tag > Ethics
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COVID-19 & AI - Privacy & Ethical Considerations (RE-Work)
Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures - as we battle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, governments, industry and citizens around the world have kicked efforts into high gear to find creative and effective ways to curb the spread of the disease. A variety of technological and AI-enabled solutions are being proposed and piloted with varying degrees of success. What's being discussed less is how this might alter what precedents get set and how the technology landscape will change once the pandemic has subsided.
Finally, we must pay attention to the creeping deployment of surveillance infrastructure under the guise of fighting the pandemic. Particular attention needs to be focused on powers being granted to the government, the technological solutions being deployed and the legal and social precedents being set. We don't want to emerge from the pandemic crisis with a privacy and ethical crisis on our hands. The solutions being deployed to combat COVID-19 need to be purpose- and time-limited to hold our rights and freedoms in place.
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Book: Battle for the Mind - by W.Sargant "What would have happened if they [new methods of physical and chemical psychiatric treatments] had been available for the last five hundred years?... John Wesley who had years of depressive torment before accepting the idea of salvation by faith rather than good works, might have avoided this, and simply gone back to help his father as curate of Epworth following treatment. Wilberforce, too, might have gone back to being a man about town, and avoided his long fight to abolish slavery and his addiction to laudanum. Loyola and St Francis might also have continued with their military careers. Perhaps, even earlier, Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern [psychiatric] treatments." - William Sargant (1907 - 1988)
Related: Over the Edge - by Mike Jay
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On DARPA’s research into human enhancement (The Atlantic)
The mission: “to ‘free the mind from the limitations of even healthy bodies.’ What the agency learns from healing makes way for enhancement. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.” “How can I liberate mankind from the limitations of the body?” one researcher asked. One aspiration: "the ability, via computer, to transfer knowledge and thoughts from one person’s mind to another’s."
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Nagasaki Atomic Bomb "Most of the best minds of the American scientific community have devoted themselves, for 50 years, to the single project of delivering more and more explosive power over longer and longer distances in shorter and shorter time to kill more and more people." - Buckminster Fuller
"It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from WEAPONRY to LIVINGRY." - Buckminster Fuller
#Military #Science #Ethics -
"In psychology, a mental state in which an organism forced to bear aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant, becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are “escapable,” presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation. Developed by American psychologist Martin Seligman starting in 1967."
#RTM #NeuroScience #Military #Media #Health #Therapy #Experience #Ethics
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How America Tortures - Report by Mark Denbeaux et.al (Seton Hall Uni, School of Law)
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"I don't trust people to genetically 'design' their child because I see what they do with character creation in games." - Thoughts on Eugenics from a thread on Reddit (2016)
via the wonderfully curios Technology and Society 2. #Biotech #ALife #Ethics #Design
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From Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", developer of Logotherapy (slides)
According to Frankl, "We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances"
Documentary: Viktor Frankl und trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen (DE only)
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Human-animal hybrids to be developed in Japan after ban controversially lifted
“If the goal of such studies is to discover a therapeutic application for humans, experiments on rats and mice are unlikely to produce a useful result because the size of the organ will not be sufficient and the result will be a far cry from humans anatomically” - Jiro Nudeshima, a life science specialist.
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Quote from the Eulogy of William C. Patrick III, Expert on Germ Warfare and bioweaponeer for the U.S. Army during the Cold War:
"Mr. Patrick expressed no regrets about his arms work, saying he was comfortable with memories of killing animals and finding new ways to produce death. He said it was all part of doing his duty for his country in perilous times."
#Comment: I wonder if his personality-type was related at all to the likes of Shirō Ishii (a microbiologist and army medical officer who served as the director of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army) or Josef Mengele. Biological warfare seems to require and attract very special types of "doctors".
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Scientists ‘May Have Crossed Ethical Line’ in Growing Human Brains: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/21/scientists-may-have-crossed-ethical-line-in-growing-human-brains #NeuroScience #Ethics #Biology #BCI
Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn. The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies. Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation. On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab. “If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”
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Pope Francis declares 'climate emergency' and urges action https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/14/pope-francis-declares-climate-emergency-and-urges-action
The last time the catholic church declared a "emergency" was against "witchcraft", resulting in the inquisition burning enormes amount of innocent (mainly women) alive (from the middle ages up to the 19th century). Maybe they should declare a priest pedophilia emergency instead?
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How Big Tech funds the debate on AI ethics: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2019/06/how-big-tech-funds-debate-ai-ethics #ML #Politics #Ethics
The Silicon Valley giants are spending billions developing AI, but they are also funding the people setting the technology’s most fundamental principles.
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Responsibility and Sustainability in Brain Science, Technology, and Neuroethics in China—a Culture-Oriented Perspective: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30050-9
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There should be a law (or incentive system) for all engineers to have to work in human-care (midwife, nurse, elderly-care, kindergartener etc.) for a minimum of 1 year during their education/career. Convinced it would have a tremendous positive impact on the discipline & society.
