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For anyone reading Orwell’s 1984, perhaps the biggest surprise is the technological simplicity of the government surveillance techniques. Only a few citizens could be monitored through their TVs at the same time, and behavior was modified through the fear of being monitored. Today, almost anything we do can be and is being monitored, including our online hobbies and real-life friends, the places we visit and when we visit that location (through our cell phones and GPS technology), what we talk about in the privacy of our own homes and vehicles (through the microphones on computers and onboard navigation systems), and even what we think (through monitoring of the brain’s p300 responses). In the year of 1984, the general consensus was that Orwell had incorrectly predicted the technological sophistication that 36 years could bring. Today, close to 60 years after Orwell wrote his book, we are far beyond any technology Orwell imagined, and we are living with today’s technology permeating our lives. This book outlines different ways in which ordinary citizens are now willing to give up their privacy for the conveniences of life.
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This book represents the efforts of a group of bright and talented students to analyze the ethics of the technologies that they currently take for granted, and to ask whether evolving technologies may require new ethics. The contents of this book are entirely researched, written, edited, and published by a group of seniors at the Leeds School of Business. The goal of the seminar was to provide a framework3 within which moral dilemmas regarding technologies, cyber-technology in particular, can be identified, analyzed and discussed. As all these students have a sense of ethics, there was no attempt to "teach ethics." Instead, the assumptions that support moral perspectives were brought to the surface and challenged. Rather than debating whether the use of a particular technology was "correct" or "incorrect," the students engaged in examining how valid, sound, and persuasive arguments3 for policies or decisions regarding technology and its uses can be constructed.
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