Monday, February 7, 2011

Is technology is neutral?

The first question we were asked this week was what:
  "Find an example of a cyber-ethics issue that can be effectively dealt with using current laws and morals".
For this I chose child pornography. There is no grey area with this subject, it universally known as wrong and against the law. Interpol, FBI and various law enforcement agencies around the world work together to prosecute these individuals. Operation Amethyst was a Garda Síochána operation that arrested over a hundred suspected paedophiles in Ireland on the 25th of May 2002.

The next question that was raised was:"Find an example of a cyber-ethics issue that cannot be effectively dealt with using current laws and morals and needs some new thinking" An issue that cannot be solved with the current laws and morals for cyber ethics is music piracy. This has existed for a long time going back to when there were bootleg copies of concerts made but with today’s technology, I can go online and within two minutes, I can download the latest Metallica cd for free. If a sharing site gets shutdown, there will be another one to take its place. A few people are charged every year for this to try and scare the public but the music industry is losing billions a year to piracy sites.


Find an example of a cyber-ethics issue from popular culture (e.g. Is Lt. Data from Star Trek TNG entitled to the same civil rights as humans?) and identify which into phase of cyber ethics evolution it belongs.
I chose a table-top game "BattleTech" as my example for this question. In the game, the timeline stretches from the 21st century to the 32nd century. It follows the expansion of humans from planet earth (terra) to other planets via FTL drives. The technology of the time period is advanced enough to build FTL drives and superluminal communication but also uses technology of today including projectile weapons and internal combustion engines. Humans are locked in interplanetary wars and feuding factions in the game. Humans are genetically engineering for piloting Mechs, 30 feet tall, 50 ton war machines that battle with each other.
The cyber-ethics issues raised are the genetically engineered humans and the technology is solely driven for war. This fits in with the current phase four of cyber ethics.

Google "Is technology neutral" and attempt to summarize some of the ideas presented
I the process of goggling "Is technology neutral", I came across varies viewpoints stating it was not neutral i.e. "A gun can be used as a paper weight but much more useful to shoot someone with" also " a knife can be used to cook, cure and a kill a person"

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