The Last Reading

In many ways people think that with technology becoming a bigger and bigger part of our life that coding is the new literacy. This has become so much of a thing that President Obama decided to address it in his last State of the Union Address. He believes that it would be beneficial for every student to have some computer science knowledge and that learning this should start at a young age.

One of the main arguments for introducing everyone to computing is that it offers a  broad based benefit. Whether the student learning it actually becomes a programmer or not there are many skills along the way that they pick up that can be beneficial to their everyday life. For example, students can become better at puzzle skills, problem-solving skills, and increase their sequencing skills which has proven to in turn increase reading comprehension. Computing also introduces a new way of thinking about certain topics. It breeds creativity mixed with deep critical thinking. A combination valuable to any person, young or old.

Despite a lot of good that could come from introducing an initiative of this sort, there are also some drawbacks and challenges to incorporating it. First, what impact will introducing screens into classrooms at a young age have? A lot of kids can’t tolerate any kind of screen time at all. So even educational use of screen time can cause issues. On top of this, America would be introducing a new complex, technical subject. Where are all of these teachers going to come from? Most good computing teachers have the inventive of going to industry and making a lot more money than they would be making teaching. Even if teachers were available, how would school systems fit this new subject into an already packed schedule?

My belief is that computer science courses should not replace other courses but should still be offered. I think at a young age incorporating computer science class in with the music, gym, and other extra-curricular activities would be perfect. In these classes one would learn more problem-solving skills and basics of computing, they would not actually be at a computer screen putting together code and programming stuff. These first classes, offered at a young age would be more focused on algorithmic thinking. These classes should have students breaking problems down into a series of steps. Then as the students grow older and enter into high school I think a one semester class should be mandatory to take before graduating and preferably during the freshman or sophomore year. I think many students are afraid to get into computing because they think it is too challenging, however what they don’t realize is that it is challenging for everyone in the beginning. This first course will spark their knowledge and if interested computer science electives will be available.

Finally, I think that anyone can learn to program, as evidenced by NBA stars going on code academy and learning some basic, but I think knowing how to code means nothing if you cannot think of good ways to apply it.

I think that it would be beneficial for grade-schoolers and high schoolers to at least be introduced to the idea of computer science. I do think there is some danger in teaching everyone, mainly because of security hacking issues or the power you are giving to people in teaching them to code in a world filled, surrounded, and based on  technology.

Censorship

There are many reasons why the government might be trying to censor the Internet. However I think one of the main reasons is that the government might limit freedom of speech is to make themselves look good. They do not want to cause a revolt against the government or any trouble so they block out the negative media reviews on them. For example, in the article “Bing Goes Full-on Censorship in English Search Results Within China” it claimed that at one point when would search for Wikipedia in Bing it would come up with fake biographies. Clearly the government is trying to create a fake image to create peace and force people to stay.

Enforcing these laws can be done by self regulation, punishment of service providers, and arrests. Overall, the government is very strict in terms of enforcing these laws. They have a police force dedicated just for looking into the Internet. If violators are caught the website can either be shut down or arrest could be made. China has the largest number of imprisoned journalists and cyber violators.

The ethical and moral rights are complicated in this regard. On one hand, the company must abide by the rules of the country. However, some of these rules are overbearing. I understand that people need the news and will otherwise be in the dark and not fairly educated on important issues going on in their country, but providing loopholes is also unfair. There has to be a way to fight against this without providing loopholes. I believe that censorship is a major concern. Not giving people the information they deserve and depicting a false identity is unjust. I believe that tech companies should do everything in their power to fight against these very restrictive limitations.

Artificial Intelligence

To begin with, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a sub field of computer science that has a goal of enabling the development of computers so that they are able to do things normally done by people. More specifically, these things are associated with people acting intelligently. Going further than this basic definition, once can split AI up into 3 different groups: strong AI, weak AI, and everything in between.

Strong AI focuses on simulating human reasoning. The people working towards this are trying to build systems that think but also explain how humans think as well.

On the other hand, weak AI can be defined as just trying to get the systems to work. While we might be able to build systems that can behave like humans, the results will tell us nothing about how humans think. For example, IBM’s Deep Blue, was a system that was a master chess player, but certainly did not play in the same way that humans do.

The middle camp focuses on systems that are informed or inspired by human reasoning. The people working on this are only using human reasoning as a guide rather than trying to perfectly model this. The article “What is artificial intelligence,” claims that IBM Watson is a good example of this camp. Watson builds up evidence for the answers it finds by looking at thousands of pieces of text that give it a level of confidence in its conclusion. It combines the ability to recognize patterns in text with the very different ability to weigh the evidence that matching those patterns provides. Its development was guided by the observation that people are able to come to conclusions without having hard and fast rules and can, instead, build up collections of evidence. Just like people, Watson is able to notice patterns in text that provide a little bit of evidence and then add all that evidence up to get to an answer.

It is similar in a way that it can mimic human thoughts and reasoning, but it is hard to get it to combine all of the complex parts of a human. Humans are still much more advanced. Good proof of this comes from the AlphaGo or Deep Blue systems. While the Deep Blue system was able to defeat the chess world champion, it was not good for much else. The chess world champion on the other hand can probably think through other things and hold conversations amongst much more. Going off of this, this is why I think that these kinds of systems are gimmicks or tricks. One thing one of the article does mention that can be concerning though is that developers might have developed a way to bottle something very like intuitive sense. This is one of the main differentiating points between humans and systems. If systems can gain this sense then they might move up from just being tricks. However, there is still much more developing to be done in order to reach a human level of intuitive sense.

If an AI machine could fool people into believing it is human in conversation, he proposed, then it would have reached an important milestone. The original Turing Test wasn’t intended to see if a robot could pass for a human, but rather, for deciding whether a machine can be considered to think in a manner indistinguishable from a human. Of course this depends on which questions you ask. For example, there was one instance where a customer was trying to unravel the responder to a chat he was participating in as a robot and it actually worked. The response back was that the server could not process their request at the moment. This shows that despite how well referenced the Turing Test is, it does neglect a decent amount of human aspects.

The Chinese test is as follows: Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but does not produce real understanding. This is trying to argue that the Turing Test is inadequate. Just because a computer system can hold a conversation does not mean it actually understands what is happening or going or being said.

Overall, after reading all of the articles, I do not think that one can consider a computing system a mind. That does not mean that in the future it could not be one. There is just too many missing parts and gaps between what humans can do and what the systems can do. Going along with this, I do not think that humans are biological computers. There is a lot more to us than just input and output. Take for example all of our emotions. These are super hard to replicate and each person is effected by things differently. The human mind and body is very complex and cannot just be dwindled down to a computer.

Two main ethical implications that were mentioned were with jobs and legal reliability. This has always been a concern with new innovative technology. However, in the past things and people were able to adjust and sometimes even make more of a profit. Now introducing AI into the workforce would cause tons of people their jobs and will turn world into who knows what. The other point being made in the articles with legal reliability. If systems begin to take over human jobs and computer systems then who is responsible when a mistake is made. How often will mistakes be made, is it more or less likely to happen. There are all sorts of unanswered questions when it comes to this that must be solved and figured out before ever implementing AI into every day life.

 

Net Neutrality

Net neutrality in the broadest sense is open Internet. More specifically though, net neutrality is the principle that internet providers should give consumers access to all legal content and applications on an equal basis. This means that they should not favor some sources or block others. It also prohibits Internet providers from charging a fee to deliver their content faster and/or slowing down content from other competing providers.

Many people argue that because customers are already paying for connectivity they deserve to get a quality experience. Among these people are Apple and Google. They believe that they should be able to do whatever they want with their Internet (if it is legal) and not be discriminated based on what websites they visit. They also think that not having net neutrality might give Internet service providers too much power that could easily be abused then. This is because they can easily increase the fee for accessing a popular website and therefore they can make a profit. Another problem is that while big services like Netflix could, in theory, afford to pay Comcast for using extra bandwidth, the small, lesser-known services can’t. Really great web sites or Internet services might never gain popularity merely because ISPs would have control over what kind of access users have to that service. That could greatly stifle innovation.

Some people argue that the new rules are too heavy-handed and could prohibit investment and innovation. But the majority of these people are the companies that would otherwise be profiting; they are the AT&Ts and Comcasts. These providers also believe that they should be able to distribute bandwidth differently depending on the service, according to one article. Or if they aren’t going to distribute it differently then someone should be paying more money for it. For example, if Netflix is sucking up all their bandwidth, they should be the ones to pay for the necessary updates that Comcast’s systems will require because of it.

I am for net neutrality. Although I understand the other side I think that it giving the Internet service providers is too much of a risk. I also believe that I should not be judged for the different websites I access. It is part of their job to provide those to me. I am paying them for that. I should not have to worry about if others are accessing those same websites and now they became popular, that is why the other people are also paying them. And on the topic of innovation, the Internet service providers could potentially block out new websites that have innovative ideas and solutions and are being blocked because they just do not have the money to be accessed. So I am not worried about preventing innovation.

Based on the readings and my opinion I think that the Internet is a public service and fair access should be a basic right.

 

 

Project 3

https://drive.google.com/a/nd.edu/file/d/0B4Qv8QbkzEaMTGoxUzNHV0JYUmc/view?usp=sharing

I believe that citizens should be allowed to have technology that completely locks out the government. It is our right to have our private information for our use only. Even if you do not have anything to hide you might still want to protect your information. Why should the government have a right to your information. I understand that they want to protect people, but unless they have reasonable suspicion of dangerous behavior, there is no reason for them to be snooping around your information.

Encryption is not that big of a deal in my life. To be honest I do not know how to encrypt my devices and I am not doing things that are so bad that I do not want others to see. Of course I want my information to be protected, but at the same point I feel that it is too much of a hassle for me to go through protecting it all than to have them snoop through my useless stuff.

I believe that national security will win. I think the government and others have too much power and money for it not to win. I don’t necessarily agree with it winning out. In the case of Apple, I am more on Apple’s side.  I think a lot of danger comes when start making codes that can unlock things. I only think harm will come from the government having such software. I also think that there is a lot to be said for personal privacy. By not having any I think the people are giving the government too much power and they will abuse and it will not create a better future. I do not know how much fighting I will do on this front but I definitely know that I stand on the personal privacy side.

Arrgg… (Reading 09)

The DMCA claims that it is illegal to provide in any way copyrighted materials. If such material is found the owner of the material is allowed to have the content holder remove the material. In which case the provider should remove the material and then notify the person who uploaded the illegal material. If the uploader feels that this is unfair they have a chance to dispute this and bring it to court. The DMCA also deals with infringement through “safe-harbor” provisions. Such provisions protect service providers from monetary damages for the infringing activities of their users and other third parties on the net. The DMCA hopes to limit piracy through these two provisions.

I personally do no think it is ethical for users to download or share copyrighted material. The owners worked hard to create the material and deserve to be recognized and benefit from their handwork and effort. There are other ways to sample or test the material. Specifically for music, iTunes offers 90 seconds of songs, that give you enough amount of time to decide if you like it enough to buy it. These change to 90 seconds happened in the last couple of years. iTunes responded to users claiming that their previous 60 second samples did not offer enough time to music listeners to get a jist of the song. Customers now have no reason to complain or pirate material. If a person truly likes the song or movie they are trying to get they will be happy enough to pay for the version of it. For example, Taylor Swift is my favorite artist and many people were very angry when she decided not to offer her music on Spotify. However, because she is my favorite I was not enraged. Instead, I was happy to buy her most recent album, 1989, to show that I support her and appreciate the music she produces.

That being said, I have participated in the sharing of copyrighted material. I do get the majority of my music from a youtube to mp3 download website. And when I do find the time to watch movies there are some times that I go to free websites and stream the movie. I didn’t really justify my actions. I just cared more about being cheap and not paying $1.29 for a song than breaking the law. This probably came about because I think that I will never get caught doing what I am doing. However, I do recognize that what I am doing is not fair to the artists and associates and I have tried to limit my piracy behavior. I think a lot of people engage in this behavior for the same reason. Teenagers many times have the mind set that just because people have been caught before they don’t think it will ever happen to them.

In the past few years though, I have heard of less people using pirate sites to get their music or movies. When I was in grade school, everyone used LimeWire, now the popular thing is to use Spotify, whether you have premium or not. The same goes for Netflix. I do think that these services have helped the piracy issue but I do not think they can ever completely solve the problem. That is mainly because I think that in general the problem can never be solved. People will always supply these sites and there will most likely always be a demand for them. I honestly think the government should try to limit the piracy use, but should not try to eliminate it. It is not worth their effort or money to try to eliminate. The few people that do pirate will continue to decrease with the rise of Spotify and Netflix and the such and the piracy group will become so little that it will become insignificant.

Patent Laws

From the readings, what exactly are patents? What are the ethical, moral, From the readings and my experience of having a dad has a patent lawyer, a patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention-a product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem. It essentially provides patent owners with protection for their invention.

There are a number of reasons why granting patents can be helpful to society. The first is that the very essence of granting someone a patent gives merit to these people for their idea’s and protects them from being stolen. Therefore, people can actually benefit from their contributions and innovations.

In addition to the rewarding people for their new ideas, having the concept of a patten provides an incentive to individuals because the patents recognize their creativity and offers the possibility of material reward for their marketable invention. Patents fuel the progress of humankind by motivating people to take action when they see something that can be fixed. Overall, patents are necessary and definitely promote innovation. However this might just be my biased side speaking. Working at the law firm my dad works at and seeing patent applications and talking to my dad about what he does presents patents in a positive light.

There are challenges to patents, specifically in the technology world. The people making the patent rules are government officials. However the problem with this is that they are making rules on everything, software and technology included. However, the government does not fully understand what software means and thus cannot make the best policies in terms of patents for software and other technology.

Finally, I must address the notion of patent trolls and if they are good or bad. This is of course  a difficult question to answer. To start off, the readings refer to a patent troll as “a person or business who takes advantage of the patent law stating that most patents are “twenty-year federally mandated monopolies on a novel, non obvious, useful invention” by filing for patents of which they have no intention of using”. These patent holders then sue corporations or businesses that develop the product or a similar product, sometimes without the knowledge that a patent for the technology already exists. Obviously this puts patent trolls in a bad light. However, on the flip side, one can argue that the trolls help the entrepreneurs, the little guys in the industry who would have their ideas stolen by big corporations. So, overall I am not sure if patent trolls are good or bad. I would need to delve deeper into the research and read about more cases to make a concrete, educated answer.

Apple Fights Back

From the readings and in your opinion, should technology companies implement backdoors in their products for the benefit of the government? Are companies like Apple ethically responsible for protecting the privacy of their users or are they ethically responsible for helping to prevent violent or harmful activities that their platforms may enable? How are these two conflicting goals to be balanced in a world of free-flowing communication and extreme terrorism?

If you are against government backdoors, how do you response to conerns of national security? Isn’t save lives or protecting our nation worth a little less individual privacy. How do you counter the argument: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear?

Before reading anything about Apple and the backdoors that the government is requesting, I had not thought much about this issue. In fact, I thought that Apple had probably already implanted some sort of hack that could help people out if their information was lost or something. However, now after reading the article sent out from Apple, amongst the other readings on the website I believe that Apple is doing the correct thing in not creating code that is a backdoor into their product.

Of course Apple is placed in a difficult situation when trying to balance the privacy of their customers with the harmful acts their devices can aid. However, I believe that Apple has more of an ethical duty toward protecting their customer’s privacy because while it is their specific product that was helping commit a violent crime, it was not their intended use of the product. If the terrorist wasn’t using an iPhone he would have used an Android or some other similar type of phone. Once a person buys an iPhone, I am not sure how much responsibility Apple should take if that person does something negative using the phone. It is hard though. We live in a world where a lot of our speech is protected and we can instantaneously be in touch with other people. How are we supposed to protect ourselves? The N.S.A. believed that one of the best ways was to spy on everyone and tap into their Internet and phones. Clearly I think that is overstepping the bounds, but the US does need to come up with a way to protect ourselves in this world of free-flowing communication without intruding on the people’s privacy.

At one time the public might have agreed that saving and protecting lives is worth a little less individual privacy, however the government went about doing this secretly and therefore the American people lost trust in them. One of the main reasons according to the article, “Inside the FBI’s encryption battle with Apple” that Apple created such a tough encryption on their phone was because Snowden released the documents and the American people felt violated. Apple wanted to give back to them what they deserved. They wanted to provide the people with reassurance that their data would be private. Ever since then, the FBI has been looking for a case to make their point and turn around the encryption placed on these phones. Finally, the San Bernardino case allows the FBI to make their argument. The FBI is not requesting for Apple to turn off the encryption they are just requesting that Apple makes it easier for the agents to guess the password as many times as they wanted and to turn off the wait time when too many wrong guesses occur. The FBI wants special privileges for this once case only. “US officials on Wednesday stressed that their request for Apple is only limited to Farook’s phone. ‘The judge’s order and our request in this case do not require Apple to redesign its products, to disable encryption or to open content on the phone’” (Inside the FBI’s encryption battle with Apple). It sounds really good, but one needs to think about the consequences of creating such a code. Two such consequences that “Inside the FBI’s encryption battle with Apple” notes is that “Apple said that it would be impossible to limit the technology to this case. Once Apple built such an investigative tool, any iPhone’s security system – even the most modern ones – could be weakened by it.” And “Apple’s lawyers are concerned that if a judge validates the FBI’s use of the All Writs Act in this case, it will give the government sweeping authority to dictate how Silicon Valley builds products in the future.” The government has gone about it all-wrong and is not allowing the public to regain any trust in them. They keep doing things behind our backs that make us distrust them more. They need to be forthcoming about their plans and desires. Maybe if this happened people would not be as protective of their information. I don’t think people are wanting to hide their information because they genuinely have stuff to hide, I think they are wanting to hide it because they feel like they were wronged or violated by the government. It is almost as if the American population is acting like a stubborn teenager, not wanting to give up their privacy just because something bad happened to them.

However, as of now I think that Apple is doing the correct thing. I think that the FBI does not realize the magnitude of their ask and the negative consequences that could come from the backdoor they are asking to create.

Response to Project 2

Podcast

I think the first thing I wish I knew earlier was that it was all going to work out. Camden said it best, you should not worry too much about getting a job because it will all work out in the end. I know at least that I stressed out basically all last semester, worrying if I would get a job. And I know that there were definitely some interviews that could have gone a lot better if I was not nervous. Of course someone is always going to be nervous interviewing but just knowing that everything will work out for the best in the end if you put the handwork in then I am sure it will ease some of the nerves.

The best guidance I received was to reach out to everyone you know. Even if they do not directly relate to what you want to do, they might know someone who does. In addition to this, it is also good practice to talk to a lot of people and formulate the way you want to express your goals and interests and other similar things.

I do not necessarily think that colleges should change their curriculum to face this reality. I think that real world experience should be implemented whenever possible, but I think that colleges are never going to be able to fully prepare students for the work force and taking time to prepare them will only distract from actually learning the material. I think there is a value in learning the different subjects and participating in debates with your peers about different topics. The preparation for interviews, especially when reading the books, are good things to know but not all of them apply to your job as well. So, trying to teach kids the information they need to know for interviews might not help them in their job and would be detrimental to their other studies. I cannot really speak specifically to the CSE program but I think above is probably try for any major at Notre Dame.

View at Medium.com

Tragic Accidents

The designers of the Therac-25 thought that they were improving the older editions (Therac-6 and Therac-20) and making it more efficient so that they could help more patients and save more lives. While it did help some people, it also led to 6 tragic accidents. How did this happen? Well according to “Killed by a Machine” the problem was twofold. First, the software controlling the machine contained bugs and second, the machine only relied on the controlling computer for safety. In the update, they had replaced the interlocks, which in previous versions had prevented something dangerous from happening. If an accelerator was activated in an invalid mode then it would blow a fuse and the machine would shut down.

After the accidents, researchers found that the Therac-25 would display a “Malfuction-54” message when an error occurred. This meant that the computer could not determine if there was an underdose or overdose, and would just hit the patient with a very radioactive beam. It all had to do with the timing of things. “If the user selected X-ray mode, the machine would begin setting up the machine for high-powered X-rays. This process took about 8 seconds. If the user switched to Electron mode within those 8 seconds, the turntable would not switch over to the correct position, leaving the turntable in an unknown state.”

After figuring out the reason for these horrible accidents, people wanted to blame the programmer, especially because he had little experience with coding for real-time systems. However, is this fair? What about his supervisor, or the hospitals that brought these machines in or the FDA? Why is it not any of their responsibility. Or even the people that designed the machine. Sure the code had a bug in it, but what about the fact that safety-critical loads were placed upon a computer system that was not designed to control them.

Overall, I think that the responsibility should be shared. I think the programmer should have asked for trial runs or help when coding if he was unsure of real-time systems, but I think other precautionary steps should have been taken.