I reviewed this article about Google’s attempts to re-enter the Chinese market by developing a search a product which would have allowed for state-controlled censorship of search content and results. Of note, this article was written while the project was still active and in development, the backlash described in this article did result in the project being shutdown less than a year after this publication. On that point, I do agree with the viewpoint taken by Google employees and others described in this article against the creation of a censored search engine. While I hold strong beliefs in the free market and the rights of businesses to pursue options that are profitable for them so long as they are legal, I also strongly believe that individual rights are of the utmost importance in society and freedom of information is a core tenet to those rights. While I imagine the financial prospects lost in the discontinuing of this project were significant, in my mind those financial gains do not justify the potential perpetuation of state censorship and persecution of dissenters that would have been enabled by the tools being developed in this project. In my tech career, I will not work for companies or take on projects that are use technology to enable state censorship or unethically limit access to public information.
I reviewed these articles about the ethics of self-driving cars, specifically how they should handle the rare but consequential decisions that are made during a vehicle accident. While these articles can be considered a little dated (5-6 years is a long time in tech) their points about understanding these ethical dilemmas that a self-driving vehicle could encounter and our limited governance on these types of vehicles remain valid. Though I do believe more research and regulation is necessary to address these and other concerns about self-driving vehicles I think that our anxiety or apprehension about self-driving vehicles as a whole may be clouding our vision about how to handle these types of situations. By that I mean, we have already encountered and are still addressing these types of problems everyday, as human drivers of not so smart cars. While our thought processes might differ in some situations and our reaction time varies greatly, we have a societal framework (ie. traffic laws) in place already that guides how to evaluate and react in these types of situations. As humans, I believe we can use this societal/institutional knowledge to create self-driving vehicles that are both safer and more effective at preventing these difficult and sometimes fatal situations from ever happening in the first pace. Not considering the isolated pockets of roads where self-driving vehicles are currently operating we are already beginning to adopt these types of technologies and understand their ethics in smaller ways such as automatic braking to avoid collisions or lane guidance systems. There will be challenges along the way to widespread adoption of self-driving cars, and unfortunately likely some fatalities, but we faced these problems when we invented the first cars and we learned how to overcome them then.