Category: Editorial & Opinion

The Trump administration cannot simply reject current theories of climate change based on nothing more than that it may conflict with a constituency’s self-interest or one’s sheer lack of understanding.

Australian Aboriginal sovereignty is no longer just about Aboriginal communities retaining rights to their own land. The most brutal types of dispossession are the latest forms of data retention, decreased privacy, and unwarranted use of this personal data as a result of activities being collected, analyzed, and intelligently manipulated by geographically remote entities, all thanks to the Internet.

Unmet local concerns related to renewable energy projects can result in costly project delays or cancellation. Strong political and financial incentives encourage state authorities and renewable energy developers to address issues of social acceptance.

At Brave Conversations we tried to do something different — not to have a conventional conference where everyone hid behind their professional personae, delivered papers and were generally spoken at.

Mining has had an impact on many Aboriginal communities in Australia. As we move to a mining sector where dump trucks, underground excavators, loaders, and conveyor systems are transformed into partial or fully autonomous systems, there is little or no human labor required other than to maintain equipment or provide oversight using a range of distant surveillance technologies.

There is an unshakable faith in our industry that we can do anything and that everything we do must be good and beneficial to society. Our industry has had similar crises before, such as dot-com busts, that exposed our assumptions, but the ideas are still here. As an industry and society, can we continue to develop solutions that unduly amplify human behavior – so that we provide and support a way for harm to be normalized? As an industry and society, can we continue to promote solutions based on long-held and dominate theories – so that the wider community is misled by influential advocates? The answer is a clear “no” to both.

In 1997 Eduardo Kac became the first human to implant himself with a non-medical device in the performance art work titled “Time Capsule”

There is an increasing interest in, and implementation of the Internet of Things. As the number and types of interconnections…  Read More

The future as depicted in works of science fiction, especially of the multiplex variety, is almost uniformly dystopian. The bleakness…  Read More

What are your values? I’m asking you, the reader. As a quick exercise, try to write down ten values you…  Read More

Norbert Wiener and the Call for Ethical Engagement Over the last century, the greatest acceleration of technological development has come…  Read More

Dear Editor, Katina Michael, in “Gone Fishing: Breaking with the Biometric Rhythm of Tech-Centricism” (IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Dec….  Read More

A bot (short for robot) performs highly repetitive tasks by automatically gathering or posting information based on a set of…  Read More

During the last century a variety of surveillance technologies have arrived, have been deployed, and have had impacts on society,…  Read More

Some years ago, a sweet grandma in my (Christine’s) neighborhood was convinced that one of her neighbors was involved in…  Read More

Within the next decade, reactive medical practices will evolve into what has been popularly coined “P4” medicine — predictive, preventive,…  Read More

Fig. 1. The effectiveness of a security measure is plotted against its impact on privacy. Optimal solutions improve both security…  Read More

The Digital Society is increasingly characterized by an ecosystem of smart, socio-technical applications, such as smart grids, smart homes, smart…  Read More

Cyberwar is insidious, invisible to most, and is fought out of sight. It takes place in cyberspace, a location that…  Read More

The United States is now debating the wisdom of limits on monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA). While the…  Read More