CS 301 Social Implications of Computer Technology Video 1

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody. And welcome to CS 301, Social Implications of Computer Technology. Today, we're going to be talking about the history of technology, computer technology, and then we're going to switch gears and talk a little bit about ethics. More specifically, I want to talk about the pace of changes, in terms of computer technology and a bunch of unexpected developments that we've had around the way, all the different themes of technological challenges that we face today, and

then of course ethics, as I said. So let's start first by looking at this quote here-- The Pace of Change. "In the way not seen since Gutenberg's printing press that ended the Dark Ages and ignited the Renaissance, the microchip is an epochal technology with unimaginably far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences," Michael Rothschild. And so, the printing press was a great achievement because all of a sudden you were able to bring knowledge to many places where otherwise you woul

dn't have been able to get there. It allowed us to be able to write more and basically create more copies of a book, whichever book it was back then-- be the Bible or whatever. I'll just say the Bible because that was one of the big books back then. And so basically, you're able to spread this knowledge in a faster and far more reaching way. And so the comparison with today is that, in a way, with the technological advances we've had in the last 80 or so years, have really pushed us forward in j

ust unexpected changes and development. And so we can trace the back-- or the history back of the computer in general, back to around the 1940s when the transistor was first created. So I will go ahead and defer to CS 219, other classes, to really talk about the history of computers in general. But just to kind of give you an idea, in 1940 the scientists at Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, which is one of the most basic components for microprocessors and computers. Computers themselves

, you have the Turing machine and you had a lot of computeresque devices that were up before that. But really, the transistor was what really allowed us to have an electronic computer. The first hard drive was made by IBM in 1956, and was approximately, I think, five megabytes in terms of size. Five megabytes is still quite a bit. We don't think of that as a lot nowadays. It's and mp3 song or something. But think about it. A megabyte is millions. it's five million bytes. And a byte is going to b

e made up of bits, so it's a large amount even in that context. But I mean, if I told you right now go ahead and write to me eight million bits, which is basically eight million zeros or eight million ones, you'd be there writing all day. So it's still considerably large. But of course, it's just insignificant nowadays to the ability of data that we can have. Most home consumer computers nowadays have data in the size of terabytes. And of course, large companies, like Facebook and Google, are pr

ocessing in the petabyte level, which was basically thousands of terabytes data and daily, potentially. This is how much data people are generating per day. And so there's been this massive explosion of technology. In 1991, the space shuttle had a 1-megahertz computer. Ten years later, some automobiles had 100-megahertz computers. And now, of course, we're in to gigahertz. And there's Moore's law, and other things. Really, we've had this massive and unexpected development in technology that has

really, really changed things. But if we look more into detail about just-- instead of just looking at computers in general, we start analyzing different side effects of computers. And one of them is, of course, the cell phone. The cell phone was relatively a small thing back in the 1990s. I believe I had my first cell phone around the early 2000s, like 2003 or so. But nowadays, at least in 2011, there was about five billion devices worldwide. And I think nowadays-- even though I don't think eve

rybody has a cell phone-- there's definitely more cell phone devices produced than there's people in the world right now. Of course, that doesn't again mean that everybody has a cell phone. Most of us have gone through multiple cell phones at this point. But it's just to kind of give an idea. And what our cell phones used for? Well, now you can take pictures, you can download music, watch videos, you can check emails, play games, do banking, do investments, watch lectures from the comfort of you

r own bed, finding things on maps. You know, there's a lot of different things. There's also some health related stuff. You can monitor your diet. If you have diabetes, you can monitor your insulin levels and things like that. You can monitor with one of those watches that's connected to your computer. You can monitor your heartbeat and potentially alert medical services if something is not right. For people that are living in remote areas, you can locate water. And these are all the good things

. But then, of course, there's the other side of the coin. There are some things that are not so good, that you can do with a cell phone. Or that can be done to you because you have a cell phone. And so on that side of things we have, of course, location tracking. Whether you like it or not, for you to be able to use a map on Google Maps or Apple Maps or Bing Maps or anything, you have to be tracked. That way you can ask for directions. I mean, you can't get directions somewhere, if you don't te

ll it where you're at. And so this, of course, raises privacy concerns. Who has access to that data? Is it just a computer that has access? Is it a human? What's the difference? I mean, it brings me to another quote that I had here. What really means a human versus a machine, potentially, if we had a full AI. I'll go ahead and read this quote. "It is precisely this unique human capacity to transcend the present, to lives one's life by purpose stretching into the future-- to live not at the mercy

of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world-- and that is a distinction between a human and animal behavior, or between a human being and the machine," Betty Friedan. And so does it really matter today whether the data is accessible by a machine or a human? And I would say that today yes. Because we don't have artificial intelligence in the level that the machine can basically, I guess, judge you in a way, or potentially take action. But that's today. And things are changing in un

expected matters. But going back to cell phones, let's talk about-- in fact, let's go ahead and list them here, a couple of the others potentially less than great things that cell phones might bring. On the positive side, as I said, we can use them for media consumption and production, consumption productions or taking pictures, watching videos on YouTube, and all of these things. For communication, whether that's not necessarily just nowadays calling somebody, but you can also send them an emai

l or send them a text message or do a video call even. And then, of course, for entertainment in general, which is media consumption, but in general it can be for entertainment, such as reading a book on their phone or playing a game. They can be also for quality of life improvements, such as managing your banks and things like that. And again, maps and things like that. And also, as I said, some health stuff like the diabetes. So these are the happy side effects. But then, of course, like anyth

ing in this world there's the good and then there's the bad. So on the other side, as I said, there's privacy concerns because you can be tracked. There's location tracking. And a lot of these things you see can be good and bad. Location tracking is good for maps to work, but it's not so good for privacy concerns. You can-- media production. You have a camera on your phone that you can use to take pictures to save good memories. But on the other hand, cameras can affect the privacy of individual

s in public and non-public places. So if somebody takes a picture of somebody doing something that they would not like to be taken a picture of, that raises some issues. Or potentially, worse yet, if somebody remotely activates your camera and monitors you using your camera without your permission. So basically privacy, and again, it's privacy in public. I'll put it here-- camera. Cell phones also can interfere with your solitude, your quiet and concentration. Suppose that you're studying for a

test and you get a phone call. And, of course, if you're at home-- I suppose it could be the same thing as somebody ringing the doorbell. But at the end of the day, if you're somewhere quiet where you don't want to be found where you have your cell phone, somebody calls you, bam-- your concentration is disturbed. I mean, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's good because suppose you were expecting a call that was very important. You rather get the information now, and it's OK. But suppose th

at it's just a spam call, and that's not that cool. There's also potential risks with cell phones that can happen using one, such as using a cell phone while driving. You know, it's potentially dangerous. Or texting while driving can distract you from putting attention on the road, which can lead and has led to a lot of people dying because of it. So technology always has two sides to a coin. There's always unanticipated, negative applications to just about anything in this world, not just neces

sarily even technology-- other things. Could be teenagers who have-- your kids accessing your phone. And that can expose them to inappropriate content, such as I suppose the word sexting or potentially watching pornography or other things that kids technically shouldn't be allowed to watch. There's other things like terrorists using them to communicate. One of the advantages of something like an encrypted text is to be able to communicate without anybody spying on you. On the other hand, are you

communicating because you care about privacy, or are you communicating because you're trying to plan a terrorist attack? So again there's always two sides of the coin. Are rioters organizing a looting party, or are you just organizing with your friends, where you're going to go for lunch? So there's always, always two sides of the coin. And so, one of the specific points that is emphasized in the book, and I'd like to emphasize too, is kill switches. One of the solutions to avoiding a lot of th

is is, can we turn off technology if needed to? And so that's basically what a kill switch is, which is allows a remote entity to disable applications or delete files or things like that. And a lot of the systems have such devices not maybe as efficient as possible, but you are able to clean your phone and do a system restore. And same with computers. But if you truly want to delete something, that it's not the most security thing. And there's also raising concerns about user autonomy and bringi

ng these things. And so that brings us to a last quote I have for the day I suppose. And that is, "While all this razzle-dazzle connects us electronically, it disconnects us from each other having us interfacing with more computers and TV screens than looking in the face of our fellow humans. Is this progress," Jim Hightower, radio commentator, 1995. And so, this brings another thing. Technology brings us together in ways that we have never imagined before. I mean, maybe we did when we-- when th

e first phone was invented to be able to communicate with somebody who is across the world. And technology is the same thing. But is that quality of interaction the same as interacting face to face? And I'm not here to promote either or. I'm just here to raise the questions and make you aware of those things. And that brings me into the next topic, which is social networking. One of the-- one of the other developments in computers and technology, of course, you have cell phones was a big thing.

But the next big thing that has happened, I believe within most of our lifetimes, is social networking. So the first online social network, or at least the one that is claimed-- because, I mean, this is kind of debatable-- was classmates.com in 1995. So that is approximately 25 years ago from the recording of this. And so, that wasn't really the big one that most people will know. But the next one that came out is probably the one that really exploded, and that's Myspace. Myspace came out in 200

3, or was founded in 2003, by, I think, it his name was Tom, or at least that's the name they remembered. And it had roughly about 100 million member profiles. I don't know if this is peak members, or just average, but this was in 2006 when it had those. So from 2003 to 2006 when it was founded, it exploded you had 100 million members. We're talking that maybe around then there was what, maybe six billion people on the planet? I'm not sure. So it's not-- it's not the full planet, but it's a cons

iderable part of the planet. I mean, the population of the US then was probably anywhere from 200 to 300 million people. So it's obvious this was worldwide, but it was a considerable amount. And then, of course, we all know nowadays the one that's up there, which is Facebook. And Facebook was started at Harvard as an online version of student directories. You can go watch that one movie, The Social Network, if you're more interested in Facebook's history. But it exploded in popularity, and to th

e point that it basically killed off Myspace. And then, there's millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, that use it because of the ease in which they can share aspects of the life, which is something that's kind of very, very important about social networking. because we had messengers. We had video chats. There was-- before Facebook was a thing, there was MSN Messenger, there was Xfire, there's Skype, I believe, was probably around then. But it would've been founded around then. But

if not, you could do video chats on MSN Messenger, and also probably in AOL. So there was the ability to communicate with people, and there was many networks in the forms of online forums and threads on the internet. However, the difference with social networks is that it was not about communicating with others more than it was about you, and basically sharing aspects of your life with others. So what separated social networks from just communication, was that it was, in a way, it was sort of e

gocentric. It was about showing what you like, what you do with the world, and seeking that attention for the good or the worst. Again, I'm not trying to make a decision on whether that's good or bad. But that made you feel important. And then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy when, of course, you would comment on the people and they would comment on you, and then you have that feeding cycle. And so social networks really, really, really, really helped to make people that would otherwise not use

computers, start using them. So in a way, that along with cell phones, really approached for the average Joe, who maybe doesn't really know how to use a computer, to start using electronic devices. Back when I was younger, in the early 2000s, I liked computers and I used computers. But it was-- computers were seen as the geekish or potentially not-- not as the norm to have a computer, especially for things that were not work related. There was people that had computers, they have Microsoft Offi

ce, they were making their PowerPoints, they were doing Excel spreadsheets, those things. They had computers for work related stuff. But for entertainment or for media consumption, it was not the norm. It was it was more of the geekish culture. But between social media and smartphones, they were able to capture that average Joe to start using them. And then, of course, we have things like the iPads and tablets and other more, I would say, new friendly technology that enabled basically the averag

e Joe, who doesn't know anything about how a computer works internally, but still be able to benefit from it. And that's really, really powerful because think about a car. At what point did cars go from, oh, this is this cool machine and fancy, to oh, wow, I need a car to be able to commute to work. And I don't care how a car works. I can just take it to a mechanic and take care. I just want to use a car. And that's what it is. So that's the big jump that we had. And that was fed a lot by my soc

ial network, and by cell phones, and all these basically media consumption. And so, other uses of social networks that are going to point out, that came as a side effect of bringing this huge amount of people here, was of course our businesses connecting with customers. So I don't really recall, unless it was a very specialized business, to be able to have an MSN of a company to be able to ask them for help, unless it was an internet provider or something. But nowadays, it's very common to have

a Facebook profile for a business, where you can communicate and ask questions to them. And, of course, it's their purpose to engage with-- not the purpose-- it's in their benefit for them to engage with you. So of course they're going to want to connect with you. There's also non-profit businesses, like organizations, to seek donations. I guess they don't necessarily have to be non-profit because anybody can ask for donations I suppose. Also to allow people to form new groups and organize in wa

ys that you may be able to find people that share interests with you. So to Facebook groups and on those kind of things. So to organize volunteers and sports and whatnot. As a random comment, there was recently the whole Area 51 Facebook thing, where they were like, oh, we're all going to go to Area 51 in one day. And I think there were a few people that showed up. But the point is that, that was something that was started on Facebook. And so it's just one example of many, many more. On the othe

r hand, you can also have protesters organize demonstrations and revolutions. There's a lot of very, very important protests or demonstrations that were basically initialized through online means. They started out saying we're going to meet here, we're going to do this and whatnot. And without mentioning any specifics, because there's no need to, they pretty much organized some pretty large groups, for the good and the bad. But there are, of course, good and bad organizations done through social

network. And then, of course, there's also more one of the more popular ones-- so I'll list protests here, but you know what I'm talking about-- for crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is another very popular recent development, in terms of technology. They did crowdfunding-- Kickstarter, those kind of things. But even before that, just the idea of funding something together and pulling in. But again, I think the most popular ones are something like Kickstarter. There is, of course, also scam stuff. Lik

e when there was all the older cryptocurrency craze, and there was all the alt coins, and then they were funding for those by buying coins and things like that, to the point that the government kicked in and was like, you guys can't do this because this is like trying to sell stocks and stuff. So there's a lot of unexpected developments. And frankly, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, what new thing is going to appear. And some of these you can already see how they can be positive or

negative. Just like with crowdfunding, there can be scams. And there can also be, legitimately, good products that can come out of the crowdfunding. I believe the Raspberry Pi, which is a very popular device for people to learn basic programming and to use it-- basically a very cheap computer that can do pretty much everything. I believe that, that actually was what started out with Raspberry Pi. Sorry-- with the crowdfunding. But again, there can be negative things like scam. Other bad things

with social networks are stalking. So stalking is when you're basically-- well, what will be a good definition of stalking? You are-- well, if it was in person, it would be you're following somebody and trying to get as much information from them for potentially negative purposes. But it really doesn't matter if it's good or-- positive or negative reasons. Stalking someone is basically trying to just find information from them when you really-- it's none of your business. But I think really the

connection is more stalking and bullying. There's a term used for computer nowadays. It's called, cyber bullying. And the idea is that you are attacking, stalking somebody, getting information on them, and then talking negative about them that which is also, I believe, a term that they use is "doxxing." And so you're essentially-- or I guess technically the cancel culture is born out of that. And the idea of you find something bad about this person, and then you either contact them directly thro

ugh there and talk to them when you-- and tell essentially mean things, or you expose things about a person. For the good or the bad. And again, I'm not making judgments on that, but you expose information about the person that would otherwise have been private, without you basically digging in them, and then exposing them, and making others attack them potentially. An example of a special case where potentially releasing information online can be viewed as bad is, for example, a juror. A juror

and in a case can tweet on Twitter about a court case during a trial. And that's kind of a violation about what they're allowed not allowed to do. There's also like-- well, this is like bots and things like that, that can simulate humans. And you might think that there's people supporting a specific topic or subject or discussion, and it seems like there's a lot of people supporting it, but they're fake. They're fake accounts. That kind of thing. And so social network has been a big, big, big ch

ange. But communication, in general, has really changed too. By the way, the emails in general started around the 1980s, just as an interesting fun fact. In the 1980s, you first had the first emails. And there were mostly just text. It's in universities or military and that kind of thing. But nowadays, that's really has been replaced by social media, as a way of communicating with someone. Other sort of online forms of communication, aside from social networks, that precede them, is blogs. Back

in the day when you wanted to express what you liked, and what movie you saw or what you think about this, you would make a blog, or a weblog. You go on a website, and make a little website, and just talk about what you liked. And it was kind of the predecessor of the idea. Because nowadays, I mean, you could say everybody's Facebook home page is like a blog essentially. But it was the idea for an amateur that wanted to express ideas and-- but some of them have remained up to today, and have bec

ome a significant source of news and entertainment. Also the cheapening of all of these video cameras and manipulation tools and technology, have really resulted in the burst of amateur content that is pretty good quality nowadays. I mean, the rise of YouTube which, of course, we all know what it is-- video sharing website-- has basically allowed-- nowadays, you can get a pretty nice 1080p camera for very, very cheap, and you can just start making content. So it's a big thing. And that also brin

gs another side of the coin. The ability to share so much content and videos online can infringe on copyright owned by entertainment companies, and that can potentially be-- copyright violations are technically a crime, which we'll talk again later on about that when we get to ethics. But it is technically a crime. So the ability to share video on the web can be done for good or potentially for criminal usages. There's another growth, in terms of unexpected developments, is telemedicine. So the

idea of being able to communicate with a doctor or a nurse, via phone call or a video call, to become routine performance of medical exams, procedures, and whatnot. And maybe someday, potentially surgery. You could have a doctor performing a surgery remotely. Another big thing that the-- I guess I would say like the internet in specific of technology has brought in is collaboration. Wikipedia being one of the most prevalent examples of that, is the online collaborative encyclopedia that is writt

en by volunteers and is potentially free, aside from the donations they occasionally ask for. And it's made by people. The people that write for Wikipedia, yes, they're basing themselves off of hopefully good primary sources. But anybody can go in there and they could potentially write false information. And that has definitely happened. And then, of course, they have some safeguards for that, but that's potentially one of the bad sides. But on the good side, Wikipedia has allowed basically the

world to be able to educate themselves by having the world's knowledge basically available to anybody with a computer, which is pretty much anybody nowadays. So if you want to learn about just about anything in the world, maybe anything about history, you can go on Wikipedia and you can find out about it. Or you can also go on pretty much other of the billions upon trillions probably of websites out there. And in terms of-- since we're all in CS people, you guys took 135 and 202, which is C plus

plus, there's thousands upon thousands of informal communities of programmers that create and maintain free software or have videos on how to create programming and whatnot. I like to say that, as somebody who is-- who is in programming, who's in computer science, it would be way, way different way of life, if we did not have the internet. Being able to learn something like programming is just so connected to being able to have access to information online. Whether that be for a Google search,

something doesn't compile, you go and you Google it. You don't just give up and cry. Hopefully you don't. You could, of course, go to a book and read the documentation. But who does that these days? I mean, it's just super slow. A quick Google search can result-- can give you access to billions upon billions of websites, or pages of websites, that can give you answers, which probably is going to be stack overflow. I'm not going to lie. And then you can see the error. And you can basically know,

from not having a clue about what something means, to being-- not an expert, but being very well versed on something within minutes or even seconds potentially. You can go from not knowing answers or something, to knowing the answer within seconds. Now, of course, whether that information is correct or not is a different story, which brings into the ethics of information. Because nowadays, information is potentially centralized on the internet. Anybody can go and create their own website and cal

l it actual news. And whether or not it's actually new, is questionable. But it's definitely something that you would want to think about. Other developments that have come up or collaboration related are watchdogs. There have been cases of basically, the internet coming together to find something or someone to help investigate crimes. Two examples that I can think of, one of them being positive and one of them being negative, is some years ago I read on a news article that 4chan teamed up toget

her to find, I think, somebody who threatened to do something. I think it was a shooting of some sort. And they actually were able to investigate this person within a couple of hours after the threat, and then send the information to the FBI to actually stop them. And I think they actually had weapons in their home and were potentially planning something. So that was a good form of crowd I mean probably one of the few good things out of 4chan that came out. On the other hand, I read another arti

cle of a video of somebody abandoning their dog at a park. Or it looks like a park, but maybe like a forest kind of thing. And then it turned out that the video had to-- I think the video uploaded was low quality, but the person who uploaded could see in the video the license plate, and they alerted the police, and they found the owner, and they find them and whatnot. And the dog of course was safe afterwards, I think. But on the backside of things, people try to-- because they didn't know or th

ey didn't care because they didn't care to look further that the person has already been found, they took it upon themselves to try to find the person who did this. And because the car they were driving was more-- was unique in a way, where there's not that many of them, and based on the location where it was that, they tracked down a person that actually had pictures of a same breed of the dog, but wasn't the right person. And not only did they, of course, share the information with authorities

, which of course by then they had already found the person, but they also sent death threats and offensive messages, bullying, cyber bullying to this person, who was completely innocent who just happened to have a car that was basically had similar-- similar physical features and then a similar dog. And the person literally was like, my dog is right here. This is not the same dog, kind of thing. But of course, that information gets lost amongst the waves of information online. And so potentiall

y, watchdog or online vigilantism can have good or negative effects as well. Moving on, other big major development online, and in terms of technology in general, is e-commerce. Amazon started in 1994 selling books on the web. But from there, has grown to selling pretty much just about anything. You can buy houses on Amazon, like LEGO houses. And they're $20,000 and you have to assemble it yourself in the forest. I've seen those on Amazon. You can pretty much buy anything on Amazon. And then wha

tever you can buy and Amazon you can probably buy on eBay, which facilitates online auctions. And so it has become one of the most popular, mostly reliable, and mostly user friendly commercial websites in the world-- Amazon. And eBay has really allowed for the average consumer to be able-- not the average consumer. Just the average person in general to be able to sell their stuff online. It has gotten to the point where traditional brick and mortar websites-- mortar businesses have had to establ

ish websites to compete with something like Amazon and eBay. So transition from basically buying things in person to buying-- to basically sitting from the comfort of your home and buying something online is insane. It's huge. And online sales, just in the US, total alone hundreds of billions of dollars. Sellers can sell directly to buyers. And that has brought up something very, very important, which is the peer to peer economy. No longer-- if you have maybe, in your town, you live in the relat

ively small town-- because you might live in a big town, as a fact, but if you lived in a small town where there's maybe one or two people that sell the content that you're looking for-- maybe you were trying to buy movies. And the only people in this town are like Blockbuster and-- what would be something around then? What was a competition of Blockbuster? I don't even know. Probably like City-- Circuit City or something? Those are old company. And so, if those were the only two shops in town i

t sold VHSes or DVDs, that's it. If they came together and decided that they're going to sell DVDs at $10 or more at least, they're never going to sell it for cheaper, then you're basically screwed. There is no chance for you. Or, if they just feel like selling DVDs for more than they would normally cost, you have no choice. Because your other choice is to drive maybe 20 miles to the next shop and hope that it's cheaper there. And so, with the power of the internet and people selling peer to pee

r, and companies being able to sell from basically across the world-- I can go and buy something from China or Europe and then have it sent here-- that has really, really, really created an economy where you can't price gouge anymore because you're the only shop in town. Because now you had to compete with the internet. Now of course, there's still people that will buy things in person regardless. Some things like necessity things. Especially something you get at Home Depot or Lowes. If you have

to get something now-- or food. Food's a better one. Food, if you need to get food, you're not going to order food online because it's going to take time to get there plus you want to see it and whatnot. So there's still limitations to that. But for a lot, a lot, a lot of things it's just-- there's no point in buying something in person when you can buy it online for cheaper. So and that's the world we live on. And that has had positive effects because it has really helped. There's no chance of

basically overpaying for anything anymore, if you dig online. If you're buying a car, you can check what other people have bought cars for in the whole US. But on the other side, some companies have run out of business because of it because you can't compete with somebody who's selling online, from China for example, where they can send it to you for much cheaper than you can buy it from the mom and pop store. So there's, of course, pros and cons as you can see. On the other hand, it wasn't eas

y to get here. Initially, there was always trust concerns. People were reluctant to provide a credit card information online to make purchases. And so, PayPal grew out of that need to handle as an intermediary. So there was a lot of economy of-- appeared out of-- from one day to the other where there was a lot of businesses that have to field things like online commerce's. Paper, I believe, is actually where Elon Musk made his money. So it's a multi-million dollar company nowadays. And so there

was a big need that came out of that market. Just like there's always-- when there's something new that comes up, there has to be an economy and the infrastructure to support it. And then from there, you have a lot of money that is potentially left to be made. For example, if tomorrow all electric cars were available super cheap and people bought them, you can probably put an electric charging station somewhere, and I bet you that there's not that many right now out there. I mean, there's still

quite a few, but I'm saying, there's potentially a market for that. Or if tomorrow we have flying cars, that will open up an entire new market of things. Stuff we can't even rationalize today to what things can happen. I was actually thinking-- I was reading the other day about self-driving cars. And I think what the article was talking about how if you have a self-driving car, and it's like fully automated where it can drive on its own, then imagine that you-- the article said, because I want t

o I don't want to claim this as my idea. The article said that you could set the car when you're sleeping or when you're working and you're not using the car, you could set it on its own to be like a taxi driver. To be like an Uber car. And basically generate money while you're not using the car. And, of course, there's wear and tear I'm assuming. But the point is, you could generate money for-- I want to say free because the cars wear and tear, but really for free aside from that. And so defini

tely, it would make up the cost of the car. You could pay the lease of the car with probably what you're making up from sending out the car to work when you're not using it. So that's just something that we can't even begin to think about until we run into a situation where we have a car and we have the ability to have a car that can do that. On my side, this is something that I was thinking of, but I'm sure I'm not the first one to think about it is, what if somebody was in a really crowded cit

y like New York, where there's traffic is just super hardcore, decides that they don't want to pay for parking. And so they set their car to just keep driving around the block for the next two hours while you're doing your shopping, so that you can then come out and get in the car. And it's still cheaper than paying for parking. And also, it's more readily available because you're just driving around the same block. How is that going to affect traffic? Because now you have a lot of cars that are

potentially idling and just wasting road space and making everything more congested. Is that OK? Is that correct? Is that ethically correct, is that morally correct, is that legal? Of course it's legal right now with current laws. But perhaps the government might decide, well, we don't-- to decrease congestion, cars are not allowed to drive without a passenger on board during these times on this roads. Europe does that actually. Not with self-driving cars but in Italy, downtown of certain citie

s, the one I can think of right now is a Pisa, and I think Rome and Florence, they only allow specific cars of people that live there or are delivering for businesses, during certain times. And people from outside of those areas are not allowed to drive in the specific centers. That way they ease congestion in there. And so this idea of not allowing certain people to drive at certain times to ease congestion can be applied to self-driving cars. With a self-driving car, should we let a car that h

as no passenger on board to literally just idle around? We don't know if he's looking for a fare, or if it's just idling because the person didn't want to pay for parking. Is this OK to congest the roads and I'm not saying-- I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just putting the question out there, and I was thinking wow, this is something that we hadn't even thought about. And just like that, there might be a ton of other things that we will only see when the technology arrives and when that nec

essity arrives. We did not-- nobody had any idea that PayPal would be a big thing until it actually was needed. Otherwise, people would have founded it before Elon Musk. And so that's the big thing out there, in terms of unexpected developments. That there's no way to predict what's going to happen tomorrow because we don't know necessarily what's going to happen tomorrow. So yeah, it's a self-fulfilling definition, but it is. Another thing is, for example going back to what we were saying with

PayPal being for lack of trust is, how do you trust an online seller? The government established the Better Business Bureau. Well, the Better Business Bureau existed, but they established a website to help consumers see if other businesses-- if other people have complained about a business. Other websites like Google or Yelp, they have reviews. Well, Yelp is more in-person, but auction sites have a rating system. Amazon has reviews. All these things came out of necessity to trust or not to trust

a certain online seller. In terms of protection, of course, encryption was a big thing because of that. So that's one of the big things was e-commerce. And then of course, there's another cool-- or quote unquote, cool thing, and that is free stuff. We have got a lot of cool free stuff, thanks to unexpected developments. Emails are free. Gmail is free. Or, quote unquote free. Again, we're going to revisit what really free means. But you're able to have browsers, firewalls, anti-viruses some of t

hem, emails, encryption software, word processor like [INAUDIBLE] office, software for being documents like start of PDF years, many software's to communicate with people like Skype and Zoom and Webex. Some of those are free. Some are not. But I'm saying, there's a lot of stuff that's free. There's University lecturers that are free. You can go and watch MIT lectures. Even this lecture is free. I mean, you guys are enrolled in the class. You're paying for it, but I'm going to-- I'm posting it on

YouTube and making it public so anybody can see it. So there's a lot of stuff that has come out for free thanks to unexpected developments. However, free is not really free as we most of the time realize. Free stuff costs money. And the question is, where is that money coming from? In my case, I don't have any benefit or hindrance to posting videos on YouTube for free. I mean I guess in the way I benefit because I might expose my work to other people who might be interested and might be self-pl

easing and satisfactory to know that other people have benefit. That is my benefit of that. But at the cost of, what if I say something wrong here, or something that is potentially-- can come back and haunt me? Maybe I accidentally say something that is offensive, and then bam, somebody reports that in the 10 years from now they bring that out of context and attacked me for it? It's perfectly possible that could happen like that. And there's a question about, how does YouTube-- because YouTube h

as a cost to host my video. How do they make money from that? And the answer to that is advertisements, or advertising. Advertising pays for a lot of free services in sites. But not all of them. Not all of them, but it does pay for a lot. Advertising is the same thing as TV with ads. It's you are trying-- someone is trying to sell you a product, while you're receiving other stuff in the meantime, free or not. You don't have to-- It's [INAUDIBLE] free stuff. You can still get advertising somethin

g you're paying for. Such as, happens when I'm doing the Twitch livestreams for my classes and Twitch plays in that. Technically, students are paying for the lecture and they're getting an ad. But ultimately, advertising is a big, big, big source of income that a lot of stuff is on for free. A lot of news websites-- they have websites for free that you can look at. Some of them. Some of them do charge money, but most are free. But they have ads. And those ads are people that want to advertise th

emselves. If I want to go and put in the ad on rooters.com, or CNN or Fox News or whatever you watch, or RT News. If you want to put an ad in those websites, you pay money to them, and then they put the ad so that the consumer, who's watching it, may be reading an article about something and they see your ad for buying shoes. So that's a big source of revenue, and that's the quote unquote free that you're getting ads in exchange for that. On the other hand, it doesn't always have to be advertise

ment. There's also donations like Wikipedia. Wikipedia, they pretty much made a pledge to not ever have ads or basically charge money. What they do instead, is they get funded through donations. And it's a very noble cause, but that doesn't always work for a certain company. On the other hand, you don't have to necessarily have ads for free stuff, or donations. Some businesses will provide some services for good public relations or as marketing tools. So in general, you can think of an example o

f software. They might give you some software for free, but then be like, hey, by the way we also have this stuff. So anti-viruses will give you the ability to scan your computer for free and fix the viruses. I'm not talking about sketchy stuff. But then if you want to have an active protection, then you can pay for some service or a premium service. Something like that. Other companies will just flat out give you stuff with the hopes that you will then buy other stuff that they sell or make. Ag

ain, it-- or simply to look good, to get good public relation. They want to look like they love the world so that you then don't attack them. And then, of course, there's always just generosity and public services, open source software. Sometimes people do it to market themselves. A new developer wants to code something to look good so they can get a job later on. They go and code it. Or simply just because they would like to, Or they want to. They want to share their expertise. They're good at

something, they go ahead and use that. But yeah, now here's the thing. Let's go back to advertising. It would be great if ads would be nice and friendly and they were just random. But the reality of things is that, in order for companies to earn revenue and fund multi-million dollar services like Google, many free sites have to collect information about your and my online activities and sell it to the advertisers. So if I am reading news about Star Wars, then potentially I'm going to get a comme

rcial for the next Star Wars movie to come out. Or something a little bit more interesting than that-- I was looking at Star Wars thing-- is if you're watching news about sports then they might advertise you with some sportswear or some fan wear or those kind of things. So that's, of course, the nicer examples. But the reality of things is that they will track everything about you. Because the more information they know about you, the better they can target ads that they want to-- that will actu

ally make you buy something. And that's not necessarily for malicious purposes. The truth of the matter is, that if I as an advertiser, I'm paying money to be able to show you an ad for something, I really want to make sure that it's something that you actually might be interested in buying. If you hate, if you just totally hate cars, you're just-- you just don't even want to see a car in your life, and somebody advertises you for a car, it's a waste of money because you're never going to buy it

. If, on the other hand, you love motorcycles, you really, really love motorcycles, or watches. If you love watches, ideally somebody who's sells watches is like, if you love watches, this is a guy that I want to advertise to because maybe he'll buy my watch, or my motorcycle. So that's what companies really want to do. Unfortunately, the amount of information that they get, they're really, really-- they can really, really go deep-- very, very deep. OK, well, I don't want to get there yet becaus

e that's going to be a whole video on its own. But they will get very deep to truly know that you're somebody that they can sell to. And the question arises, is that OK? Is it OK to know all that information about you to sell a product, regardless of if their intentions are good, is it still OK? And that's something that we will spend, like I said, a full video on. Right now, again, we're just doing a broad overview. Another big development, and this one it's iffy, is artificial intelligence. Ar

tificial intelligence is always an iffy term. But I would say that automation is a better term. Computers that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence. I would say that that's like the legitimate artificial intelligence of today. Can we automate something? Can we take somebody's job away basically, which is a big thing that we'll have a video on, with a machine? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? Imagine a world where each of us had a robot and a robot could go and

do the job for us, and we can just stay at home and take the money. That'd be great of course. Now, imagine another world where we don't own the robot. The company owns the robot, and therefore they don't have to pay us at all because we don't own the robot. So now, they can still fire us and the robot can do the job for us. And now we can't even get a job. So there is, of course, a lot of debate about artificial intelligence in the workforce. So we will have a video on its own. So I'll just le

ave it there. But essentially, it has done some really cool developments in terms of specializing in certain areas like industry. And there's also benefits to society with AI, such as speech and text recognition and pattern recognition, OCR, and all of these things. So it's definitely-- there's definitely some great developments, in terms of power and benefits that computers give us. But I would say that we're not there yet to claim that artificial intelligence is going to take anybody's job awa

y. But at the same time, it is happening with factories. There's these really, really nice machines that can manufacture stuff and that takes away from people. It brings up a couple of discussion questions, like how are we going to react-- how would you react-- think about this. How would you react if you went into a hospital and the surgery was supposed to be performed entirely by a machine? Will it be scarier than the first time that you rode an elevator? Or that you flew a plane that was flow

n by autopilot? Is it scarier, or is it less scarier. And by the way, this isn't some science fiction thing. Elon Musk is working on Neuralink, which is going to be a machine that can perform brain surgery, and it's strictly automated. There's no humans involved. Like LASIK stuff. I believe LASIK is pretty much mostly automated, if not fully. But I'm not 100% sure on that. So really, is that going to make you feel safer or less safe? Safer because a machine is more unpredictable and doesn't make

mistakes, or because it's a machine and they can't improvise and it can totally screw up if it doesn't have a specific if statement for a special case that you run into. So that's a good question to have. Here's another question that is a little more sci-fi. How are we going to react if you're having a conversation with someone and we don't know if it's a human or a machine? Suppose you're talking to customer service, and you don't know if it's a human or machine? Of course, this doesn't even m

ake sense now because we can't really picture that. Because we don't have the technologies or have such a machine. But maybe someday we will. Maybe we won't. We don't really know. It's impossible to know. But if we someday do, how would you feel about that? What about human and cyborg? Human computer interaction? What if we were able, again, let's talking with Neuralink were able to implant a chip into our brain to be able to download our memory into hard drive and back it up, so that we could r

emember things better? What if we could then transfer that to somebody else, or potentially to another body to extend our lifetime? Are we still human? Are we still the same human? When do we stop being a human when we're enhancing stuff with computers? So these are all questions that you want to think about when you think about how far technology can reach. I think that pretty much covers most of the developments that we've had, since that's the goal of this to do, is to basically give you some

history of technology and unexpected developments. There are other things, like smart sensors and the internet of things. Internet things, being a biggest craze. Pretty much, they expect 50 devices in each home to be connected to Wi-Fi. And there's recently a new Wi-Fi thing that's coming out, that's pretty cool. But there's also technology for disabled people. Assistive technology to help restore productivity and independence to people. Again, with Neuralink, to be able to help people that can

't walk to be able to walk again, to see you again, to hear again. So there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of new stuff coming out. But there's a lot of things that, when we bring in new technology out there, all the bad baggage that we have comes with it. With the advent of the internet, we have all the great things that I talked about, but those have crime. We have a decentralized market with the dark web where people could sell things and use cryptocurrency. But then, of course, people went in

and started selling drugs and even hit-men stuff. So of course, there's always going to be bad things. Adapting to a new technology, you really have to think in a different way. And at the end of the day, it's the same problems with a different turn to them. It's not typically new problems, but sometimes they are new problems that we just can't expect. Nobody can deny the fact that the reach of the internet is basically to ease communications around the world, but also potentially eases crimes t

hat happen around the world. I can scam somebody in China, and somebody in China can scam me. And then, of course, that means that we have to increase security, which is going to reduce convenience. That's another thing that we'll talk about. Increasing security can sometimes reduce convenience, and that perfection is a direction, but it's not always an option. There's a difference between personal choices, business politics, and law. So I think I will stop there with the unexpected developments

. And now let us go ahead and switch gears and talk about what ethics are. Again, it's going to be a very brief overview of that. You'd have to take a philosophy class to really dig in into what ethics and what it means. But essentially, one way to think about ethics is a study of what it means to do the right thing. So do the right thing. Frankly, while this definition is great, it's also quite useless. Because what does that even mean to do the right thing? That assumes that people are rationa

l and make free choices that make sense. So it's not exactly the best thing. So another way we could say is rules to follow in our interactions and actions that affect others. That could be another way of saying it. Ethics are the rules to follow in our interactions and our actions that affect others. And so, there's a variety of ethical views, and I'm going to go ahead and talk about three of them. But well, mostly two of them, but then the other stuff. But I wanted you to know that there's far

, far more to this topic and than I can talk about really. So what are the ethical values is what is known as-- one of the big guys around this is Immanuel Kant. But that is the deontological view of things. And that's a Immanuel Kant. So Immanuel Kant was a philosopher that was often presented as a prime example of the ontology, and contributed a lot of ideas to like ethical theory. I'm going to mention the biggest things of him. And so the ontology tends to emphasize duty and absolute rules to

be followed. Whether they lead to good things or bad things, is basically you're going to do it. So I guess the best example is the ontology says, do not lie. Do not lie. That's it. Doesn't matter the situation-- who, what, where, why, how. Do not lie. And it's an absolute rule, and it can never be bent. And these are rules-- the deontologies believe that we should follow rules of behavior that we can universally apply to everybody. So the rules have to be applicable to everybody. And the princ

iple is so fundamental to ethical theory that we already accept it in our explanation of ethics. Now this is a little bit flawed, but first let me tell you the other things that the intelligence believe. So I guess to summarize, basically is follow rules that universally apply to every. Business though, is a little bit of a trap because how do you say something universally applies to everybody. The deontologists argue that logic or reason determines the rules of ethical behavior. So logic and re

ason is how we're going to determine that. Whether something is universally applied to everybody. And the reason why they believe this is because actions are intrinsically good because they follow from logic. So they believe that something is logical, then it must be intrinsically good. Can't believe that the rationality is the standard for what is good. So rationality is a standard for good. We can reason about what makes sense and act accordingly, or we can act irrationally or emotionally, whi

ch is evil. So if something is illogical, then it would be basically bad. And something is logical, it's good. You have to respect the reasons for you. Finally, Kant stated a principle about interacting with other people. And that is, that you must never treat people as a means to an end, but rather as an end themselves. So treat others as an end themselves, not as a means to an end. So as a practical example, I suppose, suppose that you want to get an A in the class. And so you start saying rea

lly nice things to me because your means is to just get an A for the class. So I'm only a means to an end of your goal. So that would be a violation of the ontological theories. So the big argument about whether deontological is good or bad, is like the extremist position of the absolute ethical rules. So I would say that this is very extremist. And let me give you an example of that. I think there's good and bad of everything. So it's unfair to say all the good things. So he says to not lie, ri

ght? Let me put you a scenario. Of course this is very extreme, but it's a scenario regardless. That someone is looking for someone But it's not just anybody. Someone is looking to murder someone. And they ask you where the intended victim lives? You know where he lives. And deontologists say do not lie. So therefore, if the murderer is asking you where they live, if you tell them the address, they will go and kill them. You have no chance of stopping them. You don't have enough time to get to t

ell the police or to get help. So that's why option one is you just tell them and it's basically guaranteed that they're going to die. But you'll be OK at least. Option two is, you could lie to them, give them a wrong address, which gives you enough time to get help. And then hopefully you're OK if police protects you. You could die potentially, if the guy gets really angry at you. After all, he's a murderer and comes after you instead. But you could also defend and be like, hey, I thought that'

s where he lived, man. Please don't kill me, kind of thing. But ultimately, at least you give the chance to the victim by not telling the address. There's a chance that they might live. The question is, what do you do? Do you lie to them to say the victim and give them the wrong address, or do you tell the truth? And most people would probably say that they would lie. But again, some people might tell the truth. Deontologists, basically would tell the truth. Because Immanuel Kant says do not lie

. Even if the person is guaranteed to die, you do not lie. And that's the argument that people have, why they don't like this view. But again, some people, they can live by this stuff. So that's all I say-- pros and cons. The other view on ethics is utilitarianism-- utilitarianism. Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is an example of consequentialist theory, the guiding principle, as expressed by John Stuart Mill-- I'll put his name here-- is basically to increase your utility in the world, which als

o increases your happiness. So basically, a person's utility, or how useful they are, is what satisfies their needs and values. So if you do something that decreases utility for some people, and increases for others, we have to consider the consequences, or the benefits and damages of all the affected people. So if you look at the example with the murder, you have to look at the utility of it. If you tell a lie, then the person will be saved. If you tell the truth then the person will be killed.

So utilitarianism would be like, it is more useful for the world for you to lie in this case, in this specific case, to save a life. So they would lie instead. The deontologist would say, that's the address. Have fun. The utilitarian would be like no, no, no. It's better to save the person, so that you are ethically obligated to lie to save the person. So yeah, that's kind of utilitarianism. The problem with it, is that it might be difficult or impossible to determine the consequences. Now, in

the example I gave you it's kind of obvious. Yeah, so he lies, saves the person, whatnot. But of course, that's kind of a very clear cut issue. Not everything is clear cut in this world. How can you truly analyze all of the consequences of your action? Suppose that you are-- suppose you get offered a job. And when you get offered a job, you have-- if you're a utilitarian, you have to consider the pros and cons of taking the job. On one side, if you take the job, that means that some other people

aren't going to get the job. And those people that don't get the job, might have needed it more desperately than you did. But you can't really know that for sure. But it's a possibility. So can you really decide if the ethical choice, utilitarian wise, is to take the job or not? It's impossible at that point. Also imagine somebody stealing. When you steal from someone, or when somebody steals from you, they have a gain. They steal something and they gain it. The other person loses it. So a util

itarian would be like is the burglars, or if the criminal, the guy who steals it, is that guy's gain more than what the person is losing? Let's say that if the person did not steal from you, he would starve to death and die. But you're rich to the point that if he steals this from you, as long as he doesn't hurt you, it's OK. Yes, it's sad. It sucks. He stole $100 from you. But you're not going to die. You're going to feel bad. You might not be able to buy that Xbox game you really wanted or wha

tnot, but you're still going to be OK. The burglar, on the other side, instead of starving to death, is not going to eat. A utilitarian would be like, OK, on one side this guy stole from you. Yeah, sure. But he was going to die. And you don't really lose anything, but some entertainment that's optional. So the utilitarian might be inclined to side with the burglar in this specific scenario. Of course, that's again, another extreme example of somebody rich versus poor. So again, a utilitarian lik

e the other one. There's no-- I'm not saying one view is better than the other one. I'm just exposing you to all of them to be aware of that. And so the next thing to talk about is natural rights. And natural rights is a very, very iffy topic. Because at the end of the day, we believe-- what somebody might believe to be something-- to be a natural right, might not be agreed by other people. So I'm probably going to offend people with what I'm going to say. And I'll try to be as-- as not biased o

r anything, what I'm going to say. But I just want to explain to you what natural rights are, and then it's up to you to decide what is and what is not a natural right. But once approach that we can see as whether something is ethical or not, is whether it's violating somebody else's rights. And so, there are different rights. I'll talk about positive and negative rights. But first, let's look at what a natural right is. A natural right is something that is derived from the nature of humanity. A

nd another way of thinking about it is something that every person should have. In fact, some people would like to call natural rights as human rights, which I think most of us, when we think of human rights, we already have ideas as to what they include. One of the most famous people for natural rights is John Locke. And so, John Locke argued that we each have an exclusive right to ourselves, our labor, and what we produce with our labor. So what he is saying is that you have a right to just ba

sically you, to what you do with your time, so your labor. And then if you make something out of your labor, so if you're a farmer, and you go farm-- you farm some seeds in the ground, you plant them there, and then you get that crop, and you have that crop, it is your crop. It's totally yours, and it is your right to that piece of food. Because you took care of it, you farmed it, and everything. However, this kind of extends because he had an argument that there's a natural right to property th

at we create by obtaining mixing our labor with natural resources. Because if you're working that land, then that-- let's say you're planting I guess, you're planting weed if you're making-- wheat. Not weed by the way-- wheat. But OK, sure. Let's go with wheat. I was going to say something more practical like bananas. Yeah, let's say you're planting bananas because bananas is something you can actually hold. You get the bananas out of it and you have and you have the bananas. That banana came ou

t of the ground. Does that banana belong to you or not? And he is saying that it does because it's a mixture of natural resources and your labor. And so he saw the protection of private property as a moral rule. So he said private property is a moral rule. And because of that, if there's no protection for property, then the person who invented a new tool would love to show it to others or use it in their view as they might take it. So essentially, he's saying that the right to private property i

s going to increase the overall utility of something, or someone. And because you have a right to property and to potentially defend that property, there's a respect for the right of life, liberty, and property. And that implies ethical rules against killing, stealing, deception, and coercion. And so what are you saying is everybody has a natural right to defend themselves and to defend their property and to defend their labor, which again is a property. And so this, of course, gets into iffy te

rritory because if you look at something like the Constitution, some people see freedom of speech as a natural right, because of the ability to express yourself and see what you think is a natural extension of our humanity and anatomy. Our anatomy means we have the ability to speak. And therefore, we have the right to speak whatever we want. What if what we speak is offensive? Well, according to John Locke, then that's still OK because we are able to speak it. So that, of course, as you can see,

you can already, and is, causing issues worldwide, whether hate speech and whatnot. And even self-defense, you have the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights talking about the right to bear arms to defend yourself. So by extension of what John Locke is saying, if you have the right to defend yourself, then that means you have the right to potentially shoot somebody. And so that, of course, gets into iffy territory. So again I'll leave it at that. But again, natural rights can really, really be

used to extend to pretty much a lot of things that you might not think about when you think of a human right. If you want to know more details about it-- and I believe it was in the 1980s there was a Universal Declaration of Human Rights published by the United Nations, that was kind of meant to declare what natural rights could be. And they established basic concepts of dignity, liberty, equality, individual rights, provision of things like right to life, and provision of slavery and torture,

and other things. So I recommend that you all check that out and read that to get a more idea of what my natural right is. But logic can be very, very tricky, and you can extend a lot of things that you might-- because, I mean, you might think about, how do we go from property of labor to ability to kill somebody to protect your property? There's a lot of big jumps going there. And so the thing that people argue with John Locke, how do you-- yes. A to B, B to C, C to D, E to F, or whatever. But

when you see A to F, you're like, wow, that's a big jump right there. So it really contrasts with other ethical standards or approaches that tend to focus on the result of something. And so it's definitely iffy. And that brings us into the next thing, which is a negative and positive right. So rights can be split into two kinds of rights. We have negative rights and then we have positive rights. Negative rights can also be known as liberties. And then positive rights are like claim rights. So ne

gative rights is basically the right to act without interference. Basically, examples of negative rights are something like freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or freedom of-- or the right to bear arms. These are all negative rights because the government doesn't need to do anything, but just basically let you do it. If the government doesn't censor you, doesn't say you can't say these things. If you can just like make any noise out of your mouth at any time, that is a liberty. The govern

ment doesn't need to do anything to basically to enable you to have this right. If you want to believe in something, the right to believe in something, again the government doesn't need to enable you to be able to believe in that. Now of course, yes, it can be iffy. For example, if you believe in a certain religion and it requires you to be able to do a pilgrimage somewhere, and then you're asking the government for money to do that program, that's different. That goes more into a positive right

. But a negative right is basically to act without interference from the government or other people. Again, I'm saying government, but really it just applies to just people in general too, people to people thing. The right for me to go to sleep, be able to go to sleep somewhere, and just somebody tells me you can't sleep, that would be an interference. So these are all negative rights. Now, the word negative sometimes implies, of course negativity. That's not what it means here. It doesn't mean

that the negative right is any way or form lesser than a positive right or vise versa. It just means that you basically have it by default, and it's only-- if you don't have a negative right that you could have it's because somebody took it away from you. They interfered and took it away. On the other hand, we have positive rights. Positive right is more of an obligation of some people to provide a certain thing for somebody else. So let me put that down. So basically, a positive right will be,

for example, the right to health care. So if we say every person has a right to health care, then that implies that some people have to do stuff to get you that right. For example, doctors have to look at you. And if you're sick and you need help from a doctor, that doctor has to take time away from his free time, potentially, to look at you. What that entails, of course, could be a tax-- a tax that everybody pays to pay the doctor. But what we're saying is, a positive right is basically an obli

gation for somebody to do something for somebody else. Another example for that and something more related to the topic of the course is a positive if everybody wanted the internet. Let's say that it was a right of someone to have access to the internet. What kind of burden would I put on society? That really depends on the technological level. Let's go to even something simpler. Let's say that everybody had the right to have a phone and to be able to call someone. The burden for that would mean

that they need to have a phone at home, which they might not be able to afford, which means somebody has to pay for it, and then also the infrastructure. It's a lot easier to do that infrastructure today. And in fact, I'd say that a lot of places in the US at least have a phone. And some places probably very rural may not. But I think, if they don't, they have at least-- they could get a satellite phone or some form of communication. But if I told the same thing 100 years ago, then that would b

e extremely hard because 100 years ago, very little phones out there. And so infrastructure matters and technology development is a matter to be able to give somebody a positive right, potentially. So internet today, may not be physically possible to give to some people in the US because they're so rural. But there's alternatives. They're trying to get satellite internet, things like that. So positive rights always involve some sort of obligation, which typically gets translated in today's jargo

n's, to just a basically a form of a tax or something. Other examples of it could be, for example, the right to a trial, so a trial by your peers, to be judged by your peers. If you commit a crime, you have the right to a trial. That's a right that's guaranteed to us by the Constitution, I believe it's in the Bill of Rights. However, that's technically a positive right because that trial is going to cost money to the government, which of course is going to come back to you. But we all have agree

d and said, hey, it is worthwhile for us to pay these taxes that are going to the courts because if we are in a situation where we're being charged with a crime, we definitely want to be able to go to trial and fight it in case we're innocent. Or even if we're not innocent, we still have the right to fight it. And so this is technically a positive right because it costs money. Somebody has to pay the juror for their time. There's the jury duty time, whatever. But then also the judge, the install

ation's, the DA's office, or potentially a lawyer. Because I think everyone has a right to a lawyer, especially if you can't afford one. So that costs money too. So these are all things that cost money, but you're still getting them. That's an example of a positive right that I think we all have in the US, or at least we're supposed to have. Sorry. I keep hitting the table, but I think that might be making sounds in the microphone. So I apologize for that. I'll stopped doing it. But yeah. So I h

opefully you get an idea of a negative and a positive right. Again, there's different kind of rights. They don't make either one lesser or greater. But I would say that it's definitely easier to have negative rights and positive rights because again, negative rights don't cost anybody anything potentially, potentially. At least they don't cost money. I mean, of course, negative right of freedom of speech is that somebody can call you really bad names and offend you. Because that's going to cost

you your emotions and potentially your sense of self, but what we're saying it doesn't cost the world or the state anything to give you these rights potentially. Positive rights on the other hand, will typically cost in one way or form because it's an obligation to someone. Another name for positive rights is also claim rights. OH, I have it here written down. So, yeah. Other example of that would be, for example, food. Everybody has a right to food. And so people that can't afford food, somebod

y has to pay for their food. So how far does an obligation go to provide a positive right? That's the big ethical question. It's helpful to consider that when we're trying to decide a claim right, if we should give it to somebody or not. So again, if we want to have a positive right that says everybody has the right to internet, how expensive is that going to be for us to actually implement something like that? So that's basically positive and negative rights. There's also things like golden rul

es. That's more of like Bible and Confucius that basically tells you to treat others as you would want them to treat you. So that's another interesting way of looking at ethics. There's also the idea of contributing to society. So doing one's work honestly, responsibly, ethically, and creatively is good for both you and other people. So if you're working somewhere, you don't steal from them. You do your job. You don't cause problems. That benefits you because you keep your job. It also benefits

your employer because they don't have to deal with that stuff. So social contracts are very, very, very important thing. Just as in the free society, mistreating individuals according to identical rules of conduct, that's been still in my own hands. As you can see, ethics, there's a variety of different ways to agree on ethics. But there's one thing that we need to make a difference between-- law and ethics. Typically laws are viewed as ways to enforce a society that's ethical. But that's not al

ways the case. There are laws that can be viewed as unethical, but they still have to be there. And that's because it-- is because again, ethics can be interpreted in different way. So some people might consider them ethical. But the point of law and social conscience and political justice is that people have to be willing to submit to a common law in order to live in a civil society. And if they don't agree with that, then that brings up other issues. Do they argue? Do they riot, just like what

's happening in the world? Or do they just go and submit a complaint to their legislators? How do you handle that? And so there's no simple answers essentially, There's no algorithm that you can just apply to the ethical problems in today's world, and decide whether something is good or bad and how you want to deal with it. There's right, there's wrong, and then there's also OK. Human behavior is a very, very complicated. And there's always trade offs, and different ethical theories, when dealin

g with things. Also, as a throw in here, here's a question for you. Do organizations have ethics and should they be different or equal to people, to individuals? Because ultimately, it's individuals that are making decisions in organizations. So should we or could we hold individuals and organizations responsible for the decisions that organizations take? Who do we hold responsible if a company does something unethical? Do we hold the company responsible as a whole? Do we hold the individuals th

at were in charge of the company responsible? Do we hold everybody involved with the company that's responsible? So it's a lot of questions to think about. But going back to what is right and wrong and OK, there's a big difference in doing something that is unethical and is wrong, than doing something that is OK and right. Let's go back to the example with the job. Suppose you take this job and somebody doesn't get the job instead, that needed the job more. Is it wrong for you to take the job? I

t's not wrong, it's OK. But is it right? There's no clean answer. Obviously, if you have no idea what is happening, then you of course should take the job. But what if the person that didn't get the job contacts you and is like, I was starving. I'm going to starve to death now because I didn't get that job. How would you feel about that, and what would you do? Is it your responsibility to then go back to the job and quit? Does that even guarantee that he's going to get the job? You don't know. L

et's just give another example, suppose that somebody asked you for $100 on the street. The claim to give the money to someone is not the same ethically, as taking money away from somebody. So it's different from somebody asking for money and somebody robbing you at gunpoint and saying give me the money. Or for you just to simply look at the person and be like, hey, take some money. So you have to identify harm as wrong. But you also have to identify if a person to do something, what his or her

rights are, and what my rights and obligations are. So it's a very, very, very complicated situation. So here's a question I'm going to end the discussion with. Now I will make this a little discussion for you guys to write about. Can you think of examples of liberties, negative rights, and positive rights, which are claim rights, that are opposite to each other? So can you think of positive right and a negative right that are complete opposites? That they can't coexist together? And if you do,

which way-- which one should take precedence? Should negative rights take precedence over positive rights, or vise versa? And I'll leave you with that. I know this was a very long video because it's the overview. But you can watch it over the course of a couple of weeks if necessary. So I thank you for watching. Today we covered the history of computers. History, it's kind of a tricky name because it's really more of a history of like technology, in terms of the internet and what that has given

us. But a little bit of computers with IoT and things like that. And then we gave a brief introduction about ethics. And I hope that what you take away from the ethics part is that there is just no right answer to anything. It is strictly up to you to decide what something is correct or not. There's no algorithm, there's no correct thing. No matter what somebody tells you, there is no right answers to deciding whether something is ethical or not. It's just a complete and utter mess today. It doe

sn't mean that tomorrow we don't find some amazing solution. Because hopefully that's the other part of the discussion. Look at how technology has developed. We have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow and change completely everything in society. And so, tomorrow the answer to all of our problems could appear, or a whole new world of problems could appear. And that's really what the social implications of computer technology are dealing with today. And so I look forward to talking about diff

erent-- more of these topics in detail. Obviously, the other videos will definitely be smaller. But until then, I hope that I was able to cover this-- to cover this material in a neutral, unbiased way. Obviously, it's impossible because the word neutral is like the word ethics. There is no such thing as correct, true neutral. But please, please do not take anything I say as offensive or attacking anybody. I am merely trying to express what I took away from the reading of the book, and what I thi

nk may be useful to wake you up and start to think about these concepts that we have to cover in the class. And as you are deciding on what to do for your term paper, we have talked about a lot of different things today that may make you passionate about, and could be a good topic for you write your paper on. So if you have any ideas or your topics, start sending them to me. I'll go ahead and create something on Canvas for you to submit them on as well. But again, I do apologize if I said anythi

ng that might be offensive to anybody. I was, again, not my intention. I am merely trying to give you the best and broadest view possible of the contents that we have to cover. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me and I thank you for your time. I wish you have a wonderful day. And until next time, take care and see you soon.