Category Archives: Technology and Society

Philosophy, Technology and Society

Terminators, Coming Up

4 Comments

Alan Boyle has an interesting post on the ethics of killer robots.

“Asimov contributed greatly in the sense that he put up a straw man to get the debate going on robotics,” Arkin said. “But it’s not a basis for morality. He created [the Three Laws] deliberately with gaps so you could have some interesting stories.”

Even without the Three Laws, there’s plenty in today’s debate over battlefield robotics to keep novelists and philosophers busy: Is it immoral to wage robotic war on humans? How many civilian casualties are acceptable when a robot is doing the fighting? If a killer robot goes haywire, who (or what) goes before the war-crimes tribunal?

Administrative, Technology and Society

Strange Internet Problems

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As some of you have heard (it seems to be the main news now on cable), Florida had a massive power outage today. It didn’t affect me, except indirectly.

About quarter after one, I heard a little click from my UPS, which usually indicates a power drop, but we didn’t lose power, and even a computer that wasn’t on a UPS didn’t seem to have a problem. But I noticed shortly afterward that I had no internet connection. The DSL modem lights were all working fine, but I couldn’t connect, even after repeated resets. I ended up being on the phone with AT&T for over an hour, and they finally got things working again. They told me that somehow (somehow?) my authentication had gotten screwed up, and that they had rejiggered (or some other technical term) the lines to get it working again. They didn’t believe that it had anything to do with the power outage–that it was just coincidence. I’m skeptical.

Anyway, as you can see, I’m back on line.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Are Americans Stupid?

18 Comments

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts:

See how deftly it’s done? Stupid religious Americans, clever “heathen” Europeans. Unfortunately, in the context, this doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. Americans are opposed to stem cell research because we’re ignorant religious bigots. Okay, sure. But we’re opposed to nanotechnology for the same reasons? And GM foods?

GM foods? Now wait a second…a lot of Europeans are opposed to GM foods. I bet they would even say it’s on moral grounds! Yet somehow, they manage to pull that off without being either 1) religious or — more importantly — 2) stupid. Personally, I think being morally opposed to GM foods is kind of stupid, and being “morally” opposed to nanotechnology is idiotic. However, I don’t see how American stupidity is dumber than European stupidity; one may be informed by religious belief, the other by a paranoid superstitious dread of scientific progress. Advantage: Europe? If you say so.

I just hope that Americans aren’t stupid enough to fall for Obama, as the Democrats currently seem to be.

General Science, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Not So Identical

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Apparently “identical” twins don’t even have identical genetics:

Identical twins emerge when a zygote — the fertilized egg that develops into an embryo — splits into two embryos. As such, they should have the same genomes. The researchers speculate that as the cells making up each embryo divide over and over again during development in the womb, mistakes occur as dividing cells shuffle copies of their DNA into daughter cells.

But genetic differences between identical twins might also accumulate after development over a twin’s life as well. “I think all our genomes are under constant change,” Bruder told LiveScience.

I think that this has implications for cloning as well. It may not be possible to exactly clone an individual, and the differences could turn out to be quite noticeable.

[Update in the evening]

Per some comments, the key point in this story is that it has long been known that there are differences in twins (personality, eyesight, fingerprints, etc.). But those are things that can arise even from an identical genome. The genes are not a blueprint, but rather a recipe, and even if a recipe is followed carefully, the results are not always guaranteed to be the same. The point of the article is that, contrary to previous theories that obvious differences in twins could be attributed solely to different environments, that the genome itself wasn’t necessarily the same. That is new.