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"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."

"In quantum cryptography, a sender uses a cryptographic key encoded in a quantum signal to encrypt a message. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, if someone tried to intercept the key, they would destroy it."

"Researchers from MIT and Google recently showed off a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically retouching photos just like a professional photographer. Snap a photo and the neural network identifies exactly how to make it look better-increase contrast a smidge, tone down brightness, whatever-and apply the changes in less than 20 milliseconds."

"He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. After a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away, exposing the white surface of a conference table in the midtown Manhattan headquarters of his startup. He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on…nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor."

"In 2015, a research group fed an AI system called Deep Patient health and medical data from some 700,000 people, and tested whether it could predict diseases. It could, but Deep Patient provides no explanation for the basis of a diagnosis, and the researchers have no idea how it comes to its conclusions. A doctor either can either trust or ignore the computer, but that trust will remain blind."

""This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we've seen from a cyberattack, full stop," says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. "You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal," he adds. "I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn't even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?""

"It can be a tricky balance, especially as machines become more sophisticated. "Usually artificial intelligence systems are capable of coping better than humans because, as an example, they don't suffer from annoyance. They are infinitely patient, they don't care about wasting time," says Mauro Migliardi, associate professor at the University of Padua in Italy. He recently coauthored a paper summarizing 20 years of captcha versions and their effectiveness."

""The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been," he said. "Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed.""

"Marx had a point. Especially when it comes to ethics, philosophy is often better at finding complications and problems than proposing changes. Silicon Valley has been better at changing the world (even if through breaking things) than taking pause to think through the conse­quences."

"The CCPA exempted many forms of targeted advertising, essentially permitting the collection and sharing of personal user data without consent-precisely the activity the law was intended to eliminate. CCPA also left enforcement solely to the already overburdened state attorney general, a concession that caused an ongoing rift between two of its authors, Mary Stone Ross and Alastair Mactaggart. (Mactaggart coauthored the CPRA, which Ross opposed.)"

"All of this led Estonia to two inevitable conclusions. The first was that residency didn't have to have anything to do with geography. And so in 2014, e-residency was born."

"Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what's-next-what's-next of this world through our peepers."

"More algorithmic decision making and decision augmenting systems will be used in the coming years. Unlike the approach taken for A-levels, future systems may include opaque AI-led decision making. Despite such risks there remain no clear picture of how public sector bodies - government, local councils, police forces and more - are using algorithmic systems for decision making."

"A flagship artificial intelligence system designed to predict gun and knife violence before it happens had serious flaws that made it unusable, police have admitted. The error led to large drops in accuracy and the system was ultimately rejected by all of the experts reviewing it for ethical problems."

"Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too."

"But using technology is no longer a matter of choice."

"WILL HACKERS LAUNCH NUCLEAR WEAPONS?"

"I felt like a wholer person. I was thinking more, and better. My focus was improving. I thought I was breaking through. In the end, I was not."

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

"Alex Naka, a data scientist at a biotech firm who signed up to test Copilot, says the program can be very helpful, and it has changed the way he works. "It lets me spend less time jumping to the browser to look up API docs or examples on Stack Overflow," he says. "It does feel a little like my work has shifted from being a generator of code to being a discriminator of it.""