Month: November 2019

In this modern era, technology is evolving faster than ever, and it has reached a point where we have been able to build computer systems that can perform with human intelligence, which we now know as artificial intelligence. With artificial intelligence being one of the hottest and fastest growing areas in technology, we need to be prepared for what’s to come from it, whether it should be something to be embraced or feared. I think the answer is both; artificial intelligence is something that we should accept in order to thrive as a human race and also be cautious of so that it does not overtake our society. So far, some of the big artificial intelligence creations in the past few years have been AlphaGo, Deep Blue, Watson, and AlphaZero. While these AI have been able to prove that they have exceeded human intelligence in specific tasks, they still have limitations in what they can do compared to a human. Nevertheless, their superhuman intelligence is indisputable and definitely can aid us in various problems and help us learn new things that we couldn’t have thought on our own. There are popular tests to measure the intelligence of these AI systems, such as the Turing Test and the Chinese Room. These tests show that AI that pass these tests demonstrate intelligence similar to a human, but a common counterargument is that while AI can display intelligent behavior, it is merely an imitation of human intelligence. Even though I don’t believe AI doesn’t currently truly reflect human intelligence, it is useful enough if it can behave like one by passing the tests. So then at what point could artificial intelligence be considered completely reflective of human intelligence? Although it seems absurd to think that computers will ever be exactly the same as us, there has been extensive research going on in connectomics that suggests that if we can map the connections going on in our brain in a computer, then perhaps computer systems won’t be too far off of normal human behavior. Because things such as emotions and moral decisions come from the brain, a complete replication of the brain would mean that it would be possible for computer systems to have a mind of a human as well. That would mean humans, despite our extremely complicated organic nervous system, can be reduced to a conglomeration of neural connections that can be represented by a computer if we can successfully map those complex connections. But thinking of the impact of AI and automation in our society, we know that it can do good things for us, like delivering packages and taking orders at restaurants, for instance. We would not have to waste human labor to do the kind of mindless tasks and instead use our skills in more important tasks where human intuition matters more. Yet, the transition to implement AI and automation into our society will undoubtedly hurt those whose jobs are being replaced by robots and machines. This is why we should take the implementation of AI into society with caution so that we can minimize the human losses while yielding the most benefit from AI. Ultimately, I do believe in the hype of AI because combining human intuition with computer intelligence can help us to further innovation and live our lives more efficiently.

So far in the Internet, there aren’t too many restrictions on our freedom of speech; we can say what we want to say online, and we generally won’t be punished for what we post or even what we browse. Recently, however, there has been more pressure to integrate censorship and content regulation into the Internet to control what we can do online. In order to determine to what extent online regulation is acceptable, if at all, we need to consider what the Internet really is and what basic rights that we have online. In its simplest form, the Internet is just a huge conglomeration of networks that people can access from their devices. As a client, the middle-man that provides us access to the wide range of services on the Internet is our Internet Service Provider, or ISP. Few years ago, there was a law that was passed to enforce fair access for everyone, which is the ISP’s responsibility. After Trump’s election, however, it was revoked so that the ISP had freedom to control the traffic, such as throttling and creating fast lanes. While the ISPs currently may not be abusing their freedom, too much deregulation of the government could allow the ISPs to become extremely powerful and completely control the Internet, which would be an inconvenience for both tech companies as well as the consumers. Therefore, there should be some sort of regulation by the government to ensure that not all the power is transferred over to the gatekeepers of the Internet. Going back to the idea of content regulation and restriction, there should also be some kind of regulation on that. Some content are indisputably inappropriate or disrespectful and have no reason to be discussed or browsed on the Internet. As discussed in class, it may be necessary for people to be aware of such topics, but they shouldn’t actively participate in them. In order to make the Internet safer and acceptable to all audiences, there should be a combination of regulation and an effort on the user to not participate in sensitive or inappropriate areas of the Internet. Then, the question is, who gets to decide what content is regulated on the Internet? There are two primary agents that could be involved: the government and private companies. In my opinion, the private companies should be the one deciding what content should or should not be regulated on the Internet. If the government gets to decide, then not everyone would agree with their definition of what content should be regulated or censored. On the other hand, leaving up to the private companies means that if their consumers don’t agree with the regulations and censorship implemented by a specific company, the consumer can just avoid using the company’s service and look for another one. Ultimately, I am not too worried about the online censorship problem because the topics that advocates of censorship are supporting are primarily inappropriate or disrespectful ones, which I did not want to participate in anyway, let alone explore the contents. So even if some agent decides to enact online censorship, I would be fine with it as long as the content that is being censored is backed by some justification in which its presence is unnecessary on the Internet.

If corporations are afforded the same rights as individual persons, then they should obviously be expected to have the same ethical and moral obligations and responsibilities as individual persons. Corporations shouldn’t be able to enjoy the liberties and rights of humans and not be expected to behave ethically and morally as us. It was proven in several court cases that corporations, as they are recognized as a group of individuals, that they deserve basic human rights, which implies that they should also be obligated to behave with good morals and ethics since they are simply a group of people. In the case of IBM’s partnership with the Nazis, we saw an example of a corporation doing business with an unethical group of people. Using the same logic that corporations are rewarded with rights as individual persons and have an obligation to behave morally, IBM clearly should not have aided a group that was torturing and killing millions of innocent lives. No amount of profit should have justified this partnership with the Nazis; yet, the fact that IBM valued making money over ethical obligations suggests that they were clearly in the wrong in this case. Instead, IBM should have based their business decision on morality and ethics and confidently declined the partnership with the Nazis. So going back to the idea that corporations are just a group of individuals, everyone who is a part of the corporation should have a say in what is a right or wrong decision. A corporation is not just one person or made of few important board members; it encompasses everyone who is involved in the corporation. It makes more sense to say that if a corporation is a group of individuals that it should make a collective decision that is supported by the majority rather than a few higher-ups making all the decisions that may not be agreed by many, although it may not be actually applied in practice. Additionally, there should be limits that should be placed on how competitive a corporation can be. Generally, competition is a good thing because it drives corporations to develop better technology than their competitors in order to survive, which pushes innovation to new heights. However, corporations forcefully destroying their competitors to get the upper hand is not permissible. For instance, the competition between Microsoft and Netscape was very controversial because Microsoft specifically targeted Netscape’s browser and tried to take it down. Even though Netscape had the early lead in the browser war, Microsoft exploited its Windows monopoly by excluding Netscape’s browser on the operating system and integrating their own browser, Internet Explorer, not giving Netscape a chance to have its browser available to their consumers. This type of competition shouldn’t be allowed because it prohibits corporations to even try to compete with the top. In fact, this approach would eventually lead to some corporation becoming a monopoly, which would lower the incentive to further innovation because the corporation who has the monopoly wouldn’t have to worry about other corporations overthrowing its position. Therefore, there should be some sort of government intervention to regulate the competition to make it fair for all corporations to have a chance at competing.