Human-sounding Google Assistant sparks ethics questions

The Strait Times
Originally published May 9, 2018

Here are some excerpts:

The new Google digital assistant converses so naturally it may seem like a real person.

The unveiling of the natural-sounding robo-assistant by the tech giant this week wowed some observers, but left others fretting over the ethics of how the human-seeming software might be used.

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The Duplex demonstration was quickly followed by debate over whether people answering phones should be told when they are speaking to human-sounding software and how the technology might be abused in the form of more convincing "robocalls" by marketers or political campaigns.

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Digital assistants making arrangements for people also raises the question of who is responsible for mistakes, such as a no-show or cancellation fee for an appointment set for the wrong time.

The information is here.

A narrative thematic analysis of moral injury in combat veterans

Held, P., Klassen, B. J., Hall, J. M., Friese, and others
Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. 
Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tra0000364

Here is a portion of the Introduction:

In war, service members sometimes have to make difficult decisions, some of which may violate their deeply held beliefs and moral values. The term moral injury was coined to refer to the enduring mental health consequences that can occur from participating in, witnessing, or learning about acts that violate one’s moral code (Drescher et al., 2011; Litz et al., 2009; Shay, 1994). Some examples of potentially morally injurious events include disproportionate violence, engaging in atrocities, or violations of rules of engagement (Litz et al., 2009; Stein et al., 2012). Although consensus regarding how best to measure moral injury has not been reached, one preliminary estimate suggested that as many as 25% of a representative sample of veterans endorsed exposure to morally injurious experiences (Wisco et al., 2017). Involvement in these situations has been shown to be associated with a range of negative psychological reactions, including the development of mental health symptoms, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression (Held, Klassen, Brennan, & Zalta, 2017; Maguen et al., 2010), substance use problems (Wilk et al., 2010) and suicidal ideation (Maguen et al., 2012).

Litz and colleagues (2009) have proposed the sole theoretical model of how moral transgressions result in the development of mental health symptoms. Following the morally injurious event, individuals experience a conflict between the event and their own moral beliefs. For example, a service member may believe that civilians should not be harmed during combat but is involved in an event that involves the death of noncombatants. In an attempt to resolve this cognitive conflict, self-directed attributions of the event’s cause may be made, such as service members believing that they were complicit in noncombatants being harmed. The stable, internal, and global attributions that result lead to the development of painful emotions (e.g., guilt, shame, fear of social rejection) and withdrawal from social interaction. Lack of social contact leads to missed opportunities for potentially corrective information and further strengthens the painful emotions and the stable, internal, and global attributions about the morally injurious event (e.g., Martin et al., 2017). It has been proposed that unless addressed, the moral injury continues to manifest and perpetuate itself through intrusions, avoidance, and numbing in a manner similar to PTSD (Jinkerson, 2016; Farnsworth, Drescher, Nieu- wsma, Walser, & Currier, 2014; Litz, Lebowitz, Gray, & Nash, 2016; Litz et al., 2009).

The article is here.

Hostile environment: The dark side of nudge theory

Nick Barrett
politics.co.uk
Originally posted May 1, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Just as a website can use a big yellow button to make buying a book or signing up to a newsletter inviting, governments can use nudge theory to make saving money for your pension easy and user-friendly. But it can also establish its own dark patterns too and the biggest government dark pattern of all is the hostile environment policy established in 2012 to encourage migrants to leave the country.

The policy meant that without the right paperwork, people were deprived of health services, employment rights and access to housing and effectively excluded from mainstream society. They were not barred. The circumstances were simply created to nudge them into leaving the country.

For six years the hostile environment persecuted the least visible among us. It was only when its effects on the Windrush generation were revealed that the policy’s inherent prejudice became clear to all. What could once be seen as firm but fair suddenly looked cruel and unusual. These measures might have been defensible if the legal migration process hadn’t been turned into a painfully punitive process for anybody arriving from outside of the EU.

The information is here.

Preventing Med School Suicides

Roger Sergel
MegPage Today
Originally posted May 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The medical education community needs to acknowledge the stress imposed on our medical learners as they progress from students to faculty. One of the biggest obstacles is changing the culture of medicine to not only understand the key burnout drivers and pain points but to invest resources into developing strategies which reduce stress. These strategies must include the medical learner taking ownership for the role they play in their lack of well-being. In addition, medical schools and healthcare organizations must reflect on their policies/processes which do not promote wellness. In both situations, there is pointing to the other group as the one who needs to change. Both are right.

We do need to change how we deliver a quality medical education AND we need our medical learners to reflect on their personal attitudes and openness to developing their resilience muscles to manage their stress. Equally important, we need to reduce the stigma of seeking help and break down the barriers which would allow our medical learners and physicians to seek help, when needed. We need to create support services which are convenient, accessible, and utilized.

What programs does your school have to support medical students' mental health?

The information is here.

CGI ‘Influencers’ Like Lil Miquela Are About to Flood Your Feeds

Miranda Katz
www.wired.com
Originally published May 1, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

There are already a number of startups working on commercial applications for what they call “digital” or “virtual” humans. Some, like the New Zealand-based Soul Machines, are focusing on using these virtual humans for customer service applications; already, the company has partnered with the software company Autodesk, Daimler Financial Services, and National Westminster Bank to create hyper-lifelike digital assistants. Others, like 8i and Quantum Capture, are working on creating digital humans for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality applications.

And those startups’ technologies, though still in their early stages, make Lil Miquela and her cohort look positively low-res. “[Lil Miquela] is just scratching the surface of what these virtual humans can do and can be,” says Quantum Capture CEO and president Morgan Young. “It’s pre-rendered, computer-generated snapshots—images that look great, but that’s about as far as it’s going to go, as far as I can tell, with their tech. We’re concentrating on a high level of visual quality and also on making these characters come to life.”

Quantum Capture is focused on VR and AR, but the Toronto-based company is also aware that those might see relatively slow adoption—and so it’s currently leveraging its 3D-scanning and motion-capture technologies for real-world applications today.

The information is here.

The toxic legacy of Canada's CIA brainwashing experiments

Ashifa Kassam
The Guardian
Originally published May 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Patients were subjected to high-voltage electroshock therapy several times a day, forced into drug-induced sleeps that could last months and injected with megadoses of LSD.

After reducing them to a childlike state – at times stripping them of basic skills such as how to dress themselves or tie their shoes – Cameron would attempt to reprogram them by bombarding them with recorded messages for up to 16 hours at a time. First came negative messages about their inadequacies, followed by positive ones, in some cases repeated up to half a million times.

“He couldn’t get his patients to listen to them enough so he put speakers in football helmets and locked them on their heads,” said Johnson. “They were going crazy banging their heads into walls, so he then figured he could put them in a drug induced coma and play the tapes as long as he needed.”

Along with intensive bouts of electroshock therapy, Johnson’s grandmother was given injections of LSD on 14 occasions. “She said that made her feel like her bones were melting. She would say: ‘I don’t want these,’” said Johnson. “And the doctors and nurses would say to her: ‘You’re a bad wife, you’re a bad mother. If you wanted to get better, you would do this for your family. Think about your daughter.’”

The information is here.

The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?

Jon Tilburt, Megan Allyse, and Frederic Hafferty
AMA Journal of Ethics
February 2017, Volume 19, Number 2: 199-206.

Abstract

Dr. Mehmet Oz is widely known not just as a successful media personality donning the title “America’s Doctor®,” but, we suggest, also as a physician visibly out of step with his profession. A recent, unsuccessful attempt to censure Dr. Oz raises the issue of whether the medical profession can effectively self-regulate at all. It also raises concern that the medical profession’s self-regulation might be selectively activated, perhaps only when the subject of professional censure has achieved a level of public visibility. We argue here that the medical profession must look at itself with a healthy dose of self-doubt about whether it has sufficient knowledge of or handle on the less visible Dr. “Ozes” quietly operating under the profession’s presumptive endorsement.

The information is here.

What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil?

Thomas White
Aeon.co
Originally published April 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.

This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:

I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he a monster simply?’

The information is here.

Reining It In: Making Ethical Decisions in a Forensic Practice

Donna M. Veraldi and Lorna Veraldi
A Paper Presented to American College of Forensic Psychology
34th Annual Symposium, San Diego, CA

Here is an excerpt:

Ethical dilemmas sometimes require making difficult choices among competing ethical principles and values. This presentation will discuss ethical dilemmas arising from the use of coercion and deception in forensic practice. In a forensic practice, the choice is not as simple as “do no harm” or “tell the truth.” What is and is not acceptable in terms of using various forms of pressure on individuals or of assisting agencies that put pressure on individuals? How much information should forensic psychologists share with individuals about evaluation techniques? What does informed consent
mean in the context of a forensic practice where many of the individuals with whom we interact are not there by choice?

The information is here.