Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology

Tristan Harris
The New York Times
Originally posted 5 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

Our Paleolithic brains also aren’t wired for truth-seeking. Information that confirms our beliefs makes us feel good; information that challenges our beliefs doesn’t. Tech giants that give us more of what we click on are intrinsically divisive. Decades after splitting the atom, technology has split society into different ideological universes.

Simply put, technology has outmatched our brains, diminishing our capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges. The advertising business model built on exploiting this mismatch has created the attention economy. In return, we get the “free” downgrading of humanity.

This leaves us profoundly unsafe. With two billion humans trapped in these environments, the attention economy has turned us into a civilization maladapted for its own survival.

Here’s the good news: We are the only species self-aware enough to identify this mismatch between our brains and the technology we use. Which means we have the power to reverse these trends.

The question is whether we can rise to the challenge, whether we can look deep within ourselves and use that wisdom to create a new, radically more humane technology. “Know thyself,” the ancients exhorted. We must bring our godlike technology back into alignment with an honest understanding of our limits.

This may all sound pretty abstract, but there are concrete actions we can take.

The info is here.

Privacy: Where Security and Ethics Miss the Mark

Jason Paul Kazarian
securityboulevard.com
Originally posted 29 Nov 19

Here is an excerpt:

Without question, we as a society have changed course. The unfettered internet has had its day. Going forward, more and more private companies will be subject to increasingly demanding privacy legislation.

Is this a bad thing? Something nefarious? Probably not. Just as we have always expected privacy in our physical lives, we now expect privacy in our digital lives as well. And businesses are adjusting toward our expectations.

One visible adjustment is more disclosure about exactly what private data a business collects and why. Privacy policies are easier to understand, as well as more comprehensive. Most websites warn visitors about the storage of private data in “cookies.” Many sites additionally grant visitors the ability to turn off such cookies except those technically necessary for the site’s operation.

Another visible adjustment is the widespread use of multi-factor authentication. Many sites, especially those involving credit, finance or shopping, validate login with a token sent by email, text or voice. These sites then verify the authorized user is logging in, which helps avoid leaking private data.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment is not visible: encryption of private data. More businesses now operate on otherwise meaningless cipher substitutes (the output of an encryption function) in place of sensitive data such as customer account numbers, birth dates, email or street addresses, member names and so on. This protects customers from breaches where private data is exploited via an all-too-common breach.

The info is here.

23 and Baby

Tanya Lewis
nature.com
Originally posted 4 Dec 19

Here are two excerpts:

Proponents say that genetic testing of newborns can help diagnose a life-threatening childhood-onset disease in urgent cases and could dramatically increase the number of genetic conditions all babies are screened for at birth, enabling earlier diagnosis and treatment. It could also inform parents of conditions they could pass on to future children or of their own risk of adult-onset diseases. Genetic testing could detect hundreds or even thousands of diseases, an order of magnitude more than current heel-stick blood tests—which all babies born in the U.S. undergo at birth—or confirm results from such a test.

But others caution that genetic tests may do more harm than good. They could miss some diseases that heel-stick testing can detect and produce false positives for others, causing anxiety and leading to unnecessary follow-up testing. Sequencing children’s DNA also raises issues of consent and the prospect of genetic discrimination.

Regardless of these concerns, newborn genetic testing is already here, and it is likely to become only more common. But is the technology sophisticated enough to be truly useful for most babies? And are families—and society—ready for that information?

(cut)

Then there’s the issue of privacy. If the child’s genetic information is stored on file, who has access to it? If the information becomes public, it could lead to discrimination by employers or insurance companies. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), passed in 2008, prohibits such discrimination. But GINA does not apply to employers with fewer than 15 employees and does not cover insurance for long-term care, life or disability. It also does not apply to people employed and insured by the military’s Tricare system, such as Rylan Gorby. When his son’s genome was sequenced, researchers also obtained permission to sequence Rylan’s genome, to determine if he was a carrier for the rare hemoglobin condition. Because it manifests itself only in childhood, Gorby decided taking the test was worth the risk of possible discrimination.

The info is here.

It Loves Me, It Loves Me Not Is It Morally Problematic to Design Sex Robots that Appear to Love Their Owners?

Sven Nyholm and Lily Eva Frank
Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
DOI: 10.5840/techne2019122110

Abstract

Drawing on insights from robotics, psychology, and human-computer interaction, developers of sex robots are currently aiming to create emotional bonds of attachment and even love between human users and their products. This is done by creating robots that can exhibit a range of facial expressions, that are made with human-like artificial skin, and that possess a rich vocabulary with many conversational possibilities. In light of the human tendency to anthropomorphize artifacts, we can expect that designers will have some success and that this will lead to the attribution of mental states to the robot that the robot does not actually have, as well as the inducement of significant emotional responses in the user. This raises the question of whether it might be ethically problematic to try to develop robots that appear to love their users. We discuss three possible ethical concerns about this aim: first, that designers may be taking advantage of users’ emotional vulnerability; second, that users may be deceived; and, third, that relationships with robots may block off the possibility of more meaningful relationships with other humans. We argue that developers should attend to the ethical constraints suggested by these concerns in their development of increasingly humanoid sex robots. We discuss two different ways in which they might do so.

Chinese residents worry about rise of facial recognition

Sam Shead
bbc.com
Originally posted 5 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

China has more facial recognition cameras than any other country and they are often hard to avoid.

Earlier this week, local reports said that Zhengzhou, the capital of the northeastern Henan province, had become the first Chinese city to roll the tech out across all its subway train stations.

Commuters can use the technology to automatically authorise payments instead of scanning a QR code on their phones. For now, it is a voluntary option, said the China Daily.

Earlier this month, university professor Guo Bing announced he was suing Hangzhou Safari Park for enforcing facial recognition.

Prof Guo, a season ticket holder at the park, had used his fingerprint to enter for years, but was no longer able to do so.

The case was covered in the government-owned media, indicating that the Chinese Communist Party is willing for the private use of the technology to be discussed and debated by the public.

The info is here.

Affordable treatment for mental illness and substance abuse gets harder to find

Jenny Gold
The Washington Post
Originally published 1 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

A report published by Milliman, a risk management and health-care consulting company, found that patients were dramatically more likely to resort to out-of-network providers for mental health and substance abuse treatment than for other conditions. The disparities have grown since Milliman published a similarly grim study two years ago.

The latest study examined the claims data of 37 million individuals with commercial preferred provider organization’s health insurance plans in all 50 states from 2013 to 2017.

Among the findings:

●People seeking inpatient care for behavioral health issues were 5.2 times more likely to be relegated to an out-of-network provider than for medical or surgical care in 2017, up from 2.8 times in 2013.

●For substance abuse treatment, the numbers were even worse: Treatment at an inpatient facility was 10 times more likely to be provided out-of-network — up from 4.7 times in 2013.

●In 2017, a child was 10 times more likely to go out-of-network for a behavioral health office visit than for a primary care office visit.

●Spending for all types of substance abuse treatment was just 0.9 percent of total health-care spending in 2017. Mental health treatment accounted for 2.4 percent of total spending.

In 2017, 70,237 Americans died of drug overdoses, and 47,173 from suicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2018, nearly 20 percent of adults — more than 47 million people — experienced a mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“I thought maybe we would have seen some progress here. It’s very depressing to see that it’s actually gotten worse,” said Henry Harbin, former chief executive of Magellan Health, a managed behavioral health-care company, and adviser to the Bowman Family Foundation, which commissioned the report. “Employers and insurance plans need to quadruple their efforts.”

The info is here.

Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?

Neil Levy
aeon.co
Originally posted 29 Nov 19

Here is an excerpt:

If such virtue signalling is a central – and justifying – function of public moral discourse, then the claim that it perverts this discourse is false. What about the hypocrisy claim?

The accusation that virtue signalling is hypocritical might be cashed out in two different ways. We might mean that virtue signallers are really concerned with displaying themselves in the best light – and not with climate change, animal welfare or what have you. That is, we might question their motives. In their recent paper, the management scholars Jillian Jordan and David Rand asked if people would virtue signal when no one was watching. They found that their participants’ responses were sensitive to opportunities for signalling: after a moral violation was committed, the reported degree of moral outrage was reduced when the participants had better opportunities to signal virtue. But the entire experiment was anonymous, so no one could link moral outrage to specific individuals. This suggests that, while virtue signalling is part (but only part) of the explanation for why we feel certain emotions, we nevertheless genuinely feel them, and we don’t express them just because we’re virtue signalling.

The second way of cashing out the hypocrisy accusation is the thought that virtue signallers might actually lack the virtue that they try to display. Dishonest signalling is also widespread in evolution. For instance, some animals mimic the honest signal that others give of being poisonous or venomous – hoverflies that imitate wasps, for example. It’s likely that some human virtue signallers are engaged in dishonest mimicry too. But dishonest signalling is worth engaging in only when there are sufficiently many honest signallers for it make sense to take such signals into account.

The info is here.

Convict Trump: The Constitution is more important than abortion

Paul Miller
The Christian Post
Originally posted 22 Dec 19

Christians should advocate for President Donald J. Trump’s conviction and removal from office by the Senate. While Trump has an excellent record of appointing conservative judges and advancing a prolife agenda, his criminal conduct endangers the Constitution. The Constitution is more important than the prolife cause because without the Constitution, prolife advocacy would be meaningless.

The fact that we live in a democratic republic is what enables us to turn our prolife convictions from private opinion into public advocacy. In other systems of government, the government does not care what its citizens think or believe. Only when the government is forced to take counsel from its citizens through elections, representation, and majoritarian rule do our opinions count.

Our democratic Constitution — adopted to “secure the blessings of liberty” for all Americans — is what guarantees that our voice matters. Without it, we can talk about the evils of abortion until we are blue in the face and it will never affect abortion policy one iota. The Constitution — with its guarantees of free speech, free assembly, the right to petition the government, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power — is the only thing that forces the government to listen to us.

Trump’s behavior is a threat to our Constitutional order. The facts behind his impeachment show that he abused a position of public trust for private gain, the definition of corruption and abuse of power. More worryingly, he refused to comply with Congress’s power to investigate his conduct, a fundamental breach of the checks and balances that is the bedrock of our Constitutional order.

The info is here.

Deliver Us From A.I.? This Priest-Led Network Aims to Shepherd Silicon Valley Tech Ethics

Rebecca Heilweil
Fortune.com
Originally posted 24 Nov 19

Here is an excerpt:

When asked about engaging leaders in atheist- and liberal-leaning Silicon Valley, Salobir says that, even if they’re not religious, many do seek meaning in their work. “They dedicate all their time, all their money, all their energy to build a startup—it has to be meaningful," he says. "If it’s not, what is the point of waking up every morning and working so much?"

It's the kind of work that has Salobir finding inspiration in John the Baptist. “He’s the one who connects," he says. "He’s the one who puts people in touch.” 

There are other Vatican-affiliated groups interested in the impact of emerging technologies, Green says. He points to pontifical academies that have—or will—host conferences on topics including robotics and artificial intelligence. This past September, the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development came together to host a conference on the common good in the digital age that featured Silicon Valley leaders like Reid Hoffman and representatives from Facebook and Mozilla.

But Green says Optic is somewhat unique in its focus on establishing a reciprocal relationship with the technology industry. “It’s not just that the Church is going to get good information here, but [that] the technologists are going to feel like they’re also being benefitted," he says.

They’re getting the opportunity to think about technology in a way that they haven’t been thinking about it before, Green adds. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.”

The info is here.