Series | Platypus

Our Digital Selves: What we learn about ability from avatars

 Rebekah Cupitt  March 14, 2018

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Donna Davis, PhD – University of Oregon and is the sixth post in the series on Disabling Technologies Imagine sitting on the beach on a beautiful day. The sun is rising and the birds singing. Wisps of clouds gently float by as the surf rhythmically rolls in and out at your feet and the children frolic in the sand. You can almost feel the heat of the sun, only you can’t — because you’re sitting in a virtual world. Such is the experience of the childless agoraphobe who may never see the ocean again. Virtual worlds have always been places of both escape and entertainment. For people with disabilities, this notion of escape comes with far greater opportunity but also risk. The risk is that this escape is tied to a simplistic understanding of both virtual reality and disability – especially where people who have never experienced either assume an individual with disabilities may want to abandon their physical experience for the comfort of a virtual one. (read more...)

Killer Robots: Algorithmic Warfare and Techno-Ethics

 John Emery  March 7, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our Law in Computation series. War is an experiment in catastrophe; yet, policymakers today believe chance can be tamed and ‘ethical war’ waged by simply increasing battlefield technology, systematically removing human error/bias. How does an increasingly artificially intelligent battlefield reshape our capacity to think ethically in warfare (Schwartz, 2016)? Traditional ethics of war bases the justness of how one fights in war on the two principles of jus in bello (justice in fighting war) ethics: discrimination and proportionality, weighted against military necessity. Although how these categories apply in various wars has always been contested, the core assumption is that these categories are designed to be an ethics of practical judgment (see Brown, 2010) for decision-makers to weigh potentially grave consequences of civilian casualties against overall war aims. However, the algorithmic construction of terrorists has radically shifted the idea of who qualifies as a combatant in warfare. What then are the ethical implications for researchers and practitioners for a computational ethics of war? (read more...)

Privacy and Piracy: Investigating Unauthorized Online Gaming

 Evan Conaway  February 8, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the third post in our Law in Computation series. When we play an online game like World of Warcraft, where are we? This is not just a metaphysical question—are we in the fantasy world of Azeroth or in front of our computers—but a legal one as well. And there are multiple answers to that legal question. We might take a look at the space of intellectual property at the level of code and creation, whether corporate or by the players. There is also the space of law within the game, of the rules and norms guiding play (De Zwart and Humphreys 2014). What I’m concerned with here, though, are the servers, located in physical places, that connect players through infrastructures of connection whose worlds are sometimes disconnected by proprietary and computational decisions of game world owners. Servers keep online games alive. When online gamers talk about a game world being disconnected, they often point to the server as being “unplugged” or “turned off.” While official game servers are typically owned by game developers and corporations, players are now harnessing this power themselves, using privately-owned servers (“private servers”) as a viable solution for restoring and sustaining older versions of online games previously consigned to oblivion. But why? (read more...)

From Law in Action to Law in Computation: Preparing PhD Students for Technology, Law and Society

 Bill Maurer  February 6, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural post for the Law in Computation series, a collection of blog posts from faculty and graduate student fellows at UC Irvine’s Technology, Law and Society Institute. Leading up to a summer institute in 2018, the series provides examples of research and thinking from this interdisciplinary group and elaborates how sociolegal scholars might address new computing technologies, like artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, and more. In 2015, a robot buying illicit items off the “dark web” was confiscated by the Swiss authorities along with its haul of Ecstasy pills, a Hungarian passport, counterfeit designer clothing, and other items. Dubbed Random Darknet Shopper it was a bot programmed to shop on the dark web using Bitcoin, the pseudo-anonymous cryptocurrency that, at the time of my writing, is experiencing an enormous bubble. Previously assumed to be the domain of criminals or drug dealers, the Bitcoin bubble has made it more mainstream, even on popular television shows like The Daily Show and is being discussed at policy forums worldwide. It increased in value from just over $1000 to over $8000 between February 2017 and February 2018, with a peak at over $19,000 in mid-December 2017. While it was pretty obscure just a few months ago, you probably have a cousin or uncle currently “mining” Bitcoin or trading in similar digital tokens whether you know it or not. (read more...)

The Migrant’s Right to a Digital Identity

 Tania DoCarmo  February 5, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the second post in our Law in Computation series. According to the World Bank, over 1 billion people live without a formally recognized identity. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture and Microsoft, and motivated by UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, to “provide legal identity for all” by 2030, the ID2020 Alliance is a UN sponsored public-private partnership with plans to make “digital identities” more accessible for refugees, stateless and displaced populations through biometrics and blockchain technology. As an executive at Accenture explains: “Digital ID is a basic human right.” (read more...)

What Would A Techno-Ethics Look Like?

 Sareeta Amrute  January 16, 2018

Each year, Platypus invites the recipients of the annual Forsythe Prize to reflect on their award-winning work. This week’s post is from 2017’s winner Sareeta Amrute, for her book Encoding Race, Encoding Class (Duke, 2016). What would a techno-ethics look like? This question persists long after this book, has been written and edited, proofed and published; perhaps it lingers, too, in the minds of its readers as they ponder the pathways and dead-ends digital technologies lay down. Digital technologies build on previous iterations of capital, labor, as well as social and environmental relations, even as they materialize new relations. The part-time visa regimes that most tech companies make use of build on a long history of mobile migrant, free and unfree, labor that has been used to build other kinds of infrastructure, from plantation economies across the British Empire to railroads in the United States and glass-and-steel skyscrapers in Germany. Similarly, the infrastructure of cloud computing relies on previously established military bunkers and railway lines, even as it creates unprecedented demands for energy. An ethical response to these dynamics would produce regimes of care that unite a knowledge of subjects’ evolving relationships with technologies with the goal of reducing spaces of domination created by these technologies. A techno-ethics should provide guidance for those who develop, use, and make polices about technologies. (read more...)

Journalists Won’t Get the ‘Fake News’ Story Right: They Need Help

 Adrienne Russell  January 9, 2018

Editor’s note: This is a jointly-authored post by Lynn Schofield Clark, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver, and Adrienne Russell, Mary Laird Wood Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. The Federal Communications Commission vote to end net neutrality generated weeks of stories last month — good stories — and the topic will fuel many more good stories in the months and year to come. Those stories at the intersection where technology, policy, politics and ideology meet are testament in large part to the way savvy activist communities have framed the story of net neutrality and pushed it into the news cycle. Activist-experts have made net neutrality news stories easy to write. They have articulated why internet regulatory policy should matter to the public, how it affects creative and entrepreneurial endeavor, how it has fueled but could also hobble the kind of digital innovation that has shaped daily life for hundreds of millions of Americans. We haven’t enjoyed the same kind of coverage on the rise of “fake news,” a similarly complex story. “Fake news” is a digital-age phenomenon, a rhetorical device, a business story, a political scourge, a foreign policy threat, and more. It is as juicy a story as it is complex, and yet the mainstream media has failed to fully take it up — and, without help, the mainstream media never will fully take it up. (read more...)

Emilia Sanabria on Bodily Plasticity in Brazil

 Emilia Sanabria  January 2, 2018

Each year, Platypus invites the recipients of the annual Forsythe Prize to reflect on their award-winning work. This week’s post is from 2017’s honorable mention Emilia Sanabria, for her book Plastic Bodies (Duke, 2016). In early November of last year, Judith Butler was attacked during her visit to Brazil. She was in Brazil as a member of the organizing committee of a conference on “The Ends of Democracy,” held in São Paulo. Her visit drew protests from the Catholic extreme-right who assumed she was in Brazil to speak about gender and undercut catholic family values by questioning the biological “facts” of sex. (read more...)