Critical Issues in Literature

"Last spring, as 41,000 runners made their way through the streets of Dublin in the city's Women's Mini Marathon, an unassuming redheaded man by the name of Candid Wueest stood on the sidelines with a scanner. He had built it in a couple of hours with $75 worth of parts, and he was using it to surreptitiously pick up data from activity trackers worn on the runners' wrists. During the race, Wueest managed to collect personal info from 563 racers, including their names, addresses, and passwords, as well as the unique IDs of the devices they were carrying. Fortunately, Wueest is not a data criminal. He's one of the good guys-a security researcher at Symantec, the company behind Norton antivirus software. His experiment was done to expose some of the risks associated with the growing constellation of "smart" devices known collectively as the Internet of Things."

"Johnson & Johnson has appointed a nationally known bioethicist to create a panel that will make decisions about patients' requests for potentially lifesaving medicine, responding to an emotional debate over whether companies should allow desperately ill people to have access to the drugs before they are approved. The move, to be announced by the company on Thursday, is believed to be the first of its kind in the industry and, given the size and influence of the drug maker, could inspire other companies to follow suit. It comes as a small but growing number of patients with terminal illnesses have sought the right to obtain drugs still in the testing phase that show promise for treating their diseases."

"Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs - or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them."

" It has been widely reported that the likelihood of an American child being abducted and harmed by a stranger is tiny, about one in 100,000. So where did our excessive fear of child abduction come from, a sweeping and now deeply imprinted fear that has prompted the passage of all sorts of laws, spawned the growth of whole industries, and perhaps most profoundly, radically changed how children in the United States are raised, all in response to a threat that essentially exists nowhere but in our heads. The answer is a cautionary observation about a lot of risks that we learn about from the news media.   "

"Before some babies can even walk or talk, they know how to use a smartphone, and by year one, one in seven use the device for at least one hour a day, according to a recent study. This fact shouldn't be much of a surprise. We see it all the time; kids at restaurants plopped down at the table and a smartphone put in front of them. It's used as a distraction technique in public and possibly at home. But some parents may not know all the facts, like that the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages use of media devices with children."

"We review the new science fiction thriller Ex Machina. We talk about how this is one of the better movies we've seen about AI, and how in general movies seem to be getting better at handling these topics. However, we question whether the movie's use of the phrase "Turing Test" really makes sense, and whether the notion of a lone genius unilaterally creating a humanoid robot is very believable. Around the twenty minute mark we give a brief spoiler warning before discussing the plausibility of the movie's ending. While we find numerous things to nitpick about, in the end we highly recommend this movie as a film all science fiction and film fans should see."

"Retinal Chips, 'Super Soldiers' and Modified Athletes Feature in Game's Dystopian Vision"

"In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality."

"Last December, parents in Silver Spring, Md., allowed their two children - 6 and 10 years old - to walk home from a park about a mile away. Someone reported seeing unsupervised kids, the police picked them up and then the parents found themselves under investigation for neglect by their local Child Protective Services (CPS) agency. The parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, say they believe in "free range" parenting. They want to instill self-reliance and independence in their children. But now they are under investigation again. Earlier this month, police picked up the children as they walked home from a park and took them to the CPS offices. They were returned home hours later. The case has sparked a debate about how much supervision children need and how to balance independence and safety. NPR's Rachel Martin spoke with two mothers with differing views. Katie Arnold, a freelance journalist in Santa Fe, N.M., writes a blog on raising adventurous kids for Outside magazine. Denene Millner is a freelance journalist in Atlanta who writes a parenting blog called My Brown Baby."

"Drugs like Adderall were once only prescribed to help highly distractable children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work. Then college students found those drugs, amphetamine-like stimulants, could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete, whether or not they have A.D.H.D. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace?"

"A Smithsonian/Pew poll finds optimism about science and social progress despite worries about the environment and population growth"

"IT'S A BLIZZARD of bad news out there: an ongoing economic crisis, a burgeoning education crisis, healthcare turmoil, energy poverty, water scarcity - to name but a few of our fears. So pervasive is our sense of doom and gloom, that those telling a different story can rarely be heard. And there's a very different story worth hearing. Currently, thanks to the incredible, exponential rate of growth of technology, combined with three powerful emerging forces, we are teetering on the edge of a much, much better tomorrow. Imagine a world where everyone has access to clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, non-polluting and ubiquitous energy. Imagine a world of abundance. Sound too good to be true?"

"For all of Silicon Valley's talk of changing the world, critics say, Google and Facebook mainly hire armies of coders to figure out how to serve you more relevant ads, while Apple and Amazon just want to keep selling you new stuff. These are crude takes, but they get at the disillusionment with an industry whose recent innovations do not seem to have resulted in measurably more prosperous lives for most Americans. Yes, the phone you carry today is far more powerful than the one you had a decade ago. But if your wages haven't climbed and your job is imperiled because of some of the very technologies in that phone, should you rejoice?"

"One of the more contentious ideas to recently emerge from the culture war is that of "safe spaces." We are said to be at risk of social dangers. Sometimes these dangers are labeled denialism (in which someone's identity isn't recognized) or triggering speech (speech that sets off traumatic responses in unwitting listeners). The way some students at elite colleges combat these social dangers is to create, or demand the creation of, safe spaces. And just as often, students demand that their entire campus become a safe space. Hence the wrong kind of speech is re-labeled as violence. The space only becomes safe when certain ideas (and the people expositing them) are banished. We're trying to build a supportive community, don't you know?"

"A pressing question, said Rudolf Jaenisch, an M.I.T. biology professor, is why anyone would want to edit the genes of human embryos in order to prevent disease. Even in the most severe cases, involving diseases like Huntington's in which a single copy of a mutated gene inherited from either parent is enough to cause the disease with 100 percent certainty, editing poses ethical problems. Because of the way genes are distributed in embryos, when one parent has the gene, only half of the parent's embryos will inherit it. With gene editing, the cutting and pasting has to start immediately, in a fertilized egg, before it is possible to know if an embryo has the Huntington's gene. That means half the embryos that were edited would have been normal - their DNA would have been forever altered for no reason. "It is unacceptable to mutate normal embryos," Dr. Jaenisch said. "For me, that means there is no application." Advertisement Noting the many unresolved questions about gene editing of human embryos, a group of leading American researchers recently published a paper in the journal Science calling for a moratorium on doing such work for clinical purposes. They pointed out that current knowledge about genes and their interactions is limited and that changing a disease gene in an embryo that then develops into a baby could have unintended consequences that would be inherited by all of that person's progeny."

"But computers do not just replace humans in the workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers. Our normal response to technological innovation that threatens jobs is to encourage workers to acquire more skills, or to trust that the nuances of the human mind or human attention will always be superior in crucial ways. But when machines of this capacity enter the equation, employers have even more leverage, and our standard response is not sufficient for the looming crisis."

"Now most people would probably agree that whatever is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is the right action. But what if you came in for a routine medical operation and they carved you up and gave your organs to those in need?! It's a problem called the Transplant Surgeon Objection and it demonstrates how tricky our beliefs can be when we're pressed to defend them."

"Despite being a sci-fi film, Ex Machina's most notable achievement is that it simply accepts that artificial intelligence has finally moved beyond the realm of science fiction. "Alex's film brings out the philosophical issues surrounding artificial intelligence much more explicitly than anything that has come before," Shanahan says. "The most important thing about it is that it will get audiences talking about issues that may become extremely important in their lifetime.""

"In the context of the current culture, the film will have an impact because it demonstrates the consequence of living in a society where the select few - even if they have the most benevolent of intentions - are allowed to make binding decisions for the rest of the community. The rationale for all this, as one character explains about the organization of their post-apocalyptic utopia, is that when people are given the opportunity to make choices they invariably make the wrong ones. That, with all its lack of subtlety, is not only at the core of the film and Lowry's book but at the cultural and political divide in contemporary America."