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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Category: Semester
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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Sounds So Good It Hurts
The audio industry is not typically one that most would consider dangerous. However, the act of music compression and the expansion of large music festivals has created a perfect environment for damaged hearing. The engineers in this industry are instrumental in this process, and they have an obligation to prevent these hearing related injuries. This is due to their responsibility to look out for the common good, the utility of society, their own virtue, and the implications of their ethical code.
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Galactic Law and Ownership
11/9/2020 Space exploration is as fascinating as it is frightening. With plans to explore Mars and beyond proposed for upcoming decades, sooner rather than later,…
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Fines for Fire-Induced Blackouts?
11/2/2020 The California wildfires of October 2019 affected vast swaths of residents, forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate their homes and many to lose their…
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Tech Companies Accruing Monopolies that Harken Back to the Days of “Oil Barons and Railroad Tycoons”
10/26/2020 A sixteen-month investigation into tech giants including Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google has finally been completed with the filing of a lawsuit against Google by the…
View More Tech Companies Accruing Monopolies that Harken Back to the Days of “Oil Barons and Railroad Tycoons”