Week 6: Are Humanities’ Ethics in “Jeopardy?”

Examining innovative & emerging technologies, like Sherlock Holmes, led my inquiries to “Watson,” International Business Machine’s (IBM’s) computer capable of competing with humans on the game show Jeopardy.  See the following link for greater details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DywO4zksfXw .

While there have been many Sci-Fi doom and gloom stories written over the past century of how computers will eventually take over the world, technology itself has been slow to advance to meet the vision.  With Watson being on Jeopardy and recent projections of scientific and technological advances occurring in the next 10 to 20 years, increased computing power may advance manmade robots into the realm of what was previously only fiction.  

As my Google queries on potentially new technologies continued beyond Watson a series of disturbing ones fitting not only into Sci-Fi but religious & philosophical moral issues kept emerging; like Chimeras.  Now into the 3^rd to final class of the course I’ve gone full circle and have found the materialization of innovative & emerging technologies to be coupled with ethics versus 2 distinct areas of study.

My research led me to the Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET); see the following web site: http://ieet.org/ .  Here ethics is also establishing a technical presence on the internet to address advances in science.

Reading over the IEET website I happened to come across a question I first considered after having watched a documentary on Nazi experiments on human beings.  See the following link for the specifics.

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/?cn=agus_watson-20100712&cm=k&csr=google&cr=emerging_technologies&ct=USJWK002&S_TACT=USJWK002&ck=emerging_technologies&cmp=00000&mkwid=slsIwbnl5_9199393053_432n0d3749

I am still in the crossroads on the subject of whether society should use information gained at the expense of others by inhumane means under the guise of science?  Prompting me to scrutinize the affects & effects new technologies such as Social Networking may have on humanity.   Does Watson represent the ensuing gloom & doom of science fiction and the end to civilization or the beginning of a new paradigm?  

As a certified National Rifle Association (NRA) instructor, education on the proper and safe use of firearms is stressed.  One would not give or encourage someone who isn’t properly trained to handle a gun.  Plenty of incidents can be found where a youth has come by a handgun only to cause harm to themselves or someone else.

In kind, there are examples of youth or the uninitiated (see the Darwin Awards site - http://www.darwinawards.com/), to miss use technology with negative consequences.  An example shared by a classmate can be observed at the following link which shows a Boy Scout finding the means to create a nuclear reactor with potentially harmful radiation to the surrounding community in his back yard; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwRt74nzRmY .

Is technology good or bad?  Computers have been depicted as being as smart, good or evil as the individuals creating them.  A here-to-for unmentioned but very well known science fiction story series is Star Trek.  It isn’t the advances in technology which make the show so appealing to audiences as the positive factors of the people exhibiting their humanity.  The crew of the Star Ship Enterprise are aided by technology very much like Sherlock Holms receiving assistance from Dr. Watson.

IBM’s Watson represents a potential for computers to posses the capability to learn.  Can computers learn to comprehend the best that humanity has to offer in the future?  Will advances in robotics sustain the better part of humanities’ ethics long after mankind is extinct?  Benevolently – CDamian (10-17-2011)