Caroline Lester
The New Yorker
Originally posted January 24, 2019
Here is an excerpt:
The U.S. government has clear guidelines for autonomous weapons—they can’t be programmed to make “kill decisions” on their own—but no formal opinion on the ethics of driverless cars. Germany is the only country that has devised such a framework; in 2017, a German government commission—headed by Udo Di Fabio, a former judge on the country’s highest constitutional court—released a report that suggested a number of guidelines for driverless vehicles. Among the report’s twenty propositions, one stands out: “In the event of unavoidable accident situations, any distinction based on personal features (age, gender, physical or mental constitution) is strictly prohibited.” When I sent Di Fabio the Moral Machine data, he was unsurprised by the respondent’s prejudices. Philosophers and lawyers, he noted, often have very different understandings of ethical dilemmas than ordinary people do. This difference may irritate the specialists, he said, but “it should always make them think.” Still, Di Fabio believes that we shouldn’t capitulate to human biases when it comes to life-and-death decisions. “In Germany, people are very sensitive to such discussions,” he told me, by e-mail. “This has to do with a dark past that has divided people up and sorted them out.”
The info is here.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
HHS issues voluntary guidelines amid rise of cyberattacks
Samantha Liss
www.healthcaredive.com
Originally published January 2, 2019
Dive Brief:
www.healthcaredive.com
Originally published January 2, 2019
Dive Brief:
- To combat security threats in the health sector, HHS issued a voluminous report that details ways small, local clinics and large hospital systems alike can reduce their cybersecurity risks. The guidelines are voluntary, so providers will not be required to adopt the practices identified in the report.
- The four-volume report is the culmination of work by a task force, convened in May 2017, that worked to identify the five most common threats in the industry and 10 ways to prepare against those threats.
- The five most common threats are email phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, loss or theft of equipment or data, accidental or intentional data loss by an insider and attacks against connected medical devices.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Experts Reveal Their Tech Ethics Wishes For The New Year
Jessica Baron
Forbes.com
Originally published December 30, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
"Face recognition technology is the technology to keep our eyes on in 2019.
The debates surrounding it have expressed our worst fears about surveillance and injustice and the tightly coupled links between corporate and state power. They’ve also triggered a battle amongst big tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, over how to define the parameters of corporate social responsibility at a time when external calls for greater accountability from civil rights groups, privacy activists and scholars, and internal demands for greater moral leadership, including pleas from employees and shareholders, are expressing concern over face surveillance governance having the potential to erode the basic fabric of democracy.
With aggressive competition fueling the global artificial intelligence race, it remains to be seen which values will guide innovation."
The info is here.
Forbes.com
Originally published December 30, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
"Face recognition technology is the technology to keep our eyes on in 2019.
The debates surrounding it have expressed our worst fears about surveillance and injustice and the tightly coupled links between corporate and state power. They’ve also triggered a battle amongst big tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, over how to define the parameters of corporate social responsibility at a time when external calls for greater accountability from civil rights groups, privacy activists and scholars, and internal demands for greater moral leadership, including pleas from employees and shareholders, are expressing concern over face surveillance governance having the potential to erode the basic fabric of democracy.
With aggressive competition fueling the global artificial intelligence race, it remains to be seen which values will guide innovation."
The info is here.
Trump Has Officially Made ‘Conservative Ethics’ an Oxymoron
Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine
The conservative intelligentsia initially greeted the rise of Donald Trump with revulsion. After some of them peeled off, a minority remained within the party tent on the grounds that they could support Trump’s policy goals without endorsing his grotesque character. Mitt Romney’s op-ed attacking Trump’s lack of virtue, however, has put this question squarely on the table. And the conservative response seems clear: Republicans will not abide attacks on Trump’s character, either.
A couple of recent columns nakedly illustrate the moral depravity into which conservatives have descended. It would be easy to mock some blow-dried Fox News bobblehead, but I’m going to focus on two samples from a pair of the more esteemed intellectuals the conservative movement has produced. The first is a column by Roger Kimball, and the second by Henry Olsen.
Kimball is an esteemed, long-standing conservative critic, who writes for a wide array of literary, scholarly, and pseudo-scholarly journals, and is frequently photographed in a bow tie. Like many conservative intellectuals, Kimball once devoted himself to the evils of moral relativism. “What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value and 2) there is no such thing as truth,” he wrote in one such essay, in 2009. Kimball explained that by attacking fixed truths, relativism allows the strongman to impose his own values. “Relativism and tyranny, far from being in opposition, are in fact regular collaborators,” he wrote. And also: “Relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from ‘oppressive’ moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious.”
The info is here.
New York Magazine
The conservative intelligentsia initially greeted the rise of Donald Trump with revulsion. After some of them peeled off, a minority remained within the party tent on the grounds that they could support Trump’s policy goals without endorsing his grotesque character. Mitt Romney’s op-ed attacking Trump’s lack of virtue, however, has put this question squarely on the table. And the conservative response seems clear: Republicans will not abide attacks on Trump’s character, either.
A couple of recent columns nakedly illustrate the moral depravity into which conservatives have descended. It would be easy to mock some blow-dried Fox News bobblehead, but I’m going to focus on two samples from a pair of the more esteemed intellectuals the conservative movement has produced. The first is a column by Roger Kimball, and the second by Henry Olsen.
Kimball is an esteemed, long-standing conservative critic, who writes for a wide array of literary, scholarly, and pseudo-scholarly journals, and is frequently photographed in a bow tie. Like many conservative intellectuals, Kimball once devoted himself to the evils of moral relativism. “What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value and 2) there is no such thing as truth,” he wrote in one such essay, in 2009. Kimball explained that by attacking fixed truths, relativism allows the strongman to impose his own values. “Relativism and tyranny, far from being in opposition, are in fact regular collaborators,” he wrote. And also: “Relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from ‘oppressive’ moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious.”
The info is here.
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Must Bill Barr Abide Ethics Advice on Recusal? A Debate
Barbara McQuade and Chuck Rosenberg
LawFareBlog.com
Originally posted January 22, 2019
Here is an excerpt:
But we respectfully disagree on an important point that surfaced during Attorney General-nominee Bill Barr’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 15 and 16: whether, if confirmed, he should agree to abide ethics advice from Justice Department officials, before he receives that advice, regarding whether to recuse himself from supervision of the Mueller investigation.
Barr previously criticized the Mueller probe, including in an unsolicited legal memo he circulated to the Justice Department and President Trump’s legal team in the spring of 2018, and he commented favorably on the merits of investigating Hillary Clinton for what seems to us to be a bogus accusation. During his hearing, Barr was asked whether he would seek ethics advice regarding recusal. He said he would. When asked whether he would follow that advice, he said that as “head of the agency,” he would make the decision as to his own recusal. He would not follow that ethics advice, he said, if he “disagreed” with it. Is that appropriate? McQuade says no; Rosenberg says yes.
The Justice Department has a strict set of rules and norms that govern recusals. In some cases—for instance, where a prosecutor has a political, financial, or familial interest in a matter—a recusal is mandatory. Other situations can give rise to an appearance of a conflict – a set of conditions that call into question a prosecutor’s impartiality. In those cases, a prosecutor might be advised to recuse, but it is not mandatory. We both believe it is crucial that the work of the Justice Department be impartial and that it appear to be impartial. Thus, we believe that these recusal rules should be scrupulously followed. So far, so good.
The blog post debate is here.
LawFareBlog.com
Originally posted January 22, 2019
Here is an excerpt:
But we respectfully disagree on an important point that surfaced during Attorney General-nominee Bill Barr’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 15 and 16: whether, if confirmed, he should agree to abide ethics advice from Justice Department officials, before he receives that advice, regarding whether to recuse himself from supervision of the Mueller investigation.
Barr previously criticized the Mueller probe, including in an unsolicited legal memo he circulated to the Justice Department and President Trump’s legal team in the spring of 2018, and he commented favorably on the merits of investigating Hillary Clinton for what seems to us to be a bogus accusation. During his hearing, Barr was asked whether he would seek ethics advice regarding recusal. He said he would. When asked whether he would follow that advice, he said that as “head of the agency,” he would make the decision as to his own recusal. He would not follow that ethics advice, he said, if he “disagreed” with it. Is that appropriate? McQuade says no; Rosenberg says yes.
The Justice Department has a strict set of rules and norms that govern recusals. In some cases—for instance, where a prosecutor has a political, financial, or familial interest in a matter—a recusal is mandatory. Other situations can give rise to an appearance of a conflict – a set of conditions that call into question a prosecutor’s impartiality. In those cases, a prosecutor might be advised to recuse, but it is not mandatory. We both believe it is crucial that the work of the Justice Department be impartial and that it appear to be impartial. Thus, we believe that these recusal rules should be scrupulously followed. So far, so good.
The blog post debate is here.
Even arbitrary norms influence moral decision-making
Campbell Pryor, Amy Perfors & Piers D. L. Howe
Nature Human Behaviour (2018)
Abstract
It is well known that individuals tend to copy behaviours that are common among other people—a phenomenon known as the descriptive norm effect. This effect has been successfully used to encourage a range of real-world prosocial decisions, such as increasing organ donor registrations. However, it is still unclear why it occurs. Here, we show that people conform to social norms, even when they understand that the norms in question are arbitrary and do not reflect the actual preferences of other people. These results hold across multiple contexts and when controlling for confounds such as anchoring or mere-exposure effects. Moreover, we demonstrate that the degree to which participants conform to an arbitrary norm is determined by the degree to which they self-identify with the group that exhibits the norm. Two prominent explanations of norm adherence—the informational and social sanction accounts—cannot explain these results, suggesting that these theories need to be supplemented by an additional mechanism that takes into account self-identity.
The info is here.
Nature Human Behaviour (2018)
Abstract
It is well known that individuals tend to copy behaviours that are common among other people—a phenomenon known as the descriptive norm effect. This effect has been successfully used to encourage a range of real-world prosocial decisions, such as increasing organ donor registrations. However, it is still unclear why it occurs. Here, we show that people conform to social norms, even when they understand that the norms in question are arbitrary and do not reflect the actual preferences of other people. These results hold across multiple contexts and when controlling for confounds such as anchoring or mere-exposure effects. Moreover, we demonstrate that the degree to which participants conform to an arbitrary norm is determined by the degree to which they self-identify with the group that exhibits the norm. Two prominent explanations of norm adherence—the informational and social sanction accounts—cannot explain these results, suggesting that these theories need to be supplemented by an additional mechanism that takes into account self-identity.
The info is here.
Monday, January 28, 2019
Second woman carrying gene-edited baby, Chinese authorities confirm
Agence France-PresseOriginally posted January 21, 2019
A second woman became pregnant during the experiment to create the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese authorities have confirmed, as the researcher behind the claim faces a police investigation.
He Jiankui shocked the scientific community last year after announcing he had successfully altered the genes of twin girls born in November to prevent them contracting HIV.
He had told a human genome forum in Hong Kong there had been “another potential pregnancy” involving a second couple.
A provincial government investigation has since confirmed the existence of the second mother and that the woman was still pregnant, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The expectant mother and the twin girls from the first pregnancy will be put under medical observation, an investigator told Xinhua.
The info is here.
Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech
Kelly Servick
ScienceMag.org
Originally published January 2, 2019
Here is an excerpt:
Finally, neurosurgeon Edward Chang and his team at the University of California, San Francisco, reconstructed entire sentences from brain activity captured from speech and motor areas while three epilepsy patients read aloud. In an online test, 166 people heard one of the sentences and had to select it from among 10 written choices. Some sentences were correctly identified more than 80% of the time. The researchers also pushed the model further: They used it to re-create sentences from data recorded while people silently mouthed words. That's an important result, Herff says—"one step closer to the speech prosthesis that we all have in mind."
However, "What we're really waiting for is how [these methods] are going to do when the patients can't speak," says Stephanie Riès, a neuroscientist at San Diego State University in California who studies language production. The brain signals when a person silently "speaks" or "hears" their voice in their head aren't identical to signals of speech or hearing. Without external sound to match to brain activity, it may be hard for a computer even to sort out where inner speech starts and ends.
Decoding imagined speech will require "a huge jump," says Gerwin Schalk, a neuroengineer at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies at the New York State Department of Health in Albany. "It's really unclear how to do that at all."
One approach, Herff says, might be to give feedback to the user of the brain-computer interface: If they can hear the computer's speech interpretation in real time, they may be able to adjust their thoughts to get the result they want. With enough training of both users and neural networks, brain and computer might meet in the middle.
The info is here.
ScienceMag.org
Originally published January 2, 2019
Here is an excerpt:
Finally, neurosurgeon Edward Chang and his team at the University of California, San Francisco, reconstructed entire sentences from brain activity captured from speech and motor areas while three epilepsy patients read aloud. In an online test, 166 people heard one of the sentences and had to select it from among 10 written choices. Some sentences were correctly identified more than 80% of the time. The researchers also pushed the model further: They used it to re-create sentences from data recorded while people silently mouthed words. That's an important result, Herff says—"one step closer to the speech prosthesis that we all have in mind."
However, "What we're really waiting for is how [these methods] are going to do when the patients can't speak," says Stephanie Riès, a neuroscientist at San Diego State University in California who studies language production. The brain signals when a person silently "speaks" or "hears" their voice in their head aren't identical to signals of speech or hearing. Without external sound to match to brain activity, it may be hard for a computer even to sort out where inner speech starts and ends.
Decoding imagined speech will require "a huge jump," says Gerwin Schalk, a neuroengineer at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies at the New York State Department of Health in Albany. "It's really unclear how to do that at all."
One approach, Herff says, might be to give feedback to the user of the brain-computer interface: If they can hear the computer's speech interpretation in real time, they may be able to adjust their thoughts to get the result they want. With enough training of both users and neural networks, brain and computer might meet in the middle.
The info is here.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Expectations Bias Moral Evaluations
Derek Powell and Zachary Horne
PsyArXiv Preprints
Originally created on December 23, 2018
Abstract
People’s expectations play an important role in their reactions to events. There is often disappointment when events fail to meet expectations and a special thrill to having one’s expectations exceeded. We propose that expectations influence evaluations through information-theoretic principles: less expected events do more to inform us about the state of the world than do more expected events. An implication of this proposal is that people may have inappropriately muted responses to morally significant but expected events. In two preregistered experiments, we found that people’s judgments of morally-significant events were affected by the likelihood of that event. People were more upset about events that were unexpected (e.g., a robbery at a clothing store) than events that were more expected (e.g., a robbery at a convenience store). We argue that this bias has pernicious moral consequences, including leading to reduced concern for victims in most need of help.
The preprint is here.
PsyArXiv Preprints
Originally created on December 23, 2018
Abstract
People’s expectations play an important role in their reactions to events. There is often disappointment when events fail to meet expectations and a special thrill to having one’s expectations exceeded. We propose that expectations influence evaluations through information-theoretic principles: less expected events do more to inform us about the state of the world than do more expected events. An implication of this proposal is that people may have inappropriately muted responses to morally significant but expected events. In two preregistered experiments, we found that people’s judgments of morally-significant events were affected by the likelihood of that event. People were more upset about events that were unexpected (e.g., a robbery at a clothing store) than events that were more expected (e.g., a robbery at a convenience store). We argue that this bias has pernicious moral consequences, including leading to reduced concern for victims in most need of help.
The preprint is here.
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