Spy Stingrays!
Rodriguez, Jared. "Surveillance: America's Pastime" 8/13/10 via Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
What's up?
To spy or not to spy, that is the question. Spy Stingrays have stirred up quite the controversy in California's Orange County in January of 2016. Stingrays and Dirtbags are a surveillance method that emulate a very strong cell phone tower that overpowers all the cell towers in the vicinity. This causes cell phones to connect to the Stingray or Dirtbag, which reveals the identities, locations, and usage of the cellphone holder. According to law, federal use of these surveillance methods must be approved by a warrant. However, there was a loophole in the law what allowed local police to use stingrays without warrants. Matt Cagle, tech and civil liberties attorney for American Civil Liberty Union, spoke out against the Stingrays and Dirtbags the Anaheim police used on planes that collected info from the millions of people of orange county and Disneyland tourists.
Who is the sympathetic character in the controversy?
The sympathetic characters of the debate are the citizens and tourists who do not know they are being spied on. Sure, the police would generally only use their Stingrays to catch a suspect or criminal. However, the Stingrays disrupt cell service. Technically, they are supposed to let through 911 emergency calls, but emergency calls to other services will not get through which may prove disastrous for some.
Who is the least sympathetic?
I am not sympathetic to the police who now have to register their Stingrays. California legislature recently passed a law that local police must get warrants for their Stingrays and cannot secretly use them on the citizens. I am not sympathetic because the police can still use them as thy have previously but now people know when their service would be disrupted and when their info will be collected.
Robots are taking over the world!!! (But not really)
Alan. "Those Evil-Natured Robots; They're Programmed to Destroy Us" 1/26/12 via Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
What's up?
Remember the industrial revolution? Yeah, me either. However, according to the history books, mechanization of farming and the production of factories reduced the amount of jobs available- in other words machines that took over the jobs of blue collars. The modern equivalent of the industrial revolution, is the increased use of artificial intelligence due to advances in programming- robots that take over the jobs of white collars. Anne McElvoy, the senior editor of The Economist, interviewed Jerry Kaplan, an entrepreneur, AI expert, and author in London on January 14, 2016. The debate is about whether the artificial intelligence will simple replace workers or make their jobs more enjoyable and less menial.
Who is the sympathetic character in the story? Least sympathetic?
Oddly enough, the most sympathetic and the least sympathetic characters are one and the same. The individual interviewed insists that the artificial intelligence is not intended to replace humans. The AI's are only supposed to replace simple tasks such as writing simple reports, contracts, or press releases- things that are repetitive, routine and easy to define in a program. They are supposed to make people's jobs less boring and allow them to focus more on problems that actually require human intelligence or decision making. But then, he quoted Karl Marx by saying human workers do lose when labor is replaced by capital(AI's). However, he also insisted that even though some workers will lose their jobs, quality of life will improve so much due to products becoming cheaper, that even if they have to find a different lower paying job, they will ultimately live as well as or better than before. I sympathize with the people who will lose their jobs, but I can also see that the AI's will probably benefit people more than they inconvenience them in the long run.
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