CS109 Spring 2018: Unethically Ethical

  (Sriram, Danely, Alvin, Xeon) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are more and more prevalent in every aspect of our lives, from policing to banking. As such, it is important that these algorithms are designed in ethical ways. Unfortunately, in the banking sector, that is not always the case. These algorithms have advantages including increasing speed, reducing mistakes, reducing labor costs, and enhancing customer experience. However, algorithms are not without bias. Bias can come from unrepresentative or biased data samples used to train the model, bias in the training of the model, or bias in the original design or adaptation after contact with new data. This is especially bad when credit scoring company uses shopping patterns or social media activity, which could be incorrect, in a non-transparent process, and result in denying credit without the consumer knowing why. Furthermore, an algorithm could use factors such as race or writing style, which have no dire...

The Stuxnet virus was launched by the United States and likely Israel, with the United States having officially taken responsibility. The purpose of the virus was to infect centrifuges used by Iran’s nuclear program, spy on them, and interrupt their operations. This action raised a number of ethical questions. Is it ethical for a government to attack another government’s technological infrastructure? There are many valid opinions on this issue, and it is highly dependent on the situation. With technological attacks it is possible for actors, whether terrorists or nation-states, to poison water supplies, or take down the electrical grid, with devastating and life destroying consequences. It is probably agreeable that anything that will kill innocent civilians is unethical, even in a time of war. The Stuxnet virus is easier to consider ethical, as it did not target innocents, and in fact was necessary to get information and possibly stop Iran from creating a nuclear weapon, which would ...

An individual’s privacy in the United States is protected by the Fourth Amendment, in which the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of the people “shall not be violated”. With the advent of technology, however, the scope of the personal possessions of a person have expanded include digital property as well. The definition of a warrant, a right to access “the places to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”, has thus been blurred by the ease of access to personal digital property. One main example of the debate over the right to exercise the Fourth Amendment comes from the seizure of technology in order to access information that could assist criminal investigations. Tech companies, although not obligated to assist in such investigations unless summoned by a subpoena, have the option to assist the government. This being said, however, there exists opposing stances on this action. One prominent company that assists in government law enforcement is Best Buy. In a lawsuit...

                     (Sriram,Danely, Alvin, Edwin) In April 2013, Greenheart Games released Game Dev Tycoon, a single-player game in which the player gets to simulate the evolution of the game development industry by starting their own company in the 1980s. Because of huge hit that the gaming industry has taken due to bootleg games, the creators of Game Dev Tycoon released a bootleg version of their game on torrenting sites to toy a bit with the users who downloaded the pirated game. The game logged how many people pirated the game, as well as made the game inside the game get pirated. Piracy is a widespread issue in the software industry, especially for the video game sector. Piracy is the process of distributing and acquiring an illegal copy of a piece of intellectual property without having to pay for it. Essentially, piracy is stealing, with the same consequences to the creator of a work as stealing an item from a store. How...