@article {2108, title = {Is it time for a presidential technoethics commission}, year = {2016}, month = {05/2016}, publisher = {The Conversation}, abstract = {

{\textquotedblleft}A recent New York Times article highlighted the growing integration of technologies and textiles, displaying a photograph of a delicate golden nest of optical fiber. The article reported that this new {\textquotedblleft}functional fabric{\textquotedblright} has the added quality that it {\textquotedblleft}acts as an optical bar code to identify who is wearing it.{\textquotedblright}

Is this a feature or a bug? This smart material would certainly be a new milestone in the march of technology and the marketplace to erode personal privacy. Would a suit made of this material need to come with a warning label? Just because we have the technological capability to do something like this, should we?

Similar questions could have been asked about putting GPS technology in our mobile phones, drones in the air and the {\textquotedblleft}cookies{\textquotedblright} resident on our devices to dutifully record and transmit our online activity. Right now, those conversations happen in corporate boardrooms, the media, fictional books and films, and academic settings. But there isn{\textquoteright}t a broad national conversation around the ethics of the steady digital encroachment on our lives. Is it time to create a presidential commission on technoethics? ...{\textquotedblright}

}, url = {https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-a-presidential-technoethics-commission-58846}, author = {Dan Rockmore} } @article {2351, title = {The Trolley Problem [Edge.com]}, year = {2016}, month = {12/2016}, publisher = {Edge.com}, chapter = {2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?}, abstract = {

"The history of science is littered with {\textquotedblleft}thought experiments,{\textquotedblright} a term dreamed up by Albert Einstein ({\textquotedblleft}gedankenexperiment{\textquotedblright}) for an imagined scenario able to sharply articulate the crux of some intellectual puzzle, and in so doing excite some deep thinking on the way to a solution or related discovery. Among the most famous are Einstein{\textquoteright}s tale of chasing a light beam that led him to a theory of special relativity and Erwin Schr{\"o}dinger{\textquoteright}s story of the poor cat, stuck in a fiendishly designed quantum mechanical box, forever half-alive and half-dead, that highlighted the complex interactions between wave mechanics and measurement.

{\textquotedblleft}The Trolley Problem{\textquotedblright} is another thought experiment, one that arose in moral philosophy. There are many versions, but here is one: A trolley is rolling down the tracks and reaches a branchpoint. To the left, one person is trapped on the tracks, and to the right, five people. You can throw a switch that diverts the trolley from the track with the five to the track with the one. Do you? The trolley can{\textquoteright}t brake. What if we know more about the people on the tracks? Maybe the one is a child and the five are elderly? Maybe the one is a parent and the others are single? How do all these different scenarios change things? What matters? What are you valuing and why?..."

}, url = {https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27051}, author = {Dan Rockmore} } @article {2060, title = {Our Mother the Machine, by Dan Rockmore [Huffpost] }, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, publisher = {Huffington Post}, abstract = {

Prof. Dan Rockmore, Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science - Dartmouth College and member of the CBMM External Advisory Committe (EAC), has contributed an article to the Huffington Pist which may be of interest to the CBMM Commnity.

"The last couple years were pretty great years in the movies for artificial intelligence. "Her" -- the first movie ever about a relationship between an operating system and a person -- as well as the "The Imitation Game" -- about the father of AI, Alan Turing -- each won Oscars for their screenplays in addition to earning multiple nominations, including for best picture. Central to both of these movies was the famous "Turing Test," a thought experiment for providing a benchmark for achieving a level of human intelligence in a machine, wherein a human is given the opportunity to "converse" with a hidden partner, either another person or a machine. If the conversational guinea pig mistakes a machine for a person, then technology has finally made the great leap forward in the bridging of brains with bits and bytes. ... "

}, url = {http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rockmore/our-mother-the-machine_b_7273504.html}, author = {Dan Rockmore} }