Some minorities have understandable fears about the COVID-19 vaccine—how can those fears be assuaged, and whose responsibility is it to do so?
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Category: Semester
Fuzzy Ownership of NFTs
The rapid expansion of the market for NFTs, a popular new kind of cryptocurrency, raises questions about the intricacies of digital ownership.
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Implications of Interplanetary Translocation
The recent successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars gives us cause to consider the extent to which we are ethically obligated to prevent the “contamination” of other planets with earthly life.
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The Inequality of Virtual Reality
Virtual reality seems like a great escape, especially after nearly a year of lockdown, but it’s rife with inequities; do technology companies have a responsibility to combat these inequities before VR becomes a larger part of our daily lives?
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Facebook’s Role in Mitigating Vaccine Misinformation
Facebook is cracking down on the spread of misinformation about vaccines – is this a violation of free speech or a valid effort to protect the public?
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Learning to Trust Black Box Artificial Intelligence
Rolls-Royce’s “AI 2.0” has a massive series of checks to ensure its integrity; should this be the standard for other “explainable” AIs?
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How Apps are Influencing Reddit’s War with Wall Street
2/1/2021 While 2020 was undoubtedly a strange year for the stock market, with industries swinging unprecedentedly up and down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, January…
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The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars
Self-driving cars process huge amounts of sensory information in a very short amount of time. The processing speed of this information allows self-driving cars to make an informed decision on how to act in the case of an accident. In scenarios where casualties are unavoidable, this produces an ethical dilemma in determining who should survive, raising questions about how the value of a life should be calculated. Ultimately, because all lives are equal and no individual should have power over deciding the fate of the lives of others, self-driving cars are unethical.
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Profitable Risk: The Dangers of Consumer Spaceflight and Space Tourism
Society is rapidly approaching an era in which ordinary civilians can purchase tickets to become passengers on space vehicles. Companies worldwide are deep in the development of infrastructure and technology to provide spaceflight for amusement and transportation. These endeavors deviate fundamentally from traditional spaceflight and raise questions about the ethical implications of commercial spaceflight with civilian passengers.
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Autonomous Accidents: The Ethics of Self-Driving Car Crashes
Self-driving cars are no longer confined to the realm of sci-fi; a variety of autonomous vehicles are under development by companies around the world. Before they hit consumer markets, though, manufacturers, lawmakers, and society as a whole must decide how cars should behave ethically in the worst-case scenario: a possibly fatal crash.
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