L&I Sci 120 Final Prezi. on Prezi
Thank you for watching. I hope you all enjoy the song as well. My apologies if it is something you do not enjoy.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Blog 3 - Hogden
What has most intrigued me with our recent readings and discussions is this ideal of emerging technology and how this swift evolution is highly unprecedented and will continue to unfold with consequences yet to be seen. I was most compelled by the Tavani Chapter 12 reading surrounding privacy issues as it relates to bioinformatics. Tavani states that “bioinformatics is a branch of informatics, which involves the acquisition, storage, manipulation, analyses, transmission, sharing, visualization, and simulation of information on a computer” for the purpose of investigation and application (Tavani, p. 369). He focuses much of this section upon computational genomics and the deCODE Genetics Inc. scenario, which purely focuses upon “genetic/genomic information” and the idea of data mining (Tavani, p. 369). I was most intrigued by the concept of patient consent and how the deCODE scenario was able to manipulate the language of consents from the contributing individuals to allow for them utilize the information as needed.
Security and privacy have been reoccurring themes during our weekly discussions. Here with bioinformatics we are introduced to technology that will change modern medicine as we know it, and yet the infancy of this triumphant technology will likely leave many patients vulnerable to unknown forces. Consider the recent US push toward electronic medical records. The vision for this effort is pure; it desires to improve patient care by providing an interconnected medical record accessible by any participating institution at any time. An Emergency Room can instantly access a primary care physician office record to reveal the patients medications, recent EKG’s, family history and so on. While this may seem like an invaluable tool, I see endless issues with this ease of accessibility. We learned from our discussion regarding anonymous about the ease that copycats can manipulate information for the purpose of hacking or cracking institutional infrastructures for their own intrinsic desires. What if health insurance companies opted to covertly access the records of potential enrollees or their family members to determine the risk involved with insuring that individual? Or, what if the government used these systems to access nondescript information such as benign demographics and diagnoses to compile a disease database without proper consent from individuals? The former could impose great harm to an individual while the later, in a more anonymous fashion, could provide the foundation for a health care revolution. How can we truly have faith that neither will happen? While laws such as HIPAA provide a veil of security the ability to compromise any such system remains. If anonymous can shut down major credit card companies and snoop around the Pentagon’s system, then I am quite certain that someone with much less technological prowess has the capacity to penetrate a small rural hospital with their new IT equipment and electronic medical record system.
This topic is most compelling to me as I work within the health care field for a system with has an electronic medical record. The concepts we have explored over the weeks that have revealed the vulnerability of even the most seemingly fortified technological infrastructures is staggering to me. We are converging upon an era where our more sensitive and private information is going digital, yet the fate of the true integrity these electronic medical record systems remain to be seen.
Security and privacy have been reoccurring themes during our weekly discussions. Here with bioinformatics we are introduced to technology that will change modern medicine as we know it, and yet the infancy of this triumphant technology will likely leave many patients vulnerable to unknown forces. Consider the recent US push toward electronic medical records. The vision for this effort is pure; it desires to improve patient care by providing an interconnected medical record accessible by any participating institution at any time. An Emergency Room can instantly access a primary care physician office record to reveal the patients medications, recent EKG’s, family history and so on. While this may seem like an invaluable tool, I see endless issues with this ease of accessibility. We learned from our discussion regarding anonymous about the ease that copycats can manipulate information for the purpose of hacking or cracking institutional infrastructures for their own intrinsic desires. What if health insurance companies opted to covertly access the records of potential enrollees or their family members to determine the risk involved with insuring that individual? Or, what if the government used these systems to access nondescript information such as benign demographics and diagnoses to compile a disease database without proper consent from individuals? The former could impose great harm to an individual while the later, in a more anonymous fashion, could provide the foundation for a health care revolution. How can we truly have faith that neither will happen? While laws such as HIPAA provide a veil of security the ability to compromise any such system remains. If anonymous can shut down major credit card companies and snoop around the Pentagon’s system, then I am quite certain that someone with much less technological prowess has the capacity to penetrate a small rural hospital with their new IT equipment and electronic medical record system.
This topic is most compelling to me as I work within the health care field for a system with has an electronic medical record. The concepts we have explored over the weeks that have revealed the vulnerability of even the most seemingly fortified technological infrastructures is staggering to me. We are converging upon an era where our more sensitive and private information is going digital, yet the fate of the true integrity these electronic medical record systems remain to be seen.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Blog #3
These last four weeks of class assignments have ran from exploring deep within your own identity and how you present yourself online to realms almost unimaginably far outside your own being and how this artificial intelligence is evolving and becoming more and more complex. What a lot of ground to cover! I feel as though I am still absorbing all of the information we have been presented, and it may take me weeks after class is done to keep realizing some of the meanings we have uncovered and possibilities of some of the cutting edge technologies such as Sixth Sense.
In Turkle’s Life on the Screen, she says we are reconstructing ourselves and our identities online. That, “this reconstruction is our cultural work in progress” (Turkle, 177). That is interesting; especially as we learned so many people intentionally or unintentionally misrepresent themselves in the virtual world. When looking back, will the exploration of our cultural history online show an accurate representation of who we are and what we were accomplishing during this period in time? It appears we need dedicated Digital Anthropologists to explore these facets of society to a greater degree, as they are growing and occurring, as opposed to anthropologists specializing in online societies.
As we are reconstructing ourselves online, we are seemingly doing so offline as well. Several people have mentioned Military Robots and the future of war, but it really is exciting and frightening as well as eye opening to see these weapons being created when they seemed like unachievable science fiction just a few years ago. Both the military robotics and the interactive technology of Sixth Sense are ways to try to create a better, more informed, less delicate us.
We are constantly striving to update and become enhanced, but usually fall into the same mistake of trying to do so by creating robotics with better sensors, or finding an algorithm to solve conundrums, instead of performing the really hard work of being better humans. When we discussed cross cultural and intercultural ethics, I believe we really began exploring the human interactions that are necessary to become more cosmopolitan. It is possible, and for the most part, global digital citizens are working together to solve some pretty hefty problems. But when we are still at a point that the coolest technologies are made for warfare and our children don’t always see the ethical problems that arise from not being real in the digital societies they are growing up in, we still have an uphill climb.
Mistry, Pranav, auth. "Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology." TED Talks. TED Conferences, LLC, NOV 2009. web. 2 Dec
Singer, PW, auth. "PW Singer on military robots and the future of war." TED Talks. TED Conferences, LLC, Apr 2009. web. 2 Dec 2011.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 177-209. Print.
Michael Starks - Blog #3
Being a fan of democracy, I followed the uprisings of Arab Spring rather closely. It felt good to see what I believed to be a legitimate revolt against a tyrannical government. The readings during week 9 changed my perspective. As the Egyptians are beginning to riot once again because of political unrest, I am forced to re-think things. Were the Arab Spring uprisings a child of the digital divide? Since the majority of citizens in those countries do not have Internet access, were a select few pulling the strings of discord; manipulating the rest of the world into believing that their revolt was a good thing? When we examine online identity in conjunction with the digital divide, questions begin to arise from the ether. Are these online identities simply the alter ego of a person or persons trying to change their society as their ethical beliefs see fit? Only time will tell.
Perhaps we, as a people, need to step back a few feet and try to understand others a little better. I do not generally philosophize about things, but this class has changed my way of thinking as of late. I am starting to see that conflict is not created out of hate; conflict is created from a lack of understanding for one another. The cosmopolitan views of Kwame Anthony Appiah illustrated this quite clearly for me. If more societies, countries, and most importantly people would just take the time to understand the "enemy", we just might find the cohesion the world is so desperately seeking.
We all view artificial intelligence with fascination and awe. Why is this? What do we gain from artificial intelligence? Before this class, I was one of those people who thought artificial intelligence is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now I am having second thoughts. The mere thought of machines thinking and acting for themselves just to make our lives easier makes me cringe. Pranav Mistry expressed that technology will allow us to become more human; this disturbs me. How can we become more human when we rely more and more on artificial intelligence to guide us? At what point will we cease thinking for ourselves and let the machines take over? The movie Terminator may be more real that we could ever imagine.
As this class slowly comes to a close, I have learned more about my own ethical beliefs than I would have ever thought possible. Whoever coined the phrase, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" was very wrong.
Perhaps we, as a people, need to step back a few feet and try to understand others a little better. I do not generally philosophize about things, but this class has changed my way of thinking as of late. I am starting to see that conflict is not created out of hate; conflict is created from a lack of understanding for one another. The cosmopolitan views of Kwame Anthony Appiah illustrated this quite clearly for me. If more societies, countries, and most importantly people would just take the time to understand the "enemy", we just might find the cohesion the world is so desperately seeking.
We all view artificial intelligence with fascination and awe. Why is this? What do we gain from artificial intelligence? Before this class, I was one of those people who thought artificial intelligence is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now I am having second thoughts. The mere thought of machines thinking and acting for themselves just to make our lives easier makes me cringe. Pranav Mistry expressed that technology will allow us to become more human; this disturbs me. How can we become more human when we rely more and more on artificial intelligence to guide us? At what point will we cease thinking for ourselves and let the machines take over? The movie Terminator may be more real that we could ever imagine.
As this class slowly comes to a close, I have learned more about my own ethical beliefs than I would have ever thought possible. Whoever coined the phrase, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" was very wrong.
Blog Entry 3
For the third and final blog I will
be discussing weeks nine through thirteen. In week nine we discussed online identity and
what people choose to display online.
There are many different ways to display yourself online and some people
choose to not display who they really are instead they might display someone
that they would like to be. Turkle states, “Why are we doing this?” (p.180)
That is an excellent question because why would we do that? I think we should
show people who we really are and not try to pretend to be someone. Turkle asks
many good questions and some of them simply cannot be answered because everyone
is different. I also learned how other
people feel on the topic and how they choose to identify themselves on the
Internet. It seems to me that most
people prefer to display themselves and don’t try to display another person.
One video that I watched during
week 11 was the P.W. Singer video about military robotics. This video explained
a lot about what we would do differently if we had robots going into war
instead of humans. Would we take more risks? Would we become more effective?
Many questions that need to be answered but we will have to wait because we
aren’t sending more robots than humans into war. It seems to be that robotics will be the
future of war. There are many pros and cons about this subject, whether it
would be for the better of the country or for the worse. The pro that stands out to P.W Singer is that they
wouldn’t have to tell family and friends about a solider dying out in battle. That alone I feel would be something very
important to limit human casualties.
Another topic that was brought up
was if robotics would change the ethical nature of war. I believe that they would change the ethical
nature of war in many ways. The one example I think of is, if we have a
dangerous mission to complete. Sending a robot into the mission instead of the
human would be less dangerous and we wouldn’t be risking a human life or lives.
With the robot having no feelings it
would be easier to send a robot into a mission instead of a human.
My last question is, will robotics
be the future of war and will the United States invest in going this path? If
they do choose to take this path then the ethical nature of war will be much
different then what it is now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)