole world and increased prosperity for all our decendants and whatever few that survived the cleansing.
You probably think I'm talking about the war in Iraq, Nazis, or even Commies. Actually I'm talking about the workplace. Industry introduces technological changes that obsoletes a segment of the workforce in such a way that those people's lives are lost as productive citizens. I't better than murdering them sure, but not much. Seldom, if ever are changes introduced in any other way than to give the regular guy a kick-in-the-butt. I suspect that those running the show even prefer to ambush the "Joe" - it makes the elite feel feel elite. Technology has and will improve the lot of humanity, but it doesn't have to be a tool of the Social Darwinists.
The universe has shown that it abides killing. Every living thing on the planet is food for some other living thing. Many species kill their own members without a second thought.
Morality is an archetecture (sp?) for effecient communal survival...nothing more. We created morality so that we could minimize the degree to which we get in each other's way, whilst maximizing the degree to which we can all do what we want.
In the case of robots, we simply build them to be our servants, rather than our equals. We avoid programming them such that they exhibit survival-oriented behavior, and we destroy them whenever it is effecient for us to do so. If we program them properly, they will never "rise up" as they do in science ficiton novels.
Heartless? Perhaps. But what's "wrong" with that?
Increased privacy both protects the innocent and the criminals. Giving easy and safe encryption to the world would protect many people from big brother snooping and could be very valuable for freedom fighters in abusive countries (even if their material still might be found and they might be punished, the government can't use the material to find associates etc), but also for terrorists, child pornographers and common criminals.
From the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics (Markkula as in the Apple, et al. co-founder)
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/
This list focuses on computer technology and related systems only, though it is a good start and sometimes points to other areas of technology. Before using individual reports in Risks as examples, do some research. Teaching a subject without knowledge of the facts is a risk in itself.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Not sure what this 'Activity X' is, but I wanna get me some.
He obviously teaches thinking skills of some sort.(programms applications)
I also hope that when he is asked to teach someone about ethical dilemma's in IT (is asked to write a app for the mining industry) he goes and asks people in the industry what their greatest challenges are and then considers how he will approach the problem rather than blundering blindly on providing a solution that is just crap. (same thing, idiot).
The question of whether the pursuit of knowledge outweighs the governance of the masses has been argued since the 1960's, when the members of MIT's TMRC began screwing around beneath their model railroad layout. Today, forty years later, security is a cottage industry employing Amerika's best and brightest. Still, in other parts of the world, M$, RH, Sun et al are receiving free R&D from teenage males with much time and curiosity to spare. Is it wrong to hack in the pursuit of knowledge, or only to destroy someone's system with that knowledge? Where should the line be drawn, and by whom - individuals or government entities? The debate of this topic can go on for an entire semester and never get any closer to the truth, which is that information will never again be free in a capitalist society. greater minds than us have tried and failed before. Good luck to your clueless prof!
Just today I noticed that Future Shop (think Best Buy for canucks) has a big sign when you walk in: "Canadian copyright levies". Basically, it outlines the whole blank media levy issue in a couple of sentences, and has the line 'Future shop does not support levies', etc etc.
:)
I think it's really cool that a major retailer has taken up the fight against this bullshit, even if they're just doing it to keep their prices down. Beyond that one sign, I don't see the common person ever even knowing about the issue. Sometimes, corporations *are* in our favour
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Gotta say that I worked at a data mining company for aq while. Kind of scary what they know or want to know about people. Is this ethical?
That reminds me of a story about a FOAF that works in the data mining group for a big bank. They wanted to figure out what single trait was most likely to indicate a good credit card customer. Keep in mind that good credit card customers pay late but always pay. That's how the banks make money on the interest rates. The data mining tool told them that the single best indicator was whether the customer owned cats.
simon
home page
Where does privacy end; should the contents of email be made available to scan by a government org, phone conversations be tapped, locations monitored and saved. How long can an organisation hold information directly related to you?
The collection of data tagged to specific people grows daily. IMHO, the removal of personal identifiers would allow large organisations carry out the statistical analysis they 'need' and keep us from the big brother world I think society should fear.
Several people have referenced some good sources and ideas; I'll "ditto" some, but one new point (as far
as my threshold sees).
Technology is not just the buzzword fields (biotech, computers, etc.) I think it is critical to educate people that technology has existed as long as humans and almost every "delimma" boils down to a tradeoff that has little if anything to do with the specific technology that sparked it. Some points:
Talking about morality of producing weapons and items with "dangerous" uses... What about the first well crafted stone spearheads that (current supposition has) were used to drive many mega-fauna speices extinct as humans moved into the Americas.
Cloning and Genetic Engineering... The domestication of animals and crops back in pre-history started this. [Domestic plants and animals are defined as being genetically manipulated (through breeding) by humans.]
There is an interesting aspect to this discussion beyond the (IMO stupid) "Is it moral to do it at all" question. The economics and strive for short term yields has led to monoculture (in many cases like corn, of clones) and very intesive agriculture which in the long term lead to serious problems. [But who is going to tell a farmer that is on the brink of loosing his farm (or in the third world starving) that he should sacrifice short term profits for long term concerns?]
A big one: Is is moral to take uncertain risks that could effect many people for definate gains?
The ecological impact of GM, weapons research, nanotech, and lots of things are subject to this general tradeoff.
The contra-positive is also of concern. Is it immoral to not take an definate immediate hit (normally economic) for an uncertain (but potentially huge) future benefit?
Global warming and controlling carbon output is the obvious example.
Some others:
Privacy: Is it immoral to observe someone if you take no action against them? Should we be open and allow the government and others to freely observe us as long as we are unmolested by them unless we are doing something illegal?
Intellecutal property and copyrights: Is it immoral to deny information from someone who may benefit from it? How do we ballance this with profit motives that help drive innovation?
Human cloning, embryonic stem-cell, abortion, and animal rights: The core question is really what defines a "person". If you kick out all the rabid fundamentalists, you can have a good discussion of the legal standing of a "person", human rights, and what makes a person a "person". Self-consciousness fits in there somehow.
Sorry it is so long. Hope it manages to get read.
I'd also like to point out that often people have to teach something they aren't experts in, and the fact that someone is talking about it and trying to get a grip on some ideas is more than most bother with.
Every American is obligated to use free software. Restrictive licenses tied into obscene and obligatory upgrade paths are morally perverse and similar to modern-day slavery (as are restrictive non-disclosures).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology.
Bill Joy is a Luddite; he'd rather bury the technology and forget about it than face the possibilities these technologies bring. *Every* technology brings with it both good and bad, advantageous and dangerous. The computers Bill Joy helped design are today used to design and build Weapons Of Mass Destruction; I don't hear Bill screaming about *that*.
As we advance technologically, we are forced to advance socially, as well. The Nuclear Age has ushered in vast wonders, and even greater threats; but we as a world-based society have had to learn lessons to keep from blowing ourselves to glow-in-the-dark smithereens.
Someone named Alfred Nobel invented a new class of explosives. He figured it would be great for mining, and building new structures, and generally helping Man progress. Unfortunately, it was also used for killing on a scale that was (until then) unknown. Feeling a mite guilty, he created a prize for peace, which was (amazing coincidence) called the Nobel Peace Prize.
What *hasn't* been mentioned is this: even the non-lethal uses of dynamite are used for ethically-questionable purposes, such as strip mining vast amounts of land, bad movie plot devices, and fishing (which is lethal to the fish, I guess).
The things of which Bill Joy is frighted, such as nanotech and designer viruses, are coming closer to reality every day. But, along with the ability to design custom plagues comes the ability to quickly build and deploy anti-plagues. As Neal Stephenson wrote in _The Diamond Age_, destructive nanites will be countered by general purpose antinans, or custom antinans if required.
Sure, some people will die. But through technological advances, even more will be saved. Dynamite has, in general, been a Good Thing, and helped the advance of society. Sun computers have been, in general, Good Things.
Nuclear war has been averted so far. At the moment, the only nation capable of taking out the entire world is the United States. And although our illustrious President Bush is behaving as an idiot child with a loaded gun (well, he *is* an idiot child with a gun, so I guess that's appropriate), I don't believe he's pig-stupid enough to press the big, red, candy-like button. So maybe even nuclear power will one day prove worth the risk we have taken.
Besides, we have to be optimistic: the djinn is already out of the bottle. We should make the best of it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Whats the moral implications of slashdoting a website and the subsequent ulsers delivered upon system admins of said website?
and all seriousness aside what about the ease of accessing classically "immoral" material, e.g. pr0n, goatxe, etc.
Technology makes money, makes great products, but there are always hangers on who want to make cash of trying to discuss the "liberal arts" side of whatever tech/science/knowledge is around...
If it isn't outright hangers-on like the Mondo 2000/Wired crowd, it's university types wanting to do very deep, meaningful important research into the feminist anthropological sociologic dichotomy media analysis semiotic historical perspective. And please can they hang around to glean some of the cool and some of the stock options?
Technology is what it is. People are who they are. The printing press did not "cause" the widespread use of pornography any more than it "caused" the widespread use of the Bible. All it did was make available the ability to reproduce large numbers of the same document without hiring a gang of monks who did their work very slowly and therefore made the process lengthy and expensive, period, full stop, end of sentence, and PEOPLE did the sociopolitical ethical considerational crap.
If some soul-patch wearing fruitcake in a beret starts trying to pitch to me the idea of him being a "cyber-ethicist" and maybe I'd like to hire him to determine whether or not deleting a piece of software isn't tantamount to murder of a silicon based life form he's gonna find my steel toe so far up his back passage it's gonna chip his teeth.
Liberal arts people are good for one thing. Serving me my goddamn coffee. And while you're jawing away my java is getting cold, Trotsky. Get a move on. There's customers waiting. Jesus.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
If a machine can do the work of ten people, and the twenty lazy slobs who have that job are to stupid to get a real ones, so they form a union.
Did you enjoy your weekend? I hope so, because unions fucking GAVE it to you, dick. You're content to suck up the privileges unionized labor has fought and won for you, while you sit on your ass and criticize them for doing so. What a fucking joke you are.
I can't wait until a machine replaces you. Oh wait! One already has! A backed up toilet. How proud you must be! Now you can go buy stock in ToiletCo and live large off the $1.75 yearly dividend check they send you.
I'm taking an independent study on computer ethics right now. I've read a variety of journal articles related to the issues of technology and ethics, not merely computer technology. A couple of books I used that might be of interest:
t ail/-/0130 829781/qid=1049694970/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-104788 0-2912845?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
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Computers and Ethics in the Cyberage
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de
Technology and the Politics of Knowledge
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/d
Holding on to Reality
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/det
The last book there is more about information theory and how it has evolved up to modern day. It's not really a "what's right" book, but it is relevant to the New Age of computing that is basically centered on information storage and retrieval, not on computation.
Due to the identification of all the different genes humans have, one wonders if one day there will be gene-ism (as in racism, sexism, etc). I.e. will people who are identified to have a high likelihood of heart disease going to be denied life insurance because they are likely to croak earlier? etc etc.
It's a pretty popular topic that can be found with a simple search on the web and this issue has been around for the last several years.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Here's one I've thought about: Mass marketed technology has quietly but surely made the media's influence on our lives more and more intrusive. From the printing press to radios to tv to satellite tv to computers, to video games and god knows what's next, the media has gotten more and more of a foothold into the life of the average american. The problems that this produces are subtle but will eventully become damaging: tv/video game addiction, the degradation of independent thought, the control of popular opinion in the hands of a few, media becoming a source of escapism, and what will happen when virtual reality becomes feasible? When you control a person's senses, you come very close to controlling the person. As technology lets media become more and more immersive, it will be harder and harder to resist. I guess what I'm saying is, can multimedia technology grow to a point that it threatens individualism?
Yup. Actually, I added up the time that I spend reporting each and every spam that I got. That is just me who was ripped off, not even the time and money of the ISPs whose bandwidth has been coopted to send out out their unwanted intrusive messages.
Think about it this way. I was "on" the internet back when it was spam free. We could carry out business dicsussions and get work done without intrusive interruptions. Today, we have illegitamate marketers hawking mostly 100% scam wares right in the middle of our personal and business conversations. This is an intrusion into our privacy and is exactly like having a conversation with a few people while you are walking down the street and every 3rd person jumps in the middle and tries to get you to buy what they are selling.
We HAD a great resource for communciation and productivity that several hundred leeches have tried to corrupt for their own profit at our and the system's expense. Law enforcement and government is doing nothing effective to stop it. If I could get away with it, I would.
Since I can't I'll just use a service that doesn't let them get through. That still doesn't mean we should stand for it. There are more of us than there are of them. One would think that if we ARE really intelligent, we'd find a way to shut these bastards down and remove any profits they made off the backs of small ISPs and suckers while intruding on our private and business communications.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
so far no one has brought up a slight derivative of this problem that i am often concerned with. im in a slightly rarer position of being able to replace myself with machines, so to speak. i started a job wherein i had nearly 40 hours a week worth of it/data entry type duties to fulfill, but putting my engineering skills to use, i have managed to hone those 40 hours a week down to about 5. from the top, it looks like im a busy bee, but really the scrapers, crons, scripts and scripts that watch scripts, etc. are busy, meanwhile im watching tv. what is my moral duty? and those others in the same situation?
I bet you got enough topics allready ^_^ but heres perhas a little differnt view on cloning and medical tecnology:
...
Medical technology has allways had a single purpose, to improve your health and bodies, to prolong our lifespans and and life quality resultant from out physical condition. So ask yourself, why should we nessecarily draw a line here? i mean... we have LONG since crossed the line past natural treatments, so thats kinda a mot point in my opinion. You may disagree, but if you think about it, humans were never "designed" to have donor organ transplants. And millions of people are beeing kept alive via synthetic medecines that allow them to carry out normal lives instead of dying within days as they would without "artificial" intervention.
So heres a thought: If we can improve the body we have though technology, then why not? We have the knowledge to make us smarter, faster and stronger. Of course, as with all science youd need to step forward really slowly because there could be consequenses(sp?) we cant predict, but as long as we have come this far, why not go all the way? We allready tons of artificial medical help. The only difference now with cloning and DNA treatments ect is that its a much larger step up in technology than previous discoveries. Are we so afraid of ourselves and narowminded that we must label something as blasphemous or "unnatural" just because the discovery is big enough that we cant see the last step before we take the first?
OK im done ^_^ To anyone who would respond, feel free, but i wont be reading this for replies. Please excuse any grammar/spelling mistakes i may have made as english isnt my primary language ^_^
-Stigma
(The anonymus coward, who was to lazy to register)
Advances in technology are allowing fewer and fewer humans to kill more and more humans. We are approaching the point when any one human will be able to kill every human on the planet.
The problem is a social one: how do we bring along every human without leaving anyone feeling so alienated, hopeless and bitter that they think their only satisfaction will come with the annihilation of the human race. It is a problem that technology alone will not solve.
If robots came alive, would we be justified in killing them?'
Well Why the hell not?! Killing those Iraqi civilians has been justified, has'nt it !
I've recently written an academic paper on ethical issues as they relate to systems designed to support decision makers. Whilst this may be a bit academic, or even specific, for your purposes, it does provide a high level overview of some of the main issues related to ethics and information technology. You can grab a pdf copy here.
The most interesting tech dilemma I've seen is this: Is it ethical to improve a person by gene-filtering (or whatever it is that they do exactly)? Seems like a pretty basic question, until you ask "Is it ethical NOT to improve a person's life if you can easily do so?"
I have a copy of "Computer Ethics" by Forester and Morrison, which I bought for light reading . ISBN 02-63-56073-9 (paperback.) It covers:
- Computer crime (mostly money transfer)
- Software piracy
- Hacking and viruses (black hat vs. white hat debate)
- Unreliable computers (the ethics of writing bad code)
- The invasion of privacy
- AI and Expert Systems (and who's responsible if they make a mistake)
- Computerising the workplace (and putting people out of business)
It also includes scenarios for classroom discussion. I'd recommend it as a read, even if it's not suitable as a class textbook.
Gerv
Spam is never going away until there is a solution to it... That solution has not arrived yet. When it does arrive, it won't be trivial, or someone would already have thought of it.
Actually solutions to spam DO already exist. There are several variations that make spam expensive to send while keeping 99% of legitimate e-mail free. The biggest obstacle to these systems is that they need to displace the current deeply entrenched e-mail system.
To this end, spammers help. They proactively increase the level of pain in the Internet community. This brings forward the day when some kind of solution is put in place. So they are making the world a better place (or at least they will, some time soon). So I would say they are acting ethically.
This is terribly circular logic. There would be absolutely no need for a solution if there were no spammers causing pain. It's like saying the world becomes a better place when I stop hitting myself in the head with a hammer.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Pointer or reference? pointer or reference... dammit, if I don't make the right choice right now, code quality will suffer and I will stain my C++ virtue. Once I take the wrong path, I can never go back.
Here are some points to discuss:
We can understand parts of the DNA. Is your DNA private? (Would it be fair to publish data from your DNA. If yes then you might have to pay a higher life insurance prime just becose your DNA predicts a shorter lifespan or your application for a job might be rejected because you are unfit for it.)
You can be traced by your cell-phone. Is it ok to gather this data just in case you might commit a crime? (Is this not the contradiction of the "presumed innocent.."?)
Mainframe CPUs include a circuit which can radiate info about the processing. Is it decent to use your technical advantage to sell CPUs which you can tap just for the case that they might fall in the wrong hands?
There are huge surveillance systems built during the cold war. Is it honest to use them to spy on other countries to gain economical advantage? (An group of experts from the EC came to the conclussion that the US systems are used to spy on the EC. These systems are used for industrial espionage...)
I really hate it when people say this. Production/reward systems are not human nature, they are social constructs. If we go back into the not-so-far past, human nature was plucking fruit off of trees and gathering nuts and grubs. The reward systems you are talking about only became "human nature" when people started locking the food up and needed to explain why it had to be that way. A gazillion screaming linux contributors would disagree with your idea of human nature, and it's dependence on the carrot and the stick.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Why would someone want to pursue the technology that will make it possible to engineer, say, an Anthrax mutant with a genetic 'lock' on it so it will kill only certain branches of our family tree... While harmlessly infecting (and spreading through) the others...
Well... because the same technology could be used to engineer, say, a HIV mutant that would attack cancer cells but leave your healthy cells allone...
Things of the future... nice to wonder about sometimes.
We better learn how to make peace real soon
An introductary course should not focus on particular technological issues, but rather on:
The actual technology is secondary, and the person faced with the ethical dilemma will probably know more about the technology than you anyways.
Off the top of my head, I would present the following, incomplete, list of dilemma categories (An exercise for the class would be to have the students come up with the list themselves, perhaps starting with examples taken from the press and movies):
One presumes the goal of the course is to encourge ethical behaviour and decisions, rather than recognizing ethical dilemmas and using public relations to justify the use of the most cost-effective solution, regardless of the moral issues.
With that in mind the following meta-issues should be discussed:
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
is it ethical to try to be "God"?
I can best describe my view on the entire ethics issue as follows:
If you need to invoke religion or a deity to make your argument, shut up and go home.
Seriously.
I have no problem with people practicing their own religions and believing what they want. I fervently support the US constitutional right to freedom of religion, and find the current trend of a more "Christian-friendly" government far scarier than their idea of Hell. But invoking "god" as a reason for ANY act outside a religious context has two major shortcomings.
First of all, IMO it goes WAY beyond "mere" blasphemy. In order to say "We should not do this because god doesn't want us to" assumes both that the person speaking does so on behalf of their deity, and that they understand the nature of the universe to such a high degree that they can claim to know what a god would think of any particular situation. If anyone uses "we can't play god" as an excuse, you should promptly ask them for the rules of the "god" game. If the answer involves the Bible, or the Koran, or the Mahabarata, or the Principia (Newtonian or Discordian, doesn't matter which), or any other sect-specific text, just smile, excuse yourself, and walk away.
Second, invoking religion as the answer to a non-religious question does not address the question. It counts as a non-answer. It means no more than the Zen response of "mu", the un-asking of the question. "Should we clone humans?" "Mu."
Overall, I see the problem here as asking the wrong questions. "Should we do X" has no definite meaning. It can mean "Would god approve of us doing X", or "can we physically do X", or "Will doing X cause more harm or benefit in the long run", or a host of other variations on the idea, all with subtly (or even drastically) different meanings.
Even worse, the inflection used in asking such a question can VERY easily make it a loaded question. Just using the word "should" automatically carries the assumption that some uncertainty exists. "Should I accelerate toward the center of the Earth at 9.8m/s/s?" sounds a tad silly, doesn't it? Yet it carries just as much "meaning" as "Should I clone myself for spare parts"... Nothing but total gibberish disguised as a gramatically-correct sentence. "Should colorless green ideas sleep furiously?"
Mu.
If we hope to find any real answers, we need to learn to ask the right questions. Vagueries in the question lead to the same in the answer, ala GIGO.
I suggest reading "the view from nowhere" (Nagel T. 1986). It is a philosophy book relative to these issues.
>> Note that I am looking for ethical dilemmas, e.g. 'Is Activity X moral?'
I would recommend 'Is ActiveX moral?'
Convince your boss and colleagues that you are a whitespace guru. When your code doesn't work, blame it on other people. If you can keep them so busy trying to interface with your code, they won't have time to talk to each other, and you can manipulate them into bypassing your code completely. It will be noted that you are the only one in the team who finished ahead of schedule, and you will be well on your way to a position in the company where you don't need to know anything.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Like Stansilaw Lem pointed out in Summa Technologiae, "beaming" (ie. teletransportation) creates an enormous dilemma:
A "thing" which is to be beamed has to be deassembled into it's parts (read: atoms), the parts have to be transmitted and reassembled at the destination. Now it is totally thinkable that instead of deassembling the original "thing" (read: human being), it is only scanned, only the information is transmitted, and a second, identical "thing" is assemled on the receiving end, thus creating, as Lem puts it, "the same me in Buenos Aires, with my house keys, who will eventually come back to Poland and claim my/his house... and he even has a point.
Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up with technology news, so he's not sure what the most relevant dilemmas are.
And I guess he's not too sure what a "dilemma" is either.
Dilemma is a method of proof in logics (or to be precice a rule of deduction). It goes as follows:
i) a => c
ii) b => c
iii) a AND b
THUS c
The best known form in speech is probably the "damned if you do, damned if you don't". I'm guessing that that one also lead to the expression "moral dilemma" which is being used sloppily just like "that's ironic", as is often pointed out here.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
I think that technology is a rather amoral/aphilosophical topic. Having said that, technology is very good at testing your moral/philosophical standing, by obscuring very basic issues like:
1) What is information?
2) What is property?
3) What is ownership?
Good answers to these questions will require no modification, no matter how technology advances. Bad answers (like the US government's answers) are dated, because they are based on a concept (specifically, ownership of material things) which can grow obsolete, as technology marches on.
Just a recommendation to keep in mind.
Is it moral to claim IP on an algorithm for 90 years + in some cases, when others could of thought up the same algorithm independantly?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
First there is progress. Then there can be misery.
When you encounter new things, learn, it is fun. At some point there must be a switch that can be turned to "danger". The earlier this is recognized, the more can be done against this. This process, stepping out of your function and resisting the thing that you are hired to do, is very straining. Sometimes only difficult, other times against company culture. Maybe there should be a role play about whistleblowing ??
Ethics is not only about thinking/subjects. It is also about having you _OWN_ opinion. I think this is a bigger problem than finding subjects.
nosig today
An ethical dilema that does not get much attention as such is the continuing over-optimism in developing new Software. The way development schedules / effort are typically way understated has become something of a corrupt game!
You seem to be saying something like "Rapists are good, because the more they rape the more they bring forward the day when they will be caught".
Female Prison Rape in NY
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
> will be teaching a college class on the topic
> of ethical dilemmas brought about by new
> technology. Unfortunately, he doesn't keep up
> with technology news
No offense intended to your relative.
This is the biggest gripe I have today about our education system. The people teaching it are not in the real world at all. They live in their world obivious to life as the rest of the world experiences it.
My ex-mother-in-law took a C++ class taught by an accounting professor. In home work assigments, he would provide base classes that the class had to use in their assigments. However, the base classes had syntax errors or were not really bases etc....it was terrible.
(My english is terrible, sorry!)
Yes, all cientisit have responsability for their inventions.
Bombs are no self-making, neither "intelligents".
There are a lot of people who "sell" themselve, without care about what is the destiny of their jobs.
I know it seems a hippie speech, but we had to think about how to help people with cancer, and not how to create a new variation a virus. Like this new "asian pneumonia" - a chemical warfare artifact.
The speech of defend atom bombs is a tremendous display of hipocrisy. The Japan was already defeated when the first atomic mushroom raised on Hiroshima.
I actually think the GNU plubic license is a very strong agreement since it allows the end user to do things they would not ordinarially be allowed to do if and only if they agree to it. On the other hand, most closed source EULAs prevent the customer from doing things they would ordinarially be alowed to do if they didn't agree to it, and are therefore much weaker.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Hmmm???
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
How about the responsibility of professors and teachers in the technical field to know what they are talking about by staying current before the teach and mold students with little experience. Often old, outdated, or completly wrong ideas are trasfered upon the class room who's teacher doesn't take it seriously to stay current.
How about the ethics of employers viewing employee email (and other electronic communications)?
Hi all,
I should point out that ethical "dilemmas" only come about in the presense of incomplete and inaccurate ethical models. For example, in my experience as a believing Christian, (oh no, he used the C-word on slashdot), I've never gotten hung up on any of the clasical "dilemmas." The moral system in the Bible is very complete and I believe it is accurate to morality.
That being said, morals are absolutes. They are not open for interpretation or revision but because humans are fallen moral creatures, we often know the good that we should be doing, but we don't and we do our best to justify it.
Specifically regarding technology, there really aren't that many new dilemmas for the person with the well defines moral and correct moral system.
I would give a few good books by some authors that do address "society coming to grips w/ techonology" but I think I've seen everything I would have posted already. The orange/white book by the folks @ UDel is very good. Ironically and very disapointing, no one from their core Computer Science staff is associated with the book.
Hope this helps!
br
Sam
If you're looking for moral issues related to technology, I don't know how appropriate this is for a report by any sane person, but my former AI prof would do nothing but go on about the impending war for creating machines that will be superior to humans. He sees the end of human species superiority as the most important moral issue of the next 50 years. He's a little odd, AI profs often are, but it does make for interesting reading. You can see his website here and his book about the "artilect war" here Good luck
The Situation:
You have just been engaged by a state government to be chief software architect and technical lead for a large database integration project. The project will consolodate personal information of citizens in order to better serve them. Names, addresses, mental and physical health details, child protective services comments, criminal records, and court documents are all to be coordinated into a cental database. It is expected that once data is collected and validated, it will be retained forever. One of the primary targets of the system is the state's children, especially those in poverty or hardship. However, data will be collected on everyone, just in case.
Problem is, you get a creepy feeling off the people from the state you're working with. Dispite assurances that the system will only be used to help people in need and to make life better for all the state's citizens, the nature of the system and the data to be collected is such that there is a strong potential for abuse; both casual abuse by individual users and systematic abuse by the state government themselves. The more they smile and try to reassure you, the more convinced you become that they're up to something.
There is no possiblity that the system could be constructed by the client themselves. They simply don't have the necessary people. Nor would they be able to perform any but routine maintenance on it.
The icing on the cake is that it's too late to just say no. You're holding the two million dollar purchase order, along with the contract obligating you to provide the sofware and services necessary to implement this system.
In your spare time you've put together a system by which an arbitrary set of instructions can be encoded to look like routine code (like say bury the instructions in the whitespace). It occurs to you that you could include a sort of "Doomsday Device" into the system, one that would lock out control, scram the database, and nuke the hardware. You'd trigger it by sending an special message via e-mail. (For our purposes, assume you know how to do this already.)
The Dillemma:
Given the sinister nature of the system and the eroding civil-rights climate, should you stick by your professional cannon and code what was asked for or live up to your responsibilities to your fellow citizens and make sure you can take out the system should it ever be necessary?
What if you are on a non-switched network, and you run a packet sniffer? While the data wasn't intended for you, it was publicly available to anyone attached to that network. This could also apply to any sort of wireless connection in public spectrum.
My personal opinion is that any data transmitted unencrypted on a system that you have legal access to is moral to capture, and any person transmitting on such mediums should have no expectation of privacy.
Notice that I did specifically say unencrypted data. If you have to actively "break" the system to access the data, then there is no moral backing, as the transmitter of the data expected privacy (i.e. VPNs, digital mobile phones, WiFi (don't laugh...most non-/.ers don't know WEP's weaknesses))
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Isn't it an ethical dillema to teach this job without being up to date on current tech? ^.o
As a geneticist I can tell you one dilema that we will soon have to face. As our understanding of the human genome increases and the tests become both simpler and cheaper, insurance companies are going to start to ask for genetic tests.
Before when someone went to get medical cover they take into account things like weight and age and if you smoke and drink. They use this data to decide on your premium. If they can now check and see that you have a genetic predesposition to cancer and heart faliure they might choose not to insure you or to charge huge premiums.
We might end up with a underclass in society of those who are uninsurable. The dilemas are then as follows:
1- Do the insurance companies have the right to ask for "genetic" information?
2- If so are they allowed to refuse cover based soley on "genetic" information?
3- How will these rights be legislated?
4- Where will the information be deposited and in whose care?
5- If you are already insured and then the tests are performed and potential problems are detected are the insurance companies liable for preventative treatment before disease onset?
6- Who will regulate the analysis of the data? One analysis might flag a particular gene as a problem and another not.
I shall leave you with an example:
A widower Mr X goes for a test to get insurance. The results show that he has a defect in his heart muscle which will kill him around the age of 35. He is refused any life cover. He is uninsured when he dies and his kids are left with nothing.
How about the ethical dilemma of accepting the responsibility of teaching a class on modern technology when one does not bother to keep up with the current state of technology?
Really... Is the robot thing the best you could come up with before you came here? What Community College is this guy teaching at?!?
I took an Engineering Ethics class when I was working on my undergrad at Auburn (War Eagle!). Anyway, I remember one particular anecdote quite well. The professor wasked the class, "Would you say air bags in cars are good or bad?" Most of the students agreed that they were good. In fact, they have saved thousands (millions??) of lives. No question about it. However, it turns out that the average cost for hospitalization has increased during the same time frame (not just inflation--they realy have gone up). It seems that for accidents where people were usually killed (pre-air bags), the lower body injuries have become what are keeping people in the hospital. And more people are having life-long paralysis as a result of those accidents. Now, most would still agree that being alive is still better, but it turned out that there was another side to the coin that probably wasn't completely thought out.
Have fun with your class.
My apologies if something like this were already posted (were just too many to read). Here is a moral dilemma for you...
You are the manager of a software development team. You have X programmers working on the project. As is normal for software development projects, the delivery date was set by sales, not you. It cannot be changed. Your resources are fixed. No OT, no contractors, no nothing. In addition, you do not legally own enough copies of the development platform (let us say you are 30% short) to complete the project on time though you do have the manpower. Management will NOT approve an additional budget for purchasing the required number of licenses for you to be legal. If the project fails to meet the deadline there will be consequences. Staffing will be affected (i.e. layoffs).
Morally, you want to only use legal software. You are also the manager and your staff depends on you and you have a personal responsibility to do all you can to keep them employed especially since in the current economic climate, finding a new job is difficult. What do you do? Are you legal on the software and miss the deadline or do you do what ever is necessary to complete the project on time (given the constraints) and keep everyone employed? Which is more moral? Which is more right?
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
In hindsight it's always easy to point out the errors made by others.
Try to put yourself in the position of the people who made the decisions and make the attempt to understand their circumstances without coloring that decision with your prejudices.
Point, the allies had already suffered massive civilian and military casualties on all fronts, an amphibious invasion would have decimated the troops and resulted in near genocide of the civilian populations, the Soviets were already showing signs of their later desire for expansion.
Now make the hard choice and think about the results of it.
None of them are "nice", all of them are horrific.
War never has and never will be "nice", it's by definition the essence of evil. The only thing that makes it permissible to even think of as an viable option to diplomacy is that there ARE OTHERS who find no such hesitation to make war their first choice and diplomacy their second.
Unless your willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and die for your pacifist beliefs, don't bother pointing fingers.
And since your not in Baghdad, I take it your commitment to pacifism is questionable.
There are extremes on every point on the relativistic moral compass, the worst is a pacifist who's perfectly willing to have others die for their principles. The other's are nearly as bad, as in the hawk who's willing to send others into battle but unwilling to make personal sacrifice in any form.
My "relativistic" moral compass is fine for me, I don't bother to use it to judge any another.
Responsibility is never a group thing, it's individual and we all bear equal portions.
Living up to what "responsibility" actually means is a lot harder, but starts with actually participating in the modes of government.
That doesn't meet my definition of ethics. I consider ethical behavior to be defined by whether or not you have consent of the people affected by your actions. Spammers generally do not have the consent of ISPs whose resources they are using, nor the consent of the indviduals receiving the email, so there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that their behavior is unethical.
In my mind, the argument you make ("by increasing the level of pain we will motivate people to take action, ultimately making the world a better place") is a moral one, not an ethical one. To me, morals are subjective and ethics are objective. If a spammer truly believes that he is making the world a better place, then he is acting within his moral beliefs. The first problem with that is, different people have different morals. The second problem with that is, I really doubt that is the spammer's motivation.
By the way, the argument you make (if I paraphrased it correctly above) could also be used to morally justify the war in Iraq. Whether or not it is ethical...
I am a professional musician and this issue has been weighing heavy on my conciousness. From a professional perspective, I would really like to get paid for my work. That doesn't happen when music files are copied and redistributed without compensation to the creater of the music. However, I am not a businessman. I am an artist. And one of the most important goals for an artist is to have his/her work seen or heard by as many people as possible. If I get paid... great. But that is secondary.
So in essense, I like to leave it up to the consumer to deal with the ethical reprocussions of file trading on an individual basis. If you like a work, I want you to distribute it so others can experience it. But keep in mind that the artist will need support to keep producing. If I create a work of art that is extremely popular and reaches a lot of people via file trading. Great. But if no one buys the record, I can't continue making such works in the future.
On the flip side, If I make a work of art that's crap. No one will want to pay for it, naturally. This puts pressure on me to create *better* art.
A lot of ethics questions can be generated from the topic it discusses.
I think a very important question on this subject is "Is cloning ethical?". I don't think it is, but I may not be able to see all the possibilities that cloning affords.
Having said that, there are too many loose ends with regards to cloning as of now. Will the person who makes a clone of a living thing own it, or is that thing (lets consider a human for now) free to do as it pleases like any other human being in a modern country?
This is just one of thousands of questions that must be asked and answered before cloning of human beings is allowed. I believe it will eventually happen and when it does, we should not be caught completely unawares.
Sorry, the Japanese did not have jets during WWII.
If you want to start a really heated debate - ask this question:
Is it morally justified to drive an SUV? You're burning an limited resource. No matter what you drive, you burn some oil. (Ignoring cars that burn twice as much coal or natural gas after having it turned into electricity). Is it moral to consume a limited resource at all? Once it's much more scarce, someone will come up with an alternative, so what difference does it make? Is gratuitous conspicuous consumption immoral? What if it were an unlimited resource? What about using gasohol (made from wheat) in a world where people are starving? If so, how do we justify eating meat (grain-fed cattle and chickens) in a starving world?
Were we justified in killing most of the whales for lamp oil in the 1800's? If we hadn't, we'd be killing them today by starving them of the food they need through our overfishing..
Intellectual property is a good concept to discuss... as you notice from earlier posters. Charles Dickens spent half his life chasing down people who published pirated (and altered) copies of his books. Some claimed they were just "improving" them. What's intellectual property anyway? How about if my pet chimp splatters paint on a canvas? How much can you improve it? How much can you protect it from copying? (Good old MTV and their fuzzy faces and shirt logos. Do you think they're eliminating competitors' brands, or worried about invasion of privacy lawsuits?) What should you be able to copyright - house floor plans? Photos of the exterior of buildings? Photos of your artwork? Can you "recopyright" the Sistine chapel ceiling if you spend a few million restoring it? Can you sue if you end up in someone's picture of a New York CIty street? How about if they "publish" it on the web?
How about pharmaceuticals? Should people be able to self-prescribe? Remember, thi is how Syphili became immune to penecillin. People woul borrow/steal whatever penecillin they could get, and take not enough - therefore creating a resistant strain of the disease.
Want a real can of worms? Is abortion ethical? If you accept it is (hah, you've hooked the liberals, now reel them in...) can you perform abortions jut because the parents want a different sex of baby? Boys only, please... Does it change the argument if the couple is doing this to get a girl instead? (stand back and watch the fur fly...)
The list goes on... Is it ethical to take organs from executed criminals?
Should you be able to track paroled felons by GPS-ankle bracelet? What if we then made everyone a criminal (3 years probabtion for speeding!)?
Is second-hand smoke a form of child abuse?
First, they learn something about the threat to their own privacy. Second, one can present the dilemma to them: If you're asked to work on it, especially in the current job market, would you do it?
The teacher can also add that this is a concrete, current issue that is reality and not some fake problem. (I know this since I am exactly in this position.)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
The visas-for-cheap-tech-labor program brings up lots of issues, especially relevant today.
- Is it ethical to allow companies in the US to hire increasing numbers of foreign workers for tech jobs when highly skilled domestic workers are unemployed?
- Is it practical?
- How does it tie in with the current trend of tech companies (and others) to move their workforces out of the country because Indian labor is so much cheaper?
Identity in our increasingly globally connected world is rapidly becoming a very fuzzy quality, with huge implications for society.
Several recent changes make it a timely issue:
- There is discussion of creating a national ID card with an accompanying database.
- Terrorists have begun to effectively use identity theft to hide their activities and relations.
- Human cloning has brought the question of how identity is established and determined (physical attributes?) to the forefront.
For example, a system like Passport or the Liberty project has to differentiate between millions of users and probably several thousand "John Smiths". Electronic systems have the luxury of assigning their own tracking attribute (a userid and password), but in the real world, we distinguish between people with physical attributes - height, weight, hair color, finger-prints, retinal scans, etc. However, that practice is fundamentally flawed - twins and clones are an insurmountable problem for identity systems based only on physical attributes.
You may be thinking, "So what? It's been that way forever - twins have always been around." But the problem is that twins previously existed in a much smaller possible sample set and identity theft was rare.
Today, we are increasingly identified by our associations and electronic interactions, including many "virtual" attributes, and identity theft is becoming more and more common.
How important is identity? Are intrusive countermeasures against identity theft justified? Are there any effective countermeasures? Does the increase in identity theft justify increased tracking of individuals by governments, or just increased measures to improve identity resolution - these two topics are usually mixed up together. Being able to identify someone reliably does not necessarily mean you can (or should) be able to track them.
Is it even legal? If someone sends me unsolicited mail, it takes me time to read/delete it, or at least it costs me to set up a filter to delete it. The cost, then, is shifted to the recipient of the email.
So the sender is requiring the recipient to spend resources without receiving any benefit. Can unsolicited email then, be considered the same as petty theft? Can Bulk mails sent across a corporate net then be grand theft? Or vandalism/destruction of property at least?
How does your relative justify teaching a class, presumably that the students paid for, on a subject that he admits he is not qualified to teach?
Thus saith the original poster:
I'd be a lot more interested in piracy if you had Britney Speares' chest in yonder CDs!
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Freeman Dyson's book Weapons and Hope might be a good place to look. It's a little dated now, very much a cold war book, but it discusses Dyson's scientific role in the bombing of Germany, and the cold war.
Another possibility would be to discuss some of the more appalling medical studies. Consider the Japanese experiments on POWs that, uncomfortably enough, form the basis for modern treatment of pressure sickness. One might also discuss the Tuskegee experiments.
I'm not sure about the above two though, because they seem like slam-dunk examples of scientists doing Bad Things. One could do those, but it might be more interesting to cover a case that's more on the borderline, to make students really grapple with the issues instead of having a good feeling about recognizing an obvious case.
How about when we create A.I., would company ownership of said a.i. constitute slavery and endentured servitude? That one is my personal fave.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Hmm. On the one hand, I was thinking of a global society of all humanity.
On the other hand, if the nations of the world get together to prevent research in certain directions, then stupid little tinpot dictators and mad scientists will get together somewhere, and...do the research.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Indeed. Google "Henry George". Locking up nature is a human invention, as artificial as any industrial policy or government regulation.
Somewhere down the line, we are going to run into a situation where we have a completely new life form, engineered by humans, that is competing with existing species.
... I wonder if nature had any business upsetting the "order of nature"
You mean like the time when that new life form called "humans" started competing with existing species, wiping out the neanderthals, the mammoths, the bison, the spotted owl, the gorilla, the
.. you have a responsibility to guide their use.
Things are clear when you're selling guns or drugs or potent ideas, but it's hard to trace the dependencies for systematic technologies. What responsibility do you bear for selling the steel that makes the guns that kill the people? It's very easy to look at the world as a libertarian, and say that you're just responsible for your corner, and can't be held responsible for the rest. It's also easy to wax socialist and say the whole thing is our shared responsibility. I think this dichotomy is solved by the ethic of "think globally, act locally".
These robots put people out of work. The people may be from your city, your state, your country, or even another continent.
If you are unlucky enough to be one of these displaced workers, with no income, what ethical options to you have?
Economic theory dictates that EVENTUALLY balance will be achieved. But the balance may be achieved via something like the Butlerian jihad (overthrow of the robots/proletariat/oppressors/etc.)
So this boils down to:
1)If you can produce more economically via outplacement/automation/robots, should you (and where is the balance point to make your decision)
2)If you lose your ability to support your family due to the above, what should your response be?
1. Who owns the genome?
Is it moral for researchers to patent sequences of genetic code which are naturally occurring, in order that they can profit from them?
2. Should pharamceutical companies make a profit froom the Third World?
The big drug companies sell some medicines at prices which Third World inhabitants cannot afford, so as not to risk grey imports back to the USA/Europe, where higher prices are affordable. This has been a particular concern with AIDS treatments.
3. Is it moral to conceal my identity?
Whether on the Internet or "real" world, and including being anonymous or adopting a fictional persona.
I like your analogy. If I want to split a cupcake with a friend (or with several, so they don't feel left out), that's ok too. Perhaps I know someone who's never tried a cupcake, and they take a bite. Maybe they like it and go buy some cupcakes (or the company that makes the mix, if they really like it). I believe in free enterprise, until they diminish their gift to society by charging obscenely. Then it's bait. --- Give me a fish, I eat well for a day. Teach me to fish, and I'll be ok until someone says it's proprietary and makes it illegal. Then I'll starve to death while waiting for the hearing. Legal side effects are worse than the crime (or lack thereof).
Give me a fish, I shall eat well for a day. Teach me to fish, and I will eat well until some idiot patents it.
Asimov largely dealt with and answered these questions 50 years ago in the Robot Series ("The Caves Of Steel", "The Naked Sun", "The Robots Of Dawn", "Robots and Empire") and his other robot works ("I, Robot", in particular).
First of all, get a cup of coffee. Not only will it make you feel better, but also, if somebody asks why you are so nervous, you can say "it's the caffeine, man". Second, find your computer. The boss will probably take care of that. You will probably then be assigned a couple of bugs to fix, just to get familiar with the software. Now remember, every program must be "compiled" first. Ask a coworker how to "compile" the program. This is a normal question since every company does it differently. Pay attention. Now that you can "compile", you have taken care of at least a third of your day. Remember, real programmers "compile" a lot. The next tip is to find the source code (ask the coworker; no programmer will start such a search on his own) and open a couple of files. Reading them will make you look busy and eventually teach you how programs are made. The next thing to do is learn to "debug". Debugging means telling the computer to do the program one line at a time and seeing what happens. To learn to "debug", watch your coworkers for a while; it is something they do a lot. You know they are "debugging" when you see the source code with a funny colored line moving through it. (Note: if your job involves "Unix" and "gdb", you are in bigger trouble and will need to get a graphical debugger first from freshmeat.net). When you know how to "compile", read the code, and "debug", you will find that at least a three quarters of your day can be taken up by those activities. When asked about your progress say something like "oh, it might be done today, or maybe next week.". Now I know you are thinking about the remaining quarter of your day; but do not worry. Those hours are usually taken up by "meetings" and will involve little effort on your part. To cut down your day even more, come in late. All real programmers do. The real programmers also stay up until midnight, but nobody will notice if you leave before then.
1) Cloning for body part usage: Clone self, pith embryo before 3rd month, keep fetus alive until birth, take kidneys et. al. and implant in self.
2) Creating Self aware computers as opposed to self aware Robots (Computers can not move, escape, defend themselves, hook upto a phone line and call for help unless a human being helps them do this. A robot has legs to move and arms to help themselves.)
3) Genetically modifying animals for enhanced intelligence (say IQ of 70) but not granting them the smae rights we would grant a Retarded human being with the same IQ.
4) Preventing people from genetically correcting "deformities/weaknesses", such as a pre-disposition for cancer, a predisposition for weak heart, a pre-disposition for less intelligence.
5) Using Drugs/genetics to affect the sexuality of a full grown person (Make them straight not gay - or vice versa for that matter).
6) Using Drugs/genetics to affect the sexuality of a child/infant.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice" should be required reading for first year scientists and engineers.
I took a class called "Computers and Society" last year that was supposed to focus on the same things this ethics class will. I remember some of the topics: health insurance, business practices, etc. Plenty of room for ethical debate - but not a single one about technology. I dropped the class halfway through, even though it is a required class, because the teacher obviously had no idea what the word "computer" meant. Although a friend of mine who stayed in somehow managed to work EverQuest into one of the class ethics discussions... :) Please make sure your teacher friend stays on-topic, because as relevent as these other ethical issues may be, they are not technological ones, and many universities offer other ethics classes to cover non-technological issues.
What about virtual kiddie porn? - where there are no actual kids used in the making, but the images are created and photoshopped to look like children. People who do this are morally dispicable (in my opinion) but are they doing anything illegal? Are they exercising their 1st ammendment rights, or should they be prosecuted?
A corporation is a thing. One cannot behave immorally or unethically against a thing. It's like asking if it's acceptable to lie to a rock. Humans deserve ethical behavior. Corporations can only legislate lawful behavior.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Chapter 5: Revisionist History: Should Greedo have shot first? Did the FBI agents have guns, or radios? History, the truth, digital editing, and you. Who were we at war with last week? I forget.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This means that there won't be any new products or new ideas, because it will be the easiest thing for everybody to just sit back and enjoy the free, readily available goods that they get by replication.
There are two fields generally considered on this topic, software and music, so let's consider them both. The argument that software won't work if people can openly share it should be quite readily dismissed by anyone who reads Slashdot regularly. The open source movement provided a clear model that, if nothing else, shows software can, and WILL BE, developed by community to fit desire. So your argument that incentive disappears and thus creation disappears clearly disagrees with demonstrated human nature in the field of software.
Second, let's consider music. Music has existed for a long time, cd's have existed for a short time. Music is quite definitely something which does not improve by throwing a whole lot of money at it. Music is art, an expression of the soul. You can't get a better painting by paying the painter more, neither will a musician write better music if you pay the musician more. The idea of a "starving artist" is a longstanding phrase, and the phrase only exists because the true artists don't paint or write or sing for a paycheck, they do it for the art, and they will continue to do it for the art, no matter what economic system they end up in.
In modern times there seems to be no shortage of people willing to pay for concerts, so the artist's aren't really going to be hurt by an economic model shift. The recording industry might have to reform itself into a publicist, promoter, distributer, and scheduler, but this is how things go, economic systems reform as technologies change. The art certainly won't die, it courses through our veins.
Has reporting spam helped you reduce your incoming spam? No? I didn't think so. Why do you report it? The spammers aren't wasting your time--you are wasting your own time. For snail mail, do you take the time to write to each spammer to get your name removed from their mailing lists? No? Then why do you do a similar thing with spam?
Does hitting the delete key 20 times a day (or whatever) really take that much effort? How about using filters/rules or Bayesian filters then? Set them up once and you save time.
Think about it this way. I was "on" the internet back before the Web was created. Back in 1986. Back then, business was discouraged from using the Internet altogether. Now, business can use the Internet. That has led to some abuses. Yes, that sucks. But spam really doesn't cost that much unless you waste your time dealing with spam in the most ineffective manner possible (yes, your method of dealing with it is ineffective).
Let me ask you this. How the hell does spam intrude into your privacy? How do "illegitamite[sic] marketers hawking mostly 100% scam wares" intrude in the middle of your personal and business conversations? Last I checked, no spammer has been able to paste in a spam ad in the middle of an email from a friend or business colleague. There is no invasion of privacy. Hell, once again, good filters/rules and/or Bayesian filters can make it so that you don't see *any* spam.
If the Internet is no a great resource for communication and productivity any more for you, you *really* need to look at alternative ways to deal with spam. For me, about 75% of the email I get is spam. But it doesn't affect me at all. My wife, who is not as much of a computer guy as me (she relies on the "delete" button to handle spam) spends...oh...about 20 seconds a day hitting the delete button for spam. It simply isn't that much of a productivity breaker *unless you deal with it in an ineffective manner*.
You claim that the spammers have profited at the system's expense. But, last I checked, ISPs tend to pay for bandwidth at a flat rate per month, whether the bandwidth is used or not. I would bet that far less than 1% of the bandwidth of the Internet is consumed by spam. The costs of this bandwidth are negligible because ISPs don't have to buy additional bandwidth as a result of it.
Law enforcement and government are doing nothing effective to stop it because there are many precedents for allowing spam. I get about 20 snail mails a day that are unsolicited. I get about 4 snail mails a day that are solicited. Why don't we go after these spammers instead? They have a much greater cost to society, both in terms of the costs of pollution (making paper isn't too good for the environment) and the costs of our landfills. Snail mail only takes up electrons and negligible amounts of bandwidth (negligible compared to the bandwidth used for more "legitimate" business uses, like porn and surfing the web).
Just because you don't agree with the content of spam, do you think you have the right to shut down others' rights to receive the content? Maybe some people actually buy the stuff offered in spam. I don't. But I don't want to shut down another person's right to buy something offered from spam.
If spam were really such a severe problem in terms of costs and productivity, then I'm sure some enterprising soul would simply make an email replacement that operates on a different port that charges the sender for each item received. But, quite frankly, spam doesn't cost that much, and doesn't impact productivity that much (except for thin-skinned people like yourself). Nobody (other than Cringely) is calling for such an email replacement.
Can't you spend the energy you use fighting spam in another more productive way? It's clear your efforts won't make spam go away. How about you replace your quixotic endeavors with more productive uses? Become a Big Brother to an inner city youth. Donate time building housing for the underprivileged. Spend time supporting the arts in your neighborhood. Or, hell, go ahead and build that email replacement that you seem to want so badly. Anything is better than spending hours trying to blacklist spammers that have sent you 10 emails today.
--Be human.
I'm generally an open book kind of guy, and I find that privacy issues are usually non-issues for me. If I run a 24-hour web cam in my living room, what is my ethical responsibility to inform guests of this? What if a few friends come over to watch a movie? What about dinner with friends? What if I'm on a date? I don't make an effort to hide the camera, but it's not exactly a conversation piece either. Maybe I could put up a sign saying, "These Premises Are Under 24-hour Video Surveillance," and let guests interpret that as they may. Some would see this use of technology as nothing short of perverse, while others wouldn't give it a second thought. And I think these reactions are usually more felt than thought. And should that affect whether and how I disclose to guests that a camera might see them while they're at my house? I'm not really looking for answers here. This is not a deep and burning question that I loose sleep over. I'm just offering this issue for use in the course on how our use of technology introduces new issues in the area of ethical behavior.
-- Jeff Clough, Humble Programmer
In my opinion, a course in technology related ethics would not be complete without coverage of the following topics:
1.) General ethics how to define right/wrong, categorical imperative, etc.
2.) Discussion on ethics -vs- law. There IS a difference- no matter what the politicians say.
3.) Technology is synonomous with power. Power doesn't decide what is ethical.
4.) "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Think about it this way. I was "on" the internet back when it was spam free. We could carry out business dicsussions and get work done without intrusive interruptions. Today, we have...
Those of us who have really been using Internet mail for a long time remember when business use was prohibited by the AUPs (Acceptable Use Policies) of all backbone connectivity providers.
Unfortunately, the anti-business academic Internet folks that largely controlled things back then decided to lump any and all "commercial" use in with all sorts of undesirable things, like porn and spam. Unfortunately, in order to open up the net to commerce, it was necessary to deal with all the other crap as well. This wasn't helped by legions of pubescent future Slashdotters who only wanted the net to be thier private pornucopia, and so argued vehemently for no AUPs at all as ISPs began to emerge in the early 90s.
I for one would love to bring back AUPs, and a network of backbone providers that support them - Few things would make my net experience happier than never seeing either porn or spam again...
(Interestingly, such AUPs would *lower* the cost of delivering service for those service providers, but they could charge a *higher* price. Sometimes less really is more.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Actually, the USA does as it has always been a representational republic. Never a democracy.
But it's possible to make excuses anywhere, anywhen, if you want. It's just another statistic.
8-PP
Luke....I am your father.
... *
[ Luke stares, hypnotized by the blinkenlights on Darth Vader's chest]
Luke....I AM YOUR FATHER.
[blinkenlights]
Listen to me, you punk geekchild, I'm your f*cking father!
[BLINKENLIGHTS]
*Darth slaps Luke with a large trout, knocking him off the platform
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
On MS's Age of Empires EULA, it states explicitly that the owner is allowed to make a backup copy. However, since the game is copy protected, one must break the copy protection to do as they are permitted in the license. Unfortunately, that breaks the license.
As I see it, there are two ethical quesitons about this. The first is the obvious of whether the owner has the right to make a backup copy or not. The other is whether the company should be excending rights that they forbid in other ways.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
I can think of lots of ways to get into this one. Here's a few:
Is copying parts of web pages ethical? They are all copyrighted, but since technology make it so easy, and they probably expected it anyway...
HTML allows one to create a page that has pictures on another machine. A link to someone's picture isn't a copy of it, so doesn't violate copyright. However, it does use up their bandwidth. It also separates their content from their image (potentially robbing them of the self-promotion that justified their making the image available on the web). Is it ethical to do this just because the technology was designed with this in mind?
You have found that some has created a deep link to one of your pictures. You don't like that. Is it ethical to change it to something that might embarass them or get them into trouble (e.g. change it to hate propaganda, or porn)?
Technology allows credit bureaus to create large databases of lots of data on individuals. Just because technology allows them to correlate all the data and attach it to individuals, should they do so? Should they then sell the information in those databases to anyone who wants to pay?
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
There!
Given the overpopulation of the world (maybe we can feed everyone, but the world can't sustain everyone living like Americans), is it ethical to do things that promote population growth? Is it ethical to help infertile people to make babies? Is it ethical to design better corn so we can feed more people who will all want food and consumer commodities? Is it ethical to cure lung cancer, or is it better to allow people's own stupidity and choice of bad habits to kill them? Ditto for other diseases caused by destructive lifestyles? Is China's one-child policy ethical?
I'd love to know what everyone thinks. I'm in a doctoral biology program and nobody talks about the ramifications of molecular biology research.
"I never really used Joe either but a stupid editor is a stupid editor." -D. Reed.
From a library's point of view, the big companies that control access to online journal databases are pretty immoral. They charge exorbitant subscription fees, there is little choice about which databases you subscribe to, they won't give out detailed usage statistics, and they can remove the one journal you paid all that money for in the first place, at the drop of a hat. Libraries have turned to consortial arrangments to negotiate better conditions. I guess any discussion would be about whether the database companies are misusing their power of Copyright and their market monopoly to extort money from libraries.
On the one hand, I was thinking of a global society of all humanity.
Which rather begs the question of which self-important dictator will decide he speaks for quite literally everyone, and tell them all they can't do it, now doesn't it?
And (some dictator) will get together somewhere, and...do the research.
An interesting way of looking at it! Alternately, enlightened socieities that believe that the restriction of certain forms of individual liberty is tyrannical may simply excel against other, less enlightened socieities.
C//
It's already way too late for this sort of thinking, though it is good that it is coming up. If we continue with our current course at the rate we are going, I would estimate our chances of extinction at much higher than 50%. We passed that turning point a long time ago.
I used to think that leaving Earth was the answer, but that won't work. If we fail here, we will fail elsewhere. We stand or fall here on Mother Earth, and if she dies we die with her.
The clear and present danger of extinction has been there for some time. For instance, during the Cuban missile crisis, the world was literally saved by one man, a Soviet submarine captain and perhaps the greatest hero who ever lived, who refused to push the button and set it off when ordered to do so by his so-called superiors. The Djinn has been out of the bottle for quite a while now.
The idea that we can use these technologies safely and sanely is a joke. Look around. Would you call any of this safe and sane? Ha! Automobiles alone are a genocidally insane technology, and almost everybody has one of those.
There is one hope, and one hope only. Joy alludes to it near the end of the article when he starts talking about the Dalai Llama. There is a paradigm shift of unprecidented proportions taking place all over the globe. The Dalai Llama is part of it. If we are lucky, we will be able to complete the crossover before THEY manage to immanentize the eschaton. We have very little time left. I give us less than a decade before we pass the last point of no return, but this is just a guess. Fortunately for the human species, things are happening very fast now.
I am not a Luddite. Neither is Joy. I like tech. I do, however, think that it is the merest sanity to try to use tech in a way which benefits our species rather than threatening to destroy it. This should be pretty obvious. This is called tempering tech with wisdom. This will mean developing some tech and not others. There are things we wish we could uninvent. We should not invent more of them. It should be pretty clear that any species which evolves an imminant threat to its own survival is not likely to last long. Duh.
You can help with this problem! Take part in the paradigm shift, change your consciousness before it is too late!
All distinctions are arbitrary.
I took a class a couple of years ago that had a similar theme. Ethics and the Internet
is it ethical invade a spammer's privacy?