Month: April 2016

Censorship

Online censorship is starting to become a bigger and bigger problem with the boom of the internet and the continued use of technology in an increasing number of areas of out lives. As Google searches and YouTube how-to videos become more prevalent, so does the number of ideas floating around. Censorship is the hiding of many of these ideas that are thought to be harmful to an organization’s point of view or ideology. It is usually employed by a governing body.

There are many social, moral, and ethical issues regarding censorship. One issue is that censorship effectively limits the scope of thought of a government’s subjects. It hurts free speech and makes the citizens think in a way that the government is essentially forcing them to think like. This is quite obviously not ethical, as human minds are not meant to be shaped and the innovation of humanity is driven by free-flowing ideas and the ability to think for oneself. A government would go about issuing these restrictions by not allowing internet searches that use certain keywords and providing internet propaganda to limit the scope of thinking and to promote certain ideas that are beneficial to the agenda that the government is trying to promote. As has been mentioned a lot in this post, a government would want to use censorship if they want to hide a certain way of thinking from their subjects–for example, China using censorship to keep democratic ideas from spreading throughout the population.

Even if censorship in a country is wrong, I think that it is ethical for a company to respect the censorship requests of the country in which they are operating. It is not up to a company to make the laws and to deem what is right in a country, so I think they should follow governmental orders. That being said, I think that in cases such as China or North Korea where the censorship is especially bad, companies should refuse to run business in them if the censorship interrupts their daily business and look to move out of said country. I think that this is the most ethical way to deal with the problem because rather than trying to fight a revolution of sorts against the government, the company should just refuse service when it feels that its ethical standards are being compromised by the rules of censorship of a country.

By the same stretch of the imagination, I don’t think that it’s ethical for developers to provide tools to circumvent these restrictions. It is not up to developers to make laws–or in this case break them–that are set up by a government, no matter what they think is right or wrong.

I think that online censorship is a cause for concern in the coming years because of our reliance on technology. Tech companies need to stand up for what they think is ethical and right and work for freedom of speech by refusing to provide services if a country or government violates the company’s ethical code.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is pretty easily defined as a machine or computer that is capable of doing some level of computation that could normally be done by a human. This could be as simple as making a decision based on a math comparison, or as complex as hearing a question and being able to formulate a coherent and accurate response. It is similar to what I consider to be human intelligence in the fact that it can take a problem, no matter how simple, and provide an answer or a solution to said problem. How it differs, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t have human reason. That is, computers and AI generally are unable to take in non-material components, such as compassion, ethics, and other human emotions that can sometimes factor into decisions. For example, if there’s an AI that makes business decisions based solely on numbers, it can’t take into account the ethics of huge business layoffs and the effects those have on employees; it can only look at the situation from a pure numbers perspective.

I think that AlphaGo, Deep Blue, and Watson are all proof of the viability and the power of AI. They each are programmed to perform a specific task, and have proven that they can do these tasks on par–and sometimes better–than human professionals in that same field. AlphaGo and Deep Blue were able to defeat world champions in Go and chess, respectively, and Watson was able to defeat past champions on Jeopardy. While these are certainly crowning achievements and show how far computer science, technology, and artificial intelligence have come, there is no reason to believe that the advancement of AI will stop there.

I think that the Chinese Room is a good counter argument for the Turing Test in the sense that I described above. An AI can never fully take in the human components that are a part of human intelligence, so therefore they are just a strong program, or a “strong AI” that is able to interpret certain events so that it can properly respond.

Related to this is my opinion that a computing system can never fully be considered a mind. There are too many intangibles, such as emotions, relationships, and the fact that different humans respond to different situations differently that factor into decisions for a system to fully be able to mimic human intelligence. In a sense, humans are biological computers because we take in certain factors to a problem or question and are able to use these factors to come up with an answer or a solution. The fact still remains, though, that humans are able to take in some factors that computers aren’t, making us a different breed of computers. The ethical implications of this are that we shouldn’t fully rely on computers to make our decisions for us. There are many ways in which they can help us come up with solutions and present the problem in a simplified way, but there are too many human elements involved in everyday decision making to allow computers and AI to fully take over.