Category Archives: Communications & Technology

10 ways to improve social network security

A few simple precautions that one can take to minimise the chances that you personally will be the victim of an unethical individual exploiting your security weaknesses.

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Sinking of Pirate Bay and the future of file sharing

So anybody who has much of an internet presence has heard by now that The Pirate Bay has been shut-down for good by their ISP following further legal action and judgments in Swedish court. This whole episode brings to the forefront the need for further discussion about the ethics of file-sharing and even creative intellectual rights as a whole.

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Cute robots, social learning and Georgia Tech

Simon Robot is intended to be a robot focused on social learning and development through demonstration, but what I want to focus on here is the interesting development of human empathy relationships with robots. In particular, the fact that Simon Robot has been created to seemingly specifically cause us to want to pinch its cheeks and fawn all over how cute it looks.

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Autonomous systems and the ethical issues of sentient technology

The Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report that considers some of the possible issues that might arise from an ever increasing presence of autonomous systems within our society. Entitled Autonomous Systems: Social, Legal and Ethical Issues the short paper marks a call for public discussion surrounding emerging technologies.

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Would Asimov want us to teach robots to lie?

The recent experiments conducted by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have shown that the robot intelligence that they created eventually taught themselves to lie in order to bring about a more advantageous position compared to their rivals.Continue Reading

What do we want to be? Futurists, ethics, and the social conscience

I wanted to take the opportunity today to briefly discuss once more the intent behind Future Conscience and the purpose of the site – to examine the changes in society that we feel are progressive and question the consequences of our path into the future.

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