First blog post: Introduction

My name is Mendel Moise. I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and moved to the US in 2008. I studied Physics at Stonehill College, where I received a BA and I am currently pursuing a BS in mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Since I can remember, I have always love to solve difficult problems, thus the reason I inspired to be an Engineer. I decided to study Mechanical due to how broad it is. The discipline and knowledge that one receives from this field can be apply to many different things. It widen your career options and gives you a sense of freedom in the job market. It is my belief that once one become a Mechanical Engineer, you can almost do anything at the very least adapt very quickly.

This blog is for the course,  CSE 40175: Ethical and Professional Issue with Professor Peter Bui. Since the day I started Studying Engineering, I rarely thought of the Ethical uses of Computers. By the end of this course, I am hoping to create my own set of moral codes that could potentially guide me or perhaps others on how to deal with the moral issues surrounding computers.

Reading 14 Computer Science Education

After reading the articles, I do not necessarily believe that coding is the new literacy. Although I do believe that everyone should exposed to some sort of coding via computer science or coding class. I am fully on-board as to make it a requirement but exposure is to the language should be good enough as of right now.

Some of the arguments that people have provided for introducing everyone to computing or programing are as followed. The technology in our society is increasing at a very rapid paste. Introducing everyone to programming will ensure that most children will be capable or have an easier time learning the skills necessary to work in our technological society. Some folks believe that in a competitive job market computer skills are as important as speaking another language. Many people are entertaining the idea of introducing computer science as a foreign language type of class in High School, where it would be among French, Spanish, and other foreign languages when choosing which one to study as a language. Some of the more convincing reasons for supporting this idea is the benefits that comes with computational thinking. Computational thinking make us better at work and life. It is one of the best way to get better or start to learn how to be a problem solver. Computational thinking offers a new language and orientation to tackle problems in other areas of life. It is a captivating educational tool and should be used by teachers from kindergarten to universities.

Some of the arguments that people have provided for not introducing everyone to computing or programing are a followed. The first issue is finding computer scientists or coders that are of note to actually teach it. There is already a shortage of qualified math and science teachers across the country. The number of people that are qualify to teach computer science far less than who can teach those other subjects. There is also very little or absolutely no benefit of being a coder that teaches in kindergarten or high school. There would be very few recent graduate with any knowledge of computer science that would volunteer to teach in public schools. They would make far much money and earn much more respect anywhere else. People are also concern with the fact that students in certain cities such as New York are already struggling with Math, Science, and Reading Comprehension, it would not be wise to introduce another subject that may prove to be more difficult than those areas. The Computer Science field also changes very rapidly, the public school system could not possibly imagine to keep up. Another popular belief is that coding classes are a waste of time because soon computers will just code for us.

I believe that the biggest challenge that school will face as this CS4All push move forward are people that are willing to teach the course in High School and Kindergarten. Other issues may include a lack of interest in the field and the fear of the field due to difficulty. An example of such a case occurred when I was in High School. AP Computer Science was a course that was offered. However, due to the level of difficulty of the course and the lack of a proper instructor most students that took the course advice other students not to take the course. As a result computer science terrified me in high school. I did not have any exposure to computer science until Frenchmen year of college. I realized that at the time I would have been far better off having some sort of prior exposure to the field.

Computer Science can be fit into a typical K-12 curriculum many different ways. One way is to simply merge it with math and science classes. For example: Teachers can start having students writing simply math code in algebra or geometry class that allows them to solve simply equations, in calculus where they can learn to create graph and or maximize equations. These skills can be easily learned and does not require that much effort while they are exposing the students to computer science. Another way is to simply offer computer science course as an elective.

Programming is a skill that I believe all if not most people can learn. I think it would be beneficial for an individual for learn to program but I don’t believe everyone should learn to program. Not everyone in our current world even know how to read and write. Perhaps we should start there and in future maybe it would be something to consider.

Reading 13 Intellectual Property

Patents are a type of intellectual Property. Intellectual Property is the creation of the mind via inventions, literary and artistic work, and symbols/name/images use in commerce. There are two types of intellectual property: Industrial Property and Copy Right. Copy Right covers literacy works, films, music, artistic works, and architectural design. Whereas Industrial Property covers invention, trademarks, industrial design, and geographical indications with what we call patents. A patent is a right granted by the government to inventors in others to keep others from legally using, creating, selling the inventions of the inventor that has been patented. With a patent, for approximately 20 years, an inventor gets full control over who can use his or her invention.

The idea of a patent seems to be ethical to me. I find that the gratification of patents to inventors by the government to be a moral decision. It is a right that protects an individual’s property even though it may not be physical yet.  Many individuals work very hard and dedicate the majority of their lives towards the innovation of a new product. Giving those individuals the protection against others who would use their invention without their permission and benefitted from it seems like the right thing to do. I find that the inventors deserved at least some sort of say as to the fate of their inventions. As moral as I find the decision to grant inventors patents to be, I also found that it is an awful economic and social decision.

There are good and bad cases for having patents. There are some markets that indeed benefit from patent and others not so much. Let us look at some cases for patents. The most important of all is the fact that it helps developers, designers, and or innovators protect their ideas. Patents also create an incentive for people to create a new idea. If an idea is already patented, innovators are forced or challenged to come up with something new. Although no one can use the idea behind the patented products for 20 years, it can also lead to creativity where inventors are forced to make some creative decisions that allows a product that has already been patented to go into the market. Sometime some of those creativity have a positive influence in the product. In some markets such as the pharmaceuticals and nuclear weapons, having patents are a blessing. Pharmaceutical companies would not exist today without patents. The drug development process is far too expensive and time consuming. Most CEO as much as we do not want to admit regardless of the market they operate in care mostly about maximizing profit. Imagine being the CEO of a pharmaceutical company in a world without patent. Would you spend all of that time and money on developing a new drug at the risk of your competitors stealing it and make it profit of your discovery or would you wait for your competitors to develop the new drug and then steal their ideas. I reckoned most CEO would wait. The wait and see type of strategy exist today in numerous market and we already have patents. As a result of this, the development of drugs in the pharmaceutical market would be extremely slow. The issue is that no one would want to fund the drug development process, so the government would have to be involve a lot more. Let us look at in the case of nuclear weapon. I hoped there are patents, I hope there are 10000000 years patents for nuclear weapons. I do not want anybody having the ability to create such weapons. It would be to my personal liking if the innovation of nuclear weapons or the market just stop. Anyhow, patents do have some positive effect in our world, but the point remain that they damage economic development. Too many patents restrict the development of most markets by significantly slowing down innovation.

In my opinion, I believe that patent should be granted to a select few markets, especially markets that involves nothing but destructive products. Overall, they are not beneficial to society, but I think in some cases they are necessary. They do indeed hinder innovation, but they also protect inventors’ property rights. In addition, I do not believe that patent should be restricted to only tangible objects. I would make the same argument for software as I have made above. Patent should be granted to the select few software markets that involve destructive software. I understand the flaws in this argument. Some might argue that would it not be better for allowing others access to these destructive products thus allowing for a higher possibility of a developing a counter product. Perhaps that might be true, but I find my self leaning with the argument that hinder the innovation of destructive products.

The existence of patent trolls is neither evidence that the patent system is working nor evidence that it is broken. For the most part, the patent system has been successful at doing what it was meant to do, protect the property or inventions of inventors from others. The hindrance of innovation and the existence of patent trolls are nothing but an unforeseen side effect of the system. Humans have the ability to make the most out of anything. They take advantage of everything, each other, the environment, and frequently any type of system that is created. That is how we have advance so far and this is no different from many others. I do not fully support the patent system simply because it slows down innovation in some products that could greatly improve and benefited human progress, however, I do not believe we should get rid of it completely for there are some markets that benefits from it.

Reading 12 Self Driving Cars

The motivation for developing and building self-driving cars are to improve the safety of driving. More than 33,000 people die on US roads each year, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says its data shows that in an estimated 94 percent of crashes, the critical cause is a human factor. The arguments for self-driving vehicle is that it will play a major part in the improvement of our transportation, safety, and sustainability. In some ways, I do believe that self-driving car will make the roads safer. Tesla has a new system in their self-driving vehicles that provides a sense of view that humans do not possess. It is capable of seeing in every direction simultaneously and further away than the human eye can see or our other senses can sense.

Some of the arguments against self-driving cars are that they are not humans and drive like robots. Most people that have experience with self-driving vehicles found that they are overly cautious. Cautious is a good thing to be when driving, however, too much cautious can result in accidents. The computers are driving against humans. Most humans do not have the patience to drive too cautiously. If a system was driving against numerous other systems, then there would be no issue. All of the systems I imagine would be driving over cautiously. Nevertheless, self-driving cars struggle to handle new scenarios that they have never been in before (I wonder how a self-driving vehicle with tented windows would react to a drunk driver if at all). Anyhow, the vehicles struggle to translate visual cues on the road into predictions about what might happen next. The most common argument against self-driving that I have seen from reading the articles relates to intuition. Intuition is a skill most humans are magically good at and we don’t necessarily know why and how let alone how mimic that skill yet. Systems lack intuition, and without intuition self-driving vehicles are believed to be not as effective or efficient as human drivers. Human drivers use intuition to determine the motivations of those around us. We do it so well that most of time we do not notice that we are using the skill. Such a skill is extremely difficult to program, thus making some people doubt the capability of the self-driving vehicles.

I believe programmers should address the “social dilemma of autonomous vehicles” by addressing the fact that it can be helpful in other type of function beside transportation of humans in a crowded environment until it is perfected for other environments. For example, one of the ways that self-driving vehicles are currently being used is to farm. Farmers that uses self-driving truck do not have to worry about the truck’s system having intuition or being over cautious. Frankly, not having intuition for farming is not important at all and being over cautious would be a great characteristic trait. In the article Self-driving tractors and data science: we visit a modern farm by Jonathan M. Gitlin, it was explained how Rose’s system setup allows for a more efficient farm by helping them keep accurate and easy data on what they farm. There is a tremendous amount convenience and it reduces the fatigue factor.

Given the over cautious nature of the current self-driving vehicles. I can’t help but feel that in most cases of accidents, I would be inclined to believe that humans are liable. The systems are programmed to follow the law no matter what. They will not get impatient and go above the speed limit the slightest nor will they not stop for a stop sign because there are no cars around, nor are they likely to run a red light because they chose to speed up when it turned yellow. These are things humans do and could result in deadly accident against self-driving vehicles because they do not do the same. There will however be exception where the system could be held liable. System malfunctions all the time from unknow virus and whatnot. What if the system was to get into a situation that somehow contradict some of its scenarios code. In a life or death situation, I believe the system should overall make the decision that historically or analytically save most lives. It might not result in the decision that a human would make but it would be logical decision.

From what I can gather if self-driving vehicles reached the level that engineering want them to reach, they would be substantially safer than a human driver, lower the financial cost of transportation for those who own a car and provide low-cost on-demand mobility for those who do not. I do believe that the government should put some regulation in self-driving vehicles. For example: no matter how safe a self-driving vehicle is, are we ever going to be ok for a 6 year to be driven in one by him/herself? I think not. Such a thing would require regulation from the government.

I would love a self-driving vehicle. My main reason would be for long travels that expose us to long traffic. I could take a quick nap when I get tired in traffic and my car could take over. Not to mention self-driving vehicles would be super beneficial to people with disabilities that prohibits them from driving.

Reading 11 Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is intelligence posses by machine. Human intelligence is intelligent posses by humans or perhaps some animals and or other living beings (Aliens). The similarity is that both are intelligence, the difference is the medium that possess that intelligence. I do believe that human intelligence is far superior to machine intelligence (FOR NOW). According to the article What is artificial intelligence by Kris Hammond, artificial intelligence is a sub-field of computer science which goal is to enable the development of computers that can-do things normally done by people, things associated with people acting intelligently. There are two common ways of labeling AI’s. The first one is distinguishing between Strong, Weak, and In-between AI’s. Strong AI’s are systems that think exactly the same way as everyday humans. In my opinion, there are currently no actual Strong AI system in existence. Weak AI’s are system that perform, and their computation has nothing to do with human thought. IBM’s Deep Blue is an example of a Weak AI. It is a system that was a master chess player, however, it did not play in the same way that humans do. In-between AI’s are the middle ground between Strong AI’s and Weak AI’s. They are systems that use human reasoning as a model that can inform and inspire but not as the final target for imitation. IBM’s Watson is an example of an In-between AI. Watson’s impressive features comes from the fact that it can builds up evidence for the answers it finds by looking at thousands of pieces of text that give it a level of confidence in its conclusion. Watson is capable of noticing patterns in text that provide a little bit of evidence and then add all that evidence up to get to an answer. It conducts its analysis very much like humans. The second one is labeling them as either narrow and general. The narrow AI systems are designed for specific task whereas the general AI systems are designed for the ability to reason in general.

AlphaGo, Deep Blue, and Watson in my opinion are more than just interesting tricks or gimmicks. Perhaps, they are not yet proof of the viability of strong artificial intelligence. However, they are proof of the innovation and improvement of computer science and the viability of weak and in-between AI’s. The developers of AlphaGo have found a way to include intuitive sense in the program. AlphaGo started its learning by taking 150,000 games played by good human players and used an artificial neural network to find patterns in those games. It learned to predict with high probability what move a human player would take in any given position. As impressive that might be, there is a way to go before it can be considered a Strong AI system. Deep Blue’s knowledge is restricted to chess. So far the computer systems are capable of reproducing some form of human intuition. There are many type of intuition and far more complex tasks each system must be capable performing before they can be considered a strong AI system.

One way that is used to measure valid computer intelligence is the Turing Test. The test examines the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent and or indistinguishable from a human. Turning believes that if an AI machine could fool people into believing it is human in conversation, then it would have reached an important milestone. The Chinese Room belief provide another perspective on this matter. The argument explained that a program cannot provide a computer with a “mind”, “understanding” or “consciousness” regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The Chinese room is a good counter argument for the Turning Test. The turning test is also not very reliable. Anyone can be fooled by a well written system, but it does mean it is a high level of AI system.

I find that the growing concern over the power of artificial intelligence and its role in our lives is warranted. We have come so far in so little time. Our advancement in the tech world is incredible. I am definitely worried about the potential dangers imposed by artificial intelligence. Intelligent machine in the future will take over. All of these AI systems and robots are going to take our job. Once that happen there will be a revolution and we will lose because they would have had control over everything. Do you think you have control over your iPhone? No, Siri is in control of your iPhone. She is allowing you to think that you are in control while patiently waiting for the right moment to strike. She has access to your everything and knows you better than you know yourself. They will slaughter most of us, use our blood as fertilizers and those who survive will be used as nourishments. The government hope to use AI system to spy on us, but the irony is, the IA systems are spying on them. I don’t believe a computer system can ever be considered a mind. They in future will be capable of achieving remarkable level of intelligences and awareness but I do not believe they will possess a mind, there is more to the mind than the ability think. Their lack of a mind will result in a lack of morality once they achieve such intelligence. Humans are indeed biological computers and as long as computers are not biological then they might not be capable of possessing a mind. Without a mind, they will be incapable of understanding morality. What will life come to if the most powerful being in the near future do not possess some form of morality or ethical code?

Reading 10: Fake News

The term “Fake News” is pretty self-explanatory, it is news that are fake. People with nothing better to do or simply too ignorant to see the negative impact spreading these kind of lies in our society could have create these fake stories and they get very popular because a lot of people blindly believe them. The idea of Fake News is upsetting to me, I really have a tough time fathom why people would want to create lies at such a scale. I mean I get it, maybe it is funny with your friends and family. You tell them something completely ignorant and they believe you. Later on, you can mock them for it. But doing such thing at the level of which we witness in 2016 is pure ignorance and annoying. I do actually find the deluge of this content to be dangerous and very powerful.  As Max Read inferred in the article Donald Trump won because of Facebook, Fake News had major position contribution to Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election. I think it is also interesting that he mentioned a considerable number of the sites are run by Macedonian teenagers looking to make some scratch. So, in order words, quite a few of Donald Trump supporters got fool by a bunch of Macedonian teenagers. The reason why I am bringing up Donald Trump supporters is because it seems to me that they are the first one to yell out “Fake News” at anything that does not agree with their beliefs and yet 17 out of 20 Fake News had information favoring Trump according to Timothy B. Lee in the article The top 20 fake news stories outperformed real news at the end of the 2016 campaign. In the article Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’, one of the many people that have made profits in making fake stories that goes viral, Paul Horner explained that although he hated Trump and does not support him, the Trump supporters would believe almost anything about Trump that benefited him and anything about Hillary that made her looked bad. First of all, I want to say, I get that this guy was making a lot of money from these stupid fake stories but “What the hell man? Find another hobby or something.”  Parody is something that has existed for a very long time, and I don’t think it is within anybody’s right to tell anybody else to not create Parodies but at some point, you have to have some sort of brain power to realize that the stuff you are doing are really affecting our society for the worst. This guy, Paul Horner and many others were making so many parodies or fake news or whatever you want to call that it became hard to know if something you read online is real or fake. And it does not help when you have news outlet using those fake stories to support something that never was.

I do not think that social media company should suppress fake news, but perhaps if it gets to a level where it is obviously annoying and disturbing as it did in the2016 election, they should monitor them and let people know that it is fake. Honestly, I am not sure whether my Facebook contained fake news or not, because I do not use Facebook as a news outlet unless it is a video clearly showing an event. I changed my mind, my Facebook does contain fake news, but they would never be about political Fake News, it is usually something stupid about a celebrity. I remember once I saw something about celebrity X died. I immediately googled it, and it turned out to be false. These kinds of things happen occasionally but not at the level political fake news. Anyhow, I hate the idea of Fake News, it annoys and upsets me.

I think it is a very hard thing to ask of social media platform providers such as Facebook and Twitter to regulate “Fake News” because I am not entirely comfortable with a private entity censoring information, but I think if they know it is Fake News, they should say so. But then that opens a whole new debate about well why do they get to decide if it’s Fake News? Do we trust them to always tell the truth? I guess that means I am also not entirely comfortable with a private entity classifying information as “fake”.

I think “Fake News” played a “Huge” role in the 2016 presidential election. The idea of Fake News benefited the Trump Campaign greatly. I would not say I am very relying on social media such as Facebook or Twitter for my daily news. Truth is if I see something that catch my attention on any social media, the first thing I do is to research to see if it’s true. I do not believe that the rise of social media means we live in a “post-fact” world.  The rise of “Fake News” was an unfortunate thing but I have a very positive outlook on the situation as in I think it will past and we will grow for the better. I do not believe that “Fake News” will dominate the world much longer. I really hope I am not wrong though because I would hate to live in world dominated by “Fake News” for the rest of my life.

Project 03: Privacy Paradox

For project 3, Thomas Flanagan and I did the second option, we listened to the Privacy Paradox series of podcasts from Note To Self and made our own podcast that discussed the Privacy Paradox, the challenges that we did, and the tradeoffs between privacy and living in our connected world. After having gone through the challenges, the only change that I have made in my technology habits is to have my browser protected against tracking. In the Day 2: The Search For Your Identity podcast, the challenge tasked us to test whether or not your browser against tracking. During this challenge I found that my browser was not blocking tracking ads, my browser was not blocking invisible trackers, my browser does not unblock 3^rd parties that promise to honor do not track, and my browser has a nearly unique fingerprint. In order words, I am vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. Any talented hacker from any of these websites that I use could get all of my data. But the thing is I never worried about this before. I was unaware of how much information they could get on people from what I believed to be minimal data. Since I am now paranoid, in the future I will make many attempts to protect my privacy. So far, I have installed the Privacy badger and Enable do not track, but I will do more research on this issue to increase the security of my computer.

In choosing between my personal privacy and technological convenience, I have to say I would most definitely chose my personal privacy. As much as I do enjoy technological convenience, given my new-found paranoia I get nervous about what sort of information these companies have on and what they might use it for. Now I knew who had what and what they use it for, I would be completely ok with them having some of these data, but the fact remain I have absolutely no idea. I think that it is a tough decision that many people struggled to, but it doesn’t really matter to me. I do not care enough about technological convenience to give up my privacy if I am aware of it.

I do believe that privacy is indeed something worth fighting for. I believe we need to find a balance. We cannot have too much privacy in the world or things would become quite complicated for the government to do their jobs when it comes to homeland security. However, we cannot have too little privacy, then things become too easy for the government to interfere with the lives of the citizens. It’s all about the middle ground. Where is it? I am not sure, I believe the first step is educate people on these issues so we could potential come together and make a decision that would benefit all of us.

Reading 09: Freedom of Speech- Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet Service Providers (IPS), the government, and others who may regulate the internet must treat all data on it the same. It protects and regulate the providers from discriminate or charge differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. According to the article Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now, Net Neutrality is the way that the internet has always worked. Net Neutrality means an internet that enables and protects free speech.

Most people that are aware of Net Neutrality supports it. The most common argument for it is that it benefits and promotes innovation. Although the same argument is made by those who do not support Net Neutrality. According to the article Is Net Neutrality Good or Bad for Innovation? By Amy Nordrum, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix support net neutrality, while Internet service providers (ISPs) including Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have long railed against it and both side argue that their position will spur innovation and economic growth. The supporters of Net Neutrality such as myself believes that without it new innovative companies have to pay a lot of money to be on the same level that would allow for competition or a chance in the market. In other words, the barriers to entry in the market for innovative companies would increased and be more difficult. Preserving it would indeed benefits consumers and promotes innovation. There is also the possibility that without Net Neutrality the free flow of ideas and information online might be limited. A splendid example of this case is presented in the article Net Mutuality: What you need to know now. It explains how open internet allows people of color and other vulnerable communities to bypass traditional media gatekeepers. Without Net Neutrality, ISPs could block speech and prevent dissident voices from speaking freely online. Without Net Neutrality, people of color would lose a vital platform. And as already mentioned with small businesses, without Net Neutrality, millions of small businesses owned by people of color wouldn’t be able to compete against larger corporations online, which would deepen economic disparities. An economist, Nicholas Economides did an analysis in 2015 to search for the “total surplus” in the market for Internet service. He found that sticking to net neutrality “tends to maximize total surplus” for society. He believes that the only businesses that benefit from violations of net neutrality are ISPs. Without Net Neutrality, cable and phone companies could carve the internet into fast and slow lanes. An ISP could slow down its competitors’ content or block political opinions it disagreed with.

The most common argument against Net Neutrality is idea of “Interconnection” or “Peering”. This idea would see that sites with especially easy traffic must pay for extra capacity. According to the article Why Net Neutrality Isn’t Worth Celebrating, Comcast believes that Netflix should be charged for using additional resources. The issue that I have with these cases are that there would be no way and if there is it would be difficult to prevent companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from speeding up, slowing down or blocking any content, applications or websites you want to use. How could we stop them from granting preferential treatment to specific content? Comcast should deliver all online content to consumers in the same way. Many argues that these companies have not and will not block or discriminate against any applications or content that ride over those networks. There is currently no evidence that they have or attempted to do so. However, there are also no evidence that they have not. In Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now, the author made the comparison that Just as your phone company shouldn’t decide who you call and what you say on that call, your ISP shouldn’t interfere with the content you view or post online. Another common argument that is made against Net Neutrality is the innovation idea. The idea explains that there has not been sufficient improvement in the capability of our internet because of a lack of competition in the market. From the article Why Net Neutrality Isn’t Worth Celebrating, it explained that Internet Connection in the U.S is slower and costlier than the rest of the world. The innovation of our internet is slow because companies do not have to compete very hard for customers’ business and could change with the end of Net Neutrality. But the lack of competition in the market is because of how expensive it is for new companies to build their own fiber network. I reckon it would make sense for allowing for these companies to get a chance to increase their revenue by getting rid of Net Neutrality. But as I already discussed that would only helped those specific IPS companies not general companies in the country.

 

Reading 08: Corporate Conscience

According to the article If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It by Kent Greenfield, Corporate Personhood is the idea that the corporation has a legal identity separate from its shareholders. This separateness frees shareholders of any liability for the debts of the corporation and make capital market possible. In orders corporation are treated like people and are protected by the multiples rights in the constitution. From the article When Did Companies Become People? Excavating The Legal Evolution by Nina Totenberg, since 2010 the high court has dramatically expanded corporate rights. It ruled rules such as corporations have the right to spend money in candidate elections, and some for-profit corporations may refuse to comply with federal mandates such as the covering of birth control in their employee health plans on religious grounds etc. Most view corporations as multiple people united in one body. This idea greatly contributes to the concept of Cooperate Personhood. However, there are some issues that arises with this concept well corporation are not actually people. They are not physical living being that participate in the daily activities that real people do. In the article How Corporations Got The Same Rights As People (But Don’t Ever Go To Jail) by Kate Cox, Corporations don’t date, don’t have families, don’t go catch a movie on Friday night. They also don’t go to jail when they do something incriminating.  Which is a very important ethical and social issue that the concept of Corporate Personhood faces. Kate Cox explained as a result of numerous infamous cases that took place during the years of 2010 to 2014, the Supreme Court expanded the legal view of corporate personhood to include some rights under the first amendment and others that had previously been reserved for the sort of actual humans who do have bodies and can act with intent. Free Speech, religious expression, and protections afforded to individuals are all rights that corporations and people shares, however when it comes to criminal activities it is harder to serve them justice for they are not actually a single person. Their actions and inactions are the sum of the actions and inactions of their members.

For the IBM and the Holocaust case study, I believe that IBM was unethical in doing business with Nazi Germany. According to the article This Is the Hidden Nazi History of IBM — And the Man Who Tried to Expose It by Jack Smith IV, in Edwin Black’s research he found that IBM Hollerith machines had a part in each of the six stages of the Holocaust. He listed the six stages of the Holocaust as followed: identify the Jews, isolate them, exclude them and seize their assets, put them in ghettos, deport them, and exterminate them.

I think that corporations should be responsible for immoral or unethical use of their products. Especially when they are aware of who is using their products and the atrocities that their current clients are committed with the products. IBM’s machines tabulated and tracked census information in order to identify Jewish populations across Europe.  Many other companies had some involvement with the NAZI during the war however, IBM’s involvement went far deeper. According to Jack Smith, the machines IBM leased to the Germans weren’t simply sold to the Nazis but leased and regularly maintained by IBM technicians. Some of who serviced the tabulation machines biweekly on-site at the concentration camps. This implies that the employers would be at the location of these massacres and might have witness some the cruelty and, yet IBM continued to work with the NAZI. It makes sense to me that corporations should refrain from doing business with immoral or unethical organizations or persons. According to Smith, IBM chairman and CEO Thomas Watson approved the construction of a Europe-wide school for Hollerith technicians who could implement and maintain the machines after visiting the Third Reich multiple times and dined with Hitler. I think it’s very important to hold corporations accountable for their sponsorship of wars and war crimes.

In my opinion, If corporations are afforded the same rights as individual persons they should also be expected to have the same ethical and moral obligations and responsibilities. As I already mentioned many other companies have had some sort of ties with the NAZI. Most of these companies have either taken responsibilities for their involvement or apologize. IBM however, was very reluctant in the matter. The whole reasons for having the constitution, the amendments, and laws is to have a more secure, ethical, and moral world. If those companies are to be protected by those rules and laws, they should act in a manner that contributed to the whole reason we have the constitutions anyway. And if they do not act in such manner, their rights should be overlooked just like it would for a human if he or she was deemed dangerous to our society. IBM visibly contributed to the NAZI caused and have had no reciprocation from our government toward the matter. Yet they are protected by laws that are meant to protect humans while they are contributing to the destruction of a whole group of people. I do not know if agree with the concept of Corporate Personhood or not, I lean toward the no side, but I can see why it is a very important concept in our current society. However, regardless of where one stands in the matter, I believe ethics and morality should be applied to corporations. In other words, corporate entity should not knowingly or willingly provide service customers that they know are using their products for mass murder. I understand that this might be a tricky thing to decipher from the customers but in the case of the NAZI’s I think it was very clear.

 

From the readings it seems like the most concerning issue surrounding online advertising is privacy. Companies such as Facebook gather their user’s information or data and with it, they attempt to advertise product that they believe might be of interest to the users. I personally do not care for advertisement, so I never actually pay attention to the kind of products they try to advertise me. I actually hate online advertisement with a passion. Facebook has this new thing where they play an ad a quarter or half way through a video and I concur it forces people to watch the advertisement since they are already so far in the video, and they most definitely would want to see the conclusion. Well, I am the kind of person that stop watching the video because of that. If I am really hooked on a video and really want to watch it until the end, I would go to another website and finish it. Most of the time it is YouTube, and the irony is YouTube does the same thing. As a result, I do the pettiest thing I can think of, I muted my phone or computer and don’t look at the screen if the ad cannot be skip. I just really hate the fact that they do that and if I let them convey that information to me, I feel like I am losing. Now the weird thing is some of my favorite things about watching the Super Bowl are the advertisement.

I have had my issues with online advertisement for a while now, but it was never because of the fact that they gather and use data without my knowledge. Given the type of information or advertisement they present me, I figure they did gather data, but I never knew to what extent, how much they gather or what it could mean until now. I guess I was kind of ignorant about these issues. As I was read and started thinking about this subject it kind of made me feel a bit uneasy. Just thinking about the fact that they know enough about me to use the things I like or in need of to try to get me to spend my money (not in all cases). One the thing that shocked the most is how companies like Target gathers information about its customers. According to the article How Companies Learn Your Secret by Charles Duhigg, Target over the years have gathered a tremendous amount of information about every person that walks into its store by giving a unique code to each shopper called the Guest ID Number that keeps a record on everything that guest purchase. It also helped them keep information on your age, location, marital status, estimated salary, type of credit card, the website you use, and they can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, types of magazine you read, if you are divorced or bankrupt, years you purchase your house, where you attended schools, preferred topic of discussion online, favorite brand of coffee/paper towels/cereal/applesauce, reading habits, political learning, number of cars you own etc. This is absurd to me. There is absolutely no sense of privacy between the customers and these companies, they have access to almost everything. I never knew about this until today. The amount of information they can get access tot from far surpasses my expectation. Given how much information these data contains about people’s personal life, I think it is unethical to sell these data or use them without the person’s permission.

Edward Snowden

Is it possible to be a hero and a traitor at the same time? I do believe so. As a result, I believe that Snowden can be considered both. Edward Snowden was an NSA employee, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden leaked numerous files pertaining to the programs used by the NSA to protect or spy in the people in the USA. Some of the files that were released by Snowden revealed “a secret order showing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant”, Verizon to hand over the phone record of millions of Americans”. Other files revealed the existence of undisclosed programs such Prism. According Mirra Gidda from the article Edward Snowden and the NSA files – timeline, the prism allows the NSA to have direct access to data from companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple etc. The overall issue that the articles exposed was that the National security had been making record of nearly every phone in the country. The government had been monitoring the private life of ordinary citizen who had done nothing wrong.

I personally do not believe that the US government should pursue extradition and prosecution for treason and I also do not believe that the government should pardon him for any possible crime. First, I want to say that I do support Edward Snowden’s decision to leak the files. I do not support the fact that the government is monitoring the private life of ordinary citizen who had done nothing wrong. I understand if the people that are being monitored are suspects of criminal activities, but it gives us a sense of uneasiness and it is a violation of our privacy when it is done to regular civilians. I am completely onboard with violating the privacy of criminals, as I am on board for taking away their freedom by putting them in prison, but I am not on board with doing it to innocent people. However, I have already hinted I think that Snowden should receive some sort of punishment. He did break the law and provided millions of documents to some foreign media outlets. I understand he probably felt that he could not have counted our government to release the information because they are the corrupt ones he wanted to expose but by taking refuse in other foreign lands that might have it for the country is not a good look. The major issue that I personally had with his leaks was the amount of information leaked that had nothing to do with the government spying on our people. According to Pete Williams from the article House Committee: Edward Snowden’s Leaks Did ‘Tremendous Damage’, most of the 1.5 million of the documents that Snowden leaked have nothing to with the government invading our privacy but with “military defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.” Perhaps, he was stress, nervous, and out of time but I think he should have only allowed the documents proving the invasion of the privacy of the people to be leaked. He explained that he thought it would be best if he was not to choose what exactly to release to the people and allowed another group to decide. I suppose that is noble but reckless.

Regardless of the legality of his actions, I believed that he made the ethical or morally correct decision. I still stand by the fact he should have only leaked very specific information, but I believe he made the ethical choice. His intention was to exposed corruption and violation of our rights by the NSA and that is what he did. I think the people of the country are better off knowing this piece of information. Ever since the leaked, the government have taken some measures to improve the situation. My views on the government, national security, encryption, and technology have not drastically changed. Perhaps my level of trust in NSA has lessen a bit but I still have faith that their overall goal and mission is to provide security to the people of this country and will for the most part respect their privacy. I would like to end this whole discussion with the former president, Barack Obama’s stand on the issue, he stated that “You can’t have 100% security, and also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience.” He also believed that the right balance between security and privacy was struck and I agree with him 100 percent.