[14] cs education for all

lets go to the bar

[13] patenting the idea of not doing blog posts

nope

[12] the age old question: would you rather face the devil you know or the devil you don’t?

When it comes to self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles, I tend to think it refers to the question above. They will not be perfect and they will take time to improve and become better at driving themselves. Is this risk and fear, though, better than the current state of affairs on the roads of the United States and numerous countries across the world?

I, as someone else referenced in class, tend to think we should not try and hamper innovation and let it reign and prosper for itself. Autonomous vehicles fall, obviously, in this category with the possibilities for discovery knowing no bounds. as written in ars Tecnicha and stated by the President and CEO of Forbes:

“The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago.”

Hampering innovation does nothing but continue to set us back as a society and an economy, in the specific case of the United States. In essence, they look to make our roads safer by eliminating mistakes that drivers might otherwise make and therefore reduce accidents. The argument against such machines is simply that they will make mistakes, and who wants to be killed by a robot in a car accident? To me, I think that if someone is killed by a self-driving car there will be infinitely more outrage than a human and I do not think this is right–if this is the major excuse against self-driving cars, then the argument against falls flat in a major way here.

When an accident happens, the liability should fall partially between the corporation creating the car and the owner of the vehicle itself–they have accepted at least some of the risk in buying the product. When it comes to life-or-death situations, the autonomous vehicle should err on the side of caution for the purpose of reducing the liability of the corporation and in preserving human lives at the expense of, overall, decreased human-like driver competence. It is important to understand what the Seattle Times writes:

“What they’ve found is that while the public may most fear a marauding vehicle without a driver behind the wheel, the reality is that the vehicles are overly cautious. They creep out from stop signs after coming to a complete stop and mostly obey the letter of the law — unlike humans.”

They will inherently drive differently than humans, and this is something that must be accepted if we are to move forward with the autonomous vehicle into the future and the mainstream economy and society.

Lastly, would i want a self-driving car? At times, yes. When I would normally call an Uber/Lyft (intoxicated or busy streets in a packed city), I would want an autonomous vehicle. I tend to generally enjoy the task of driving and all that it entails. I think the self-driving car can be of great use to many, though, who do not enjoy such a task. This is not to say I would never reach a point where I would buy one, just that for now it would not provide me enough marginal benefit to outlay whatever amount of money is necessary to put one in my garage.

Also, do not worry. I still found an autonomous car meme for you to finish my blog with. Is it my best work? No, but at the same time there are surprisingly slim pickings with this topic, as there also was with one of the more recent weeks if you were tasked with grading that one too. Enjoy:

[11] r u smartr than a 5th gratr?

I fully recognize that by making that ridiculous title that I might lose points for lack of proper spelling/grammar, and that it has very little to do with what I am going to talk about, but I think its catchy and I liked it.

So

Artificial Intelligence is this weeks topic, and has become reasonably customary with my blog posts I have attached a relevant meme for your personal enjoyment as you hurry through reading 20-100 of these things:

Artificial intelligence continues to develop further and further, becoming more and more human-like in the process. It has revolutionized the way much of the world works and will continue to do so. I do believe that it lacks the human element, though, which will rear its head further into the process beyond being able to regurgitate factual information. At the end of the day, the computer does not have true emotion.

The mentioned AI systems, such as Deep Blue and Watson, are gimmicks of sorts but are also ways of showing us what is possible with artificial intelligence. I believe these systems are pioneering ones that will give rise to the greatest artificial intelligence systems of the future; as written in the NY Times following Watson’s run on Jeopardy!:

“Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at I.B.M. and other companies are already developing uses for Watson’s technologies that could have a significant impact on the way doctors practice and consumers buy products.”

It is a starting point. An imperfect one, but all starting points have imperfections–thats why we call them starting points.

I believe the Turing Test to be a reasonable test of computer consciousness; if I cannot distinguish a computer from a human, then that means it is human-like. The test, like AI itself, is also not without its imperfections. As noted by the BBC:

“Already, online gamers can find themselves unsure if they are competing against a human or a “gaming bot” – in fact, some players actually prefer to play against bots (which are assumed to be less likely to cheat).”

This is a real-life application of the Turing Test. The Chinese Room counterargument acknowledges that a computer can be defined as human-like, but that does not make it a human, and of this I agree. At the end of the day, this is a tricky situation to decide this and something I do not, as a whole, feel very strongly about.

The threats posed by artificial intelligence are real; at the same time, the benefits posed by artificial intelligence are real. It is a fine line that will eventually be walked where computers begin to take over human lives and tasks entirely. For now and the near future, though, I think the problem more lies in the economics of artificial intelligence and its ability to replace traditionally human work with automation. I think this is by far the more pressing topic being posed by artificial intelligence because I see the economy making a major turn with the oncoming wave of artificial intelligence sweeping in. For this, per usual, I tend to agree that the market will make the decisions here and I will simply leave it at that. I recognize that people need work and an income, and that will have to be dealt with in the coming few years.

Lastly, a human is not simply a biological computer. I am sure that there is an argument to be made as to why we are and that argument may well have more validity than my own, but I just like to think of humanity as its own device and a beautiful one at that. Where lives are lived and tasks are not simply completed. I hope this world never loses the true human element, as that is what makes this life and this world so beautiful to live in.

[10] news is kinda like the argument on whether or not Joe Flacco is elite

It really is the age old question: Is Joe Flacco elite? It is simple to argue that he is not elite, based on the facts as stated above, but people will always argue that he is elite due to a small piece of a wide array of work. How does this relate to fake news? News is what you make of it, and you can twist absolutely any event into any type of response that you want to drive up. You can even create falsified information about someone or something, but if it is presented on a pretty website from a credible-looking source, you just went viral and now everyone thinks whatever you said is correct, even though it is utter garbage. Most reasonable people would understand the fake news (such as thinking that Joe Flacco is an elite quarterback), but at the end of the day the fake news can begin to take over popular opinion and make a strong, falsified impact.

The sheer scope of fake news is incredible. The fact that this question was even asked to a writer is preposterous–as written in the Washington Post:

“You think you personally helped elect Trump?“

I mean it is wild to think that fake news spread this far, but indeed it has become somewhat of a phenomenon. As I scroll through my Facebook and Twitter feeds, it is not difficult to find pieces of fake news that people truly believe and repost. As written in NY Magazine:

“The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. “

I mean, we can claim that fake news had no bearing but that is just irresponsible. What should Facebook and Twitter do? Of that I am not sure. I understand that something must be done, but it also leads down a slippery slope where we do not have a clear stopping point. I rely on social media for my news, as do millions of other people my age; for it to be reputable, there has to be some form of vetting system, something to try and eliminate faker stories before they go viral. Something like what Facebook is doing, according to NPR, seems like a reasonable start to the solution:

“The new algorithm would make hoax articles less likely to trend because it will look at “the number of publishers that are posting articles on Facebook about the same topic,” accounting for coverage by multiple news outlets, Facebook says.”

Something needs to happen with fake news–although it has been around forever, that does not mean that it has not also become more dangerous to the population. It is a problem with an unclear answer but to me, at the end of the day, I think going down the slippery slope is the move here–and just hope that you have some good emergency brakes.

[project 03] julian assange isn’t actually a massive douchebag

Link to our stellar podcast:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByzQRHaHJm9AZkFFYXc5dDlIWk0

I hope you appreciate the meme that I put above for you, basically explaining how Julian Assange (Fred) uncovered Vault 7 and how the CIA was spying on its people. It took me 25 minutes to find this because there are way fewer Wikileaks/Assange memes than you think; take a look for yourself.

Now onto this blog post I am supposed to be writing for this class. Initially, the concept of Vault 7 being released unto the world by Julian Assange and his team at WikiLeaks was an interesting one at that. In general, Vault 7 did not change my views on government surveillance as I have always assumed that the government would do things behind our backs in the name of securing the nation, etc. and overall I was not at all surprised to hear that they do this.

In general, I think WikiLeaks has been a source for good, although they are in no way a perfect organization. I think it is incredibly important for organizations like WikiLeaks to keep people and organizations in-check and ensure that they are held to a certain standard. As CNET states:

“Certainly the publication of classified documents, emails and videos does give an unusual inside look into a government’s dealings and actions.”

It is a constant reminder, especially in the ears of politicians, that shady dealings may eventually come undone and exposed to the masses.

In general, I do tend to trust WikiLeaks to a point–the same way that I look at things said and released by the United States government. As for WikiLeaks, I trust that the story I am being told is accurate, just that there is the opportunity for some piece of the story to be left out. As for the United States government, I tend to trust them providing a more holistic picture while that picture may be flawed or not entirely factual. As with all sources of information in our lives, you have to determine how much you should trust the story coming from a source and react accordingly to the information that source provides you with.

As for whistleblowing, I tend to think there is a fine line to walk. If the whistle is being blown on something illegal AND not in the best interest of the United States and its goals, I tend to believe it is acceptable. For example, I tend to think Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were wrong in their actions, while the release of the actions of the Democratic National Convention in 2016 were proper. As Wired writes:

“Let that be a warning to the Democratic Party and any other organization with secrets to keep. If the leaks don’t kill you, the fear of them just might.”

Has WikiLeaks crossed lines before? Absolutely. But they have also provided us with information and brought about a reason for people in positions of power to be held responsible. At the end of the day, I see them as having an overall positive effect on society and the world we live in.

WikiLeaks opens governments–for better or for worse.

[09] gross neutrality – taxes = net neutrality

Or at least that is the equation I had always used to calculate the net of something in classes and life. Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers cannot discriminate on the speed of their services to different companies/people. Everything must be done the same towards everybody to keep a fair playing field on the internet.

Overall, contrary to popular belief, I do not have an extraordinarily strong opinion on the topic at hand. I know I have become moderately famous for my hot takes and opinions, but I am rather torn on this point for the sheer argument of the internet as a common good and whether or not it has reached that status in today’s modern world. My entire belief hinges upon this concept, which we did discuss in class. If the internet is in-fact a common good, something everybody in a given society needs to have access to in order to survive and maintain the opportunity to prosper, then it must have certain regulations to allow for relatively equal access to such a good. If, on the other hand, it is deemed to be a tool for success but not necessary for success, then it would not require such regulation and the market could regulate it itself.

I overall tend to favor on the side of supporting net neutrality, as it opens up a pool for those trying to make their own breaks in the technology world. It levels the playing field and forces for different companies and services to continually innovate and push the boundaries of what we see as possible in today’s age. I tend to agree with IEEE Spectrum:

“The greatest threat to innovation is if new companies, innovative companies, have to pay a lot to be on the same playing field as everybody else,” Economides says. Net neutrality supporters worry there might be secondary effects from limiting the free flow of ideas and information online.”

Many companies already have a difficult time making it into the big leagues, but the opportunity for a company to do that as well as pay for top-tier service from an ISP could be catastrophic to the technology industry. Like I said before, my entire argument for net neutrality lies on the concept of it being seen as a common good. If this is not true, i do believe such regulation is unnecessary moving forward. Competition is essential to a thriving capitalist economy, and is something that is sorely lacking in some of these industries, as stated in the article from The Verge:

“Fifty-one percent of Americans only have one choice of broadband provider, according to the FCC’s own 2016 data. Thirty-eight percent of Americans only have two choices. Add it up, and 89 percent of Americans have but one or two options for broadband, and one of them is often much slower than the other. This is not a situation ripe for fierce competition and lower prices.”

In all, I favor an area where the market and competition rule out and petty rules are unnecessary and simply slow down progress and innovation. In the case of net neutrality, I see it as needing some form of regulation to maintain the public good, without choking out the ISPs from profits they do deserve to earn. The net neutrality debate is not nearly as neutral as one might think (like that pun? No? Good.).

[08] Denzel Washington spoilers ahead

The concept of corporation personhood is certainly an interesting one, one with implications that stretch far beyond the realm of what many consider when breaching the topic. They do not face the same consequences for their actions, they instead may lose money or something of the sort, and the same phrase continues to come to my head (although in an arguably different way than it originally gained popularity by): “Too big to fail.” They are made up of so many different entities that even if there becomes a bad apple or a bad branch, we feel bad about tearing down the entire tree.

In the end, though, corporations are not people. As written in The Consumerist:

“Corporations are not actually living, breathing, physical beings. They cannot go to jail, they cannot lose their lives, and they do not think or feel. Their actions and inactions are the sum total of the actions and inactions of their members.”

They are a collection of beings, not an individual being. If we decide to give them all of the same rights as people, we must also treat them as people when it is harder to treat someone as a person–during times of punishment. Admit it, its way easier to tell someone they are great, but it is way more difficult to tell an inmate sitting on death row they have a week to live. Punishing corporations is far more difficult in the legal sense than it is to penalize individuals, which is why corporations will, for better or worse, never truly be people.

I chose to read up on the IBM-Nazi relationship, as it reminded me at least slightly of the movie Inside Man:

(trailer)

(SPOILER ALERT: why I thought of this)

Where, in essence, the heist is based around the founder and owner of the bank being enriched during WWII by unsavory means (definitely recommend watching the movie to fully understand what I am trying to get at here). Now, back to the topic at-hand–IBM. According to Mic, the allegations are frankly extremely spooky:

“IBM’s machines tabulated and tracked census information in order to identify Jewish populations across Europe. Hollerith machines tracked the coming and going of passenger and freight trains, and managed the populations of the concentration camps. The numerical tattoo inked on the arms of Auschwitz prisoners? It was originally an IBM identification number used to track that prisoner in the punch card system.”

I mean, that sounds and is absolutely horrible. It is an absolutely atrocity that occurred in WWII. As far as a business operating, I think it is unethical to supply to a regime such as Nazi Germany or one that does not align with the corporation. At the end of the day, if you are able to live with the decisions your company made on a moral level and accept the possible fiscal backlash that may come from it, then that is your prerogative and nobody will stop you or force you to stop doing what it is you are doing so long as what you are doing is not illegal. In business, people will cut corners and do the unethical thing. At the end of the day, I think it is important to maintain an ethical line-in-the-sand beginning from inception and never cross whatever that line is.

Overall, I do believe that ethics relates back to corporations and that they should be held to some sort of ethical standard–and that standard will be established by the actions of the market that decides whether or not to buy their product/service based on their history of decisions. A company should establish a set of guidelines for making decisions as they pertain to morals and ethics and stick to that throughout its existence. If it does this then maybe, just maybe, they can move closer to personhood.

[07] online advertising is fine

We live in an age where our entire lives and everything about us is readily available on the internet through what we publicly post, what we search, and where we spend our time on the internet. We utilize all of these online services–Google, online retailers such as Amazon to name a few–but then become surprised or even unhappy when we see extremely targeted advertising. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as free; there is always a cost in any activity you choose to participate in even if it is not a direct monetary one. As one Professor Tim Weninger told my class: “Google is a multi-billion dollar advertising company.” At the end of the day, you are provided with phenomenal services and pay for that service with your data about what you are doing and (maybe) why you are doing it.

This is not to say that it might be considered creepy and that people have problems with it. As written in The Atlantic:

A friend’s Facebook status update captures this idea well: “I am never quite sure if Facebook’s advertising algorithms know nothing about me, or more than I can admit to myself.”

These algorithms make us begin to question our own thoughts about ourselves and whether or not we want to be giving this much information up to all of these corporations. I understand the pause that many people receive when they think about these topics. To the people, though, who believe Facebook or Google are unethical in what they do (taking your data to put targeted ads in front of you), I offer a rather simple solution. It is one that may not be the most liked answer but one that I think is reasonable–stop using it. You literally agree to let them do this too. As news.com.au states:

Facebook’s Data Use Policy warns users that the company “may use the information we receive about you … for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

You have signed a “contract” of sorts–they get your data, you get to use a service that has revolutionized the way the world communicates. Save paying for connection to the internet from a telecom company, how much are you paying Google or Facebook to utilize their services or refund them for the phenomenal services they provide? I would venture to say that every person in the class will answer $0. Like I said before, nothing is truly free.

I am not trying to discount that these companies can and have overstepped their bounds. People are not to be discriminated against for who they are (think Facebook’s marketing against children); these companies owe this to their customers. Pending these corporations act responsibly, and by that I am stating that targeted advertising is entirely acceptable until you try and take advantage of the inherent vulnerabilities of an individual. To me there is an inherent difference between targeting an audience and abusing an audience and that should be understood by adtech companies such as Facebook and Google as well. We just have to continue to enforce such standards.

To add, I in general think using tools such as AdBlock are completely acceptable practices although I have never used one myself and tend to think online advertising is bearable. If Silicon Valley was so worried about people using AdBlock then they would do something about it–its their profit after all.

TL;dr: I think online advertising is fine

[06] ed

I spent probably the first fifteen minutes of this blog post looking for the right Edward Snowden meme and landed on this one. Enjoy:

In all, I tend to think what Edward Snowden did had a negative effect on the United States of America and should be treated as such. When Edward Snowden leaked extremely sensitive NSA documents, he was acting against the United States government and jeopardizing American actions abroad, as well as actions occurring within the country itself. As we now look back on the time of Edward Snowden, what will he be remembered for? What has changed?

Edward Snowden may have accomplished his point of the United States surveying its citizens, but he did much more harm in the process. Had he carefully curated what he sent out and sent it out to the right people (i.e., New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), then maybe actionable change could have been made. Instead, Snowden did not show great restraint in how he leaked and blew the whistle. As written in The Diplomat‘s article:

Instead, he collected an apparently unknowable amount of information (unknowable to both him and the NSA) and dumped it on the doorsteps of largely foreign newspapers. As he no doubt fully understood, most of these documents contained information pertaining to how the NSA collected intelligence on legitimate foreign targets, not Americans whatsoever.

The channels through which Snowden sent are also of negative consequence. He decided that instead of going through the many channels that he could go through, he would just dump a ton of information to a newspaper–not even a reputable one at that. The channel through which Edward Snowden went was hasty; had Snowden gone through another channel, the conversation about Edward Snowden could be entirely different. Instead, though, Snowden failed (according to The New Yorker):

The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it.

While being illegal, his actions were also unethical. He took the security and secrets of the United States of America for granted. He harmed the relations of the United States with foreign nations, which is an interesting point. We all know that every country spies on every other one, but once it has been confirmed and brought to the media it sows a new form of mistrust (think of the German situation). Overall, Edward Snowden’s goals of changing the way the United States collects information have fallen woefully short, instead doing far more harm than good.

Very little has truly changed due to the Snowden leaks as far as actionable government change, contrary to Snowden’s original goals.