Minnesota colleges grappling with ethics and potential benefits of ChatGPT; Star Tribune, August 6, 2023

Hannah Pinski , Star Tribune ; Minnesota colleges grappling with ethics and potential benefits of ChatGPT

"While some Minnesota academics are concerned about students using ChatGPT to cheat, others are trying to figure out the best way to teach and use the tool in the classroom.

"The tricky thing about this is that you've got this single tool that can be used very much unethically in an educational setting," said Darin Ulness, a chemistry professor at Concordia College in Moorhead. "But at the same time, it can be such a valuable tool that we can't not use it.""

Ethics in the digital era; The Times of Israel, June 27, 2023

The Times of Israel; Ethics in the digital era

"A new course offered by Dr. Jeremy Fogel at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science presents fresh perspectives on issues that Computer Science students at Reichman University will deal with in their careers. According to Dr. Fogel, a lecturer in Jewish philosophy, “The role of an educational institution is not only to transmit information, but also to cultivate and encourage the development of ethical thinking amongst its students and give them the space to do so.”

Students are being asked to discuss moral issues that have arisen as a result of the Digital Revolution, using the viewpoints of great philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc. Dr. Fogel believes that analyzing current digital developments through the eyes of these philosophers might give students some insights about these developments. Since reality constantly changes with new initiatives and inventions, it has become very hard to explore their ethical outcomes...

Dr. Fogel explains that there’s an ethical component in every action we take in our lives, such as what we eat, where we work, etc. When our students develop their new application or software, they will have to ask themselves, “What are the moral and ethical issues that could arise by using this?” Dr. Fogel also says that “The students I have met, want to make the world a better place. I am not teaching them anything new; they already have these ethical questions in their minds. I am just giving them the tools and inspiration to try and answer them.”"

How to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation about Ukraine; The Washington Post, February 24, 2022

Heather Kelly, The Washington Post ; How to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation about Ukraine

"Anyone with a phone and an Internet connection is able to watch the war in Ukraine unfold live online, or at least some version of it. Across social media, posts are flying up faster than most fact-checkers and moderators can handle, and they’re an unpredictable mix of true, fake, out of context and outright propaganda messages.

How do you know what to trust, what not to share and what to report? Tech companies have said they’re trying to do more to help users spot misinformation about Ukraine, with labels and fact checking. On Saturday, Facebook parent company Meta announced it was adding more fact-checkers in the region dedicated to posts about the war. It’s also warning users who attempt to share war-related photo when they’re more than a year old — a common type of misinformation.

Here are some basic tools everyone should use when consuming breaking news online."

Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them.; Slate, April 17, 2019

Daniel Susser, Slate;

Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech

Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them.

"Ethics requires more than rote compliance. And it’s important to remember that industry can reduce any strategy to theater. Simply focusing on law and policy won’t solve these problems, since they are equally (if not more) susceptible to watering down. Many are rightly excited about new proposals for state and federal privacy legislation, and for laws constraining facial recognition technology, but we’re already seeing industry lobbying to strip them of their most meaningful provisions. More importantly, law and policy evolve too slowly to keep up with the latest challenges technology throws at us, as is evident from the fact that most existing federal privacy legislation is older than the internet.

The way forward is to see these strategies as complementary, each offering distinctive and necessary tools for steering new and emerging technologies toward shared ends. The task is fitting them together.

By its very nature ethics is idealistic. The purpose of ethical reflection is to understand how we ought to live—which principles should drive us and which rules should constrain us. However, it is more or less indifferent to the vagaries of market forces and political winds. To oversimplify: Ethics can provide blueprints for good tech, but it can’t implement them. In contrast, law and policy are creatures of the here and now. They aim to shape the future, but they are subject to the brute realities—social, political, economic, historical—from which they emerge. What they lack in idealism, though, is made up for in effectiveness. Unlike ethics, law and policy are backed by the coercive force of the state."

Quiet Please, Episode 89: "If I Should Wake Before I Die"; Old Time Radio Downloads, Air Date: February 27, 1949

Old Time Radio Downloads; Quiet Please, Episode 89: "If I Should Wake Before I Die" 

[Kip Currier: Heard this cautionary tale--first aired in 1949--on Radio Classics this weekend. Especially prescient and timely, in light of real-world stories like this one, calling for ethics education in IT programs: Lack of ethics education for computer programmers shocks expert]

"Plot: He is the epitome of the word "mad scientist." This top scientist doesn't care whether his inventions have already vastly altered the world, all that he cares about is the vast amount of knowledge that he acquires in his research. What the world sees as a destructive weapon is nothing more but a mere scribble of equations for him. The world is starting to reach a crucial point when human knowledge has become dangerous and unwise."

Facebook launching tools to tackle revenge porn; Guardian, April 5, 2017

Alex Hern, Guardian; 

Facebook launching tools to tackle revenge porn

"Facebook is launching a series of tools designed to crack down on the sharing of so-called revenge porn.

The new tools will allow users to easily report any intimate photos posted without consent that they see on the social network, which will flag the pictures in question to “specially trained representatives” from the site’s community operations team, who will “review the image and remove it if it violates [Facebook’s] community standards”."