Daniel Guerra's Ethical and Professional Issues Blog

Patents are legal safeguards provided to companies or individuals that wish to profit from their inventions. The idea makes sense - if you put time, effort, and money, into creating something new, something that hasn't been done before, you should reap the benefits of your hard work. If this wasn't the case, any invention by an individual could be copied by a large corporation capable of producing it cheaper and in larger quantities. Similarly, it makes ethical/moral sense that an individual or company should hold ownership of their invention, the thing that came from their mind. One might argue that, for the good of society, all inventions should be public, such that everyone can benefit from it. That is a fair point, but at the same time, I think the decision of whether the invention should be used by the public for common good should come from the inventor and not the government. I think patents definitely promote innovation. It seems to me that if there was no guaranteed th

The first article starts with the sub-headline: "What does it mean to experiment with technology that we know will kill people, even if it could save lives?" As crappy at it sounds, that is the definition of progress. If we can be pretty certain that the implementation of AV's will reduce 35,000 deaths a year, then it makes sense that we would want to works towards that, even if it means having an extra 10, or 100, deaths a year until we reach that goal. And that is not taking into account the clearly negligent behavior of Uber, disabling certain safety features like emergency breaking and a second driver, both measures that could have saved Herzberg. I think we should work towards reducing human-error vehicle fatalities, but also make sure companies working on AV's act responsibly, and take all possible safety measures. I would also add that it is hard to tell whether a real driver would have been able to avoid hitting Herzberg. The video shows her appearing from the

Artificial intelligence is intelligence that is created by humans, artificially introduced into some non-human matter-form. Unlike teaching another human to walk or talk, artificial intelligence implies that everything about the intelligence of this agent is artificial, meaning us humans not only taught it intelligence, but we also taught it to learn, we gave it a brain though a CPU, memories through hardware memory, and life though electricity. Nothing about this agent is natural, and nothing about it is possible without human and human intelligence. I've always taught that there is no way robots could surpass human intelligence. It always seemed to me that it was impossible for us to create something smarter than us - how are we supposed to teach it things we don't know? How do we give it the ability to process things faster than us if we can't process things that fast? However, that is probably flawed logic. After all, if we effectively teach general learning habits, i

Trolling has been a staple of the internet since it's inception. As a kid, it took some time going to forums online, looking at comments on blog posts or videos, for me to understood trolling. Trolling is sort of romanticized in online culture a little bit, it's like this art form where you have to push the right buttons, say exactly the rights things, in order to make people as infuriated as possible. The only reason it exists is because of anonymity. If every comment online was tied to a real person, the "art" of trolling wouldn't exists, because trolling only exists while there are no consequences, while the troll doesn't have to be held responsible for the outrage they cause. I never engaged with trolls, because all they want is to elicit a response, so if you say anything at all back, especially a thought-out, intelligent response, they've already won. Once you realize that trolls don't really believe in what they type, don't really care abo

It makes sense to me that the internet should be considered a common carrier. It's an integral part of society, and without it, many public services today would stop working. I worked for a large company's cloud infrastructure this summer, and when one of our datacenters went down, a certain police department called in and said that they couldn't communicate with their officers out in the field. I think that illustrates just how entrenched in society the internet is, and how important to the daily function of so many services it is. Net neutrality is an all-encompassing term for the movement to keep the internet "neutral", that is, to prevent internet service providers from regulating/charging more for certain content. The regulations that were put in place to establish some form of net neutrality were repealed earlier this year. The majority of people on the intern seemed outraged at this. The concerns over repealing net neutrality are very much valid. Any gove

The concept of corporate personhood was entirely new to me. I would never have assumed that, for most legal purposes, corporations "are" people. The concept of corporate personhood basically states that, as a large collection of individuals, corporations are entitled to many of the same rights that people have, such as the right to free speech, and religious freedom of expression. At first I was very confused at the idea that corporations are thought of as people in United States law, because they are something entirely different. However, it now makes sense to me that, instead of writing another set of laws that applies only to corporations, it was decided that corporations would get so many of the same rights as people that we might as well just say they're people; it's like inheritance in object oriented programming. Except that I think writing a new set of rules for corporations would have been the better option, because there are so many ways in which corporati