Ethics
The Code I’m still ashamed of
- This article was especially linked to ethics in technology. The article was about a developer, who when he was just starting out, was tasked to build a site that gave a quiz. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the end result was that regardless of the answer, the site would then recommend teenage girls to take a certain drug that was made by the client. While he didn’t feel any negative feelings while making the initial site/quiz, he only felt bad after he found out that a young girl had committed suicide due to the same drug that came recommended as the results to the quiz. While I will reserve my judgement of this guys ethics, I will say that it was definitely the wrong thing to do as a person, because you never know what might happen, and recommending drugs to young children that you are targeting is just ludocris. As a developer, it’s a dark hazy area, because while on one hand you probably want to retain your humanity, but on the other you are a professional who was tasked with a job. The devils advocate would say that, there is no concrete proof that what he had put out there had any directional cause to that girls death, but that is probably a debate for anther time. So, I’ll end with this, as person that cares about teh lives of others, it was completely wrong to finish this project.
Morality, ethics of a self-driving car: Who decides who lives, dies?
- This article was about asking the philosophical questions about self driving cars and how they will react to life-and-death scenarios in the future. The ethical delimma here is the same as the trolley problem, where we have to weight and put value on human life, and it gives question to whether or not we are capable of doing so. The machine will react according to how we tell it to, but again are we able to determine whether or not someone deserves to live over someone else, or whether an individual deserves to live over a group. Theorically, we could have it where the car is able to more accurately prevent a collision, but that is not guaranteed, and so we are still left with the delimma of choose and individual over another. The car has to choose whether to possibly harm the occupant or maybe the pedistrian ahead. I think in these cases it’s rather impossible choose, because we are unable to put a value on the human life.