This week I have been pondering the morality of suicide after we had that class lecture on Monday. Suicide is one of those very interesting “crimes”, at least to me it is. Unlike murder, or other crimes such as battery, suicide is unique because the individual is choosing to kill himself. How do we as a society have the authority to take away that right from the individual? Some states like Oregon have passed laws allowing people to undergo assisted suicide. This is where a licensed professional can legally kill a patient that has some kind of terminal condition. I believe that every person should have the right to choose when to kill himself when confronted with a terminal illness. However, when someone wants to kill themselves because of depression there should be more restrictions put into place. A lot of times it can be hard to judge why someone killed themselves. Many times the victim never showed signs of depression or at least never showed signs of severe depression. I think that a lot of this stems from our poor funding of mental health and especially our eagerness to dismiss it when it is brought up. Anyways all this thinking about suicide led me to think about all the social media sites that have been in the news because someone filmed themselves killing themselves. Should companies have the right to create algorithms that may be able to recognize when a person is planning on killing himself? This would probably involve parsing through the individual's private messages and posts. This would be a clear violation of privacy, but is it ethical if it leads to suicide prevention? This is a tough question and one to which I do not have the answer to. I believe that these tough questions must start being answered starting with our government and then transitioning to law.
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This week I did some more research into my ethics and technology topic, censorship. I chose censorship as my topic because I am very anti-censorship and I wanted to see if I can find any information that would either change my view of it, or solidify my opinions on it. I started by finding a couple of different types of censorship. Parental controls, social media, and government censorship were the first three that I decided to look into. It turns out there's a couple of different parental controls that parents use to supervise their children. Although this is a much less talked about form of censorship it is still censorship and I believe that in extremes it can lead to a sheltered child. The next thing I investigated was censorship in social media websites. Websites have the power to hinder certain stories or information from the public. For example, if Facebook wanted to they could censor all stories about a politician and make sure that they would not show up on trending, eetc. This kind of censorship is a lot more dreadful since it can have devastating consequences when very large websites do it. We can take the latest US election as an example. There are reports of many fake news stories being shared at an alarming rate on certain websites, while their counterparts were nowhere to be seen. And finally I did some research on government censorship which is prevalent in many countries around the world, with an emphasis on China. The main way that governments censor the “web”, is by forcing search engines to exclude websites for certain search queries. Governments can also ban certain social media posts and force social media websites to delete comments that do not agree with the government's agenda. Again the best example of this is China, which is terrifying. Billions of people are being forced to live under this kind of censorship, it almost reminds me George Orwell's 1984.
This week there was a big leak on the CIA, it has renewed everyone's fears on privacy and rightly so. The big leak this week is being called vault 7 and it is only the “tip of the iceberg”, according to wikileaks. The first few reports point to an issue that has been plaguing the United States for a while now. It seems more information has come out and it all points to the CIA purposely infecting millions devices from United States citizens. Samsung TV’s and consumer smart phones have been just a couple of the targeted devices. Furthermore some documents point to the CIA deliberately finding flaws in some smartphone operating systems and never reporting them, in order to use them later when needing to access information. This is completely unacceptable and unethical. We the people should immediately demand an investigation into these accusations. The fact that the CIA thinks they can just go about anyway they want to get the information they need then they have a bad time coming. I jozy will not allow for this type of behavior, I will be a social warrior and make sure that people know what is going on. For example, I will start spreading the word and making sure everyone is aware of the deeds that the CIA are doing. I’m joking of course, but seriously this is pretty bad. We love to talk about how free America is, land of the free as we call it. Yet our own government is actively conspiring against its citizens and constantly hiding critical information from us.
This week I saw the movie that everyone has been talking about lately, Get Out (There will probably be spoilers in this by the way). Since hearing that Jordan Peele was directing the film, I was stoked to watch it. I think this movie does a very good job on presenting how there are still some shades of modern racism and how they can be difficult for the person committing them to recognize them. An excellent example of this comes from a very innocent scene in the movie where Kris’s (the main protagonist in the story who happens to be black) father in law tells him he would vote for Obama a third time. He does this as an act of kindness from his perspective, however Kris takes is as an act of racism. Obviously this is pretty tame and many would consider this as extending an olive branch, but from Kris’s perspective he feels that he is being identified by his race instead of by who he is. I find this to be a very interesting interaction, and I can see how it can be considered racist, however I think ‘’racism’’ might be too strong of a word for it. The film obviously amplifies a lot of these interactions, there is a scene where a woman grabs Kris’s arm to see how “fit” he is. Eventually the film presents a kind of underlining message which goes something along the lines of, white people want to control the positive attributes that african americans possess such as athleticism. This is a very crude interpretation but it is what I got. Anyways it was a very good movie and I recommend everyone go check it out, the racism is not nearly as up in your face as I might make it seem, it is presented in more subtle ways and done in a very entertaining matter.
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May 2017
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