Wearables, implants, autonomous vehicles, mobile and cloud technology, privacy against the security services, the issues AI and robots raise, and how patents, trademarks and licences protect ideas.
What you will learn
- Discuss the issues raised by wearables, implants, autonomous vehicles, mobile and cloud technology
- Weigh privacy against the work of the security services
- Recognise accountability, safety, bias and legal liability in AI and robotics
- Choose between copyright, patents, trademarks and licences
New technologies, new questions
- Wearable technology (fitness watches) and computer-based implants (pacemakers, cochlear implants) collect health data all day: useful for care, but sensitive if shared or leaked, and an implant that connects wirelessly must be protected from hacking.
- Autonomous vehicles could cut accidents caused by tired or careless drivers, but must be proven safe, and someone must answer when one crashes.
- Mobile technology and cloud storage keep us connected and our files safe from a lost phone, but record where we go and put our data in another company's hands, sometimes abroad.
- Hacking is an ethical issue as well as a crime: it harms the people whose data is inside.
Privacy and the security services. Police and security services want to read the messages of suspected criminals and terrorists. Privacy campaigners answer that collecting everyone's data, or building a back door into encryption, invades the privacy of the innocent and could be found and used by criminals too.
The rest of this lesson and its 9 practice questions are locked.
In this lesson
- New technologies, new questions
- AI, machine learning and robots
- Protecting ideas
- Try it: Which issue?
9 practice questions, marked as you go; about 20 minutes in all.
Key terms
Wearable technology, Computer-based implants, Autonomous vehicles, Mobile technology, Cloud storage, Hacking, Machine learning, Robots
In this unit: Ethical, legal and environmental impacts
Privacy, fairness, jobs and the digital divide; the Data Protection Act, Computer Misuse Act and copyright; open source and proprietary licences; the energy and e-waste behind our devices; and the questions raised by wearables, implants, self-driving cars, AI and robots, with patents, trademarks and licences.
- Ethics, privacy and culture
- Computing and the law
- Technology and the environment
- New technologies, AI and ideas
- Extended answers