Technology is not really my forte, so this documentary was really informative and introduced me to a lot of issues that I hadn’t really thought about before. However, there were a couple subjects about which I was already familiar, including how the Internet gives people access to education. I really enjoyed the professor talking about how online teaching allowed students from all over the country to do as well as, if not better than, Stanford students, and it was clear that technology has a positive impact through its ability to give people the opportunity to become more educated and live a better life. Another topic I knew a little about was self-driving cars and how they can help make driving safer. Since self-driving cars eliminate the risks from distracted drivers, safer travel is certainly something to look forward to. …show more content…
I had never thought about how ethics need to be incorporated into self-driving technology, but realized that this could cause a problem if the ethics of the car company conflict with those of the driver. This also leads to a larger ethical discussion mentioned in the documentary about how technology achieves these ethical standards. Even if technology, specifically artificial intelligence, was programmed to be benign, it is quite possible that the AI would determine the fastest way to an ethical endpoint would be a path that we would consider completely unethical. Additionally, technology can be controlled by anyone, meaning it could be programmed to be purposefully harmful. This discussion on how ethics and technology intersect, or, more importantly, may clash, did highlight a really big problem that we could face in the future, so the documentary did raise my level of concern regarding this