DOES TECHNOLOGY NEED TO BE ETHICAL?

                Over the past 50 or 60 years, technology has brought significant changes to our lives. Yet there remains some disagreement as to whether technology needs to be ethical. To begin with, ethics is generally defined as a theoretical discipline that reflects on the good or responsible actions of human beings. It is claimed that there is no room for ethics; existing technology should create machines as intelligent as humans and use them  in every area. However, some people argue that technology has a responsibility to society to be ethical because new technological developments may harm people.  Moreover, trust in the tech world continues to erode due to the increase in the vulnerability to hacking and the proliferation of misinformation via Google and Facebook.

                First of all, one point which is believed to be absolutely pivotal is the fact that new technological developments may harm people. It is important to emphasize that there are some adverse effects of technology on human life, so the adverse effects of technology are widely debated. The debate on using technology such as gene editing techniques on the Designer Baby Experiment in China, for example, has become a hot-button political issue, involving scientists, policy-makers, politicians and religious groups because how ethical is it to use technology to improve human species? Therefore, the adverse effects of technology are an undeniable fact and some developments may harm people.

                When it comes to the second point, at the heart of the matter lies another contributing factor: trust in the tech world continues to erode due to the  increase in the vulnerability to hacking and the proliferation of misinformation via Google and Facebook. Similarly, the discussion on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has mobilized civil society, scientists and policy-makers in a wide debate on ethics and safety. Request for transparency and the desire to be ethical are increasingly central to these debates. A serious hacking event has happened in the USA. The hacked folders included the personal data of about 50 million Americans  which was/has been harvested  via Facebook. This  was announced as ‘’a mistake’’ by Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder and owner of Facebook. Zuckerberg has been criticized during  the investigation. But there is no obvious conclusion and explanation about both GMOs and the hacking event. Therefore, there is a wide debate about whether technology needs to be ethical.

                On the other hand, some proponents argue that there is no room for ethics; existing technology should create machines as intelligent as a human and use them in every area. According to them, these machines should be the most superior and intelligent species in the universe. However, these technologies may have devastating consequences/lead to a lot of serious problems for human beings: for example, (For example..) artificial intelligence might be uncontrolled or get out of control:  we saw/have seen  an apparent instance in the latest Facebook AI Experiment. After a few hours, it was turned off by Facebook because it got out of control and it created its own language.Therefore, Technology needs to be ethical and should  not be used  in every area like in the case of the Facebook AI Experiment and the Designer Baby Experiment.

                To summarize, whether technology needs to be ethical is a controversial issue. There are those who claim that  there is no room for ethics; and technology should create machines as intelligent as humans and use them in every area. However, it seems that technology needs to be ethical because new technological developments may harm people, and trust in the tech world continues to erode due to the increase in the vulnerability to hacking and the proliferation of misinformation.

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