Artificial intelligence has nearly unimaginable potential to shape the world, but it poses a number of significant ethical questions that need to be carefully examined at every step to reduce bias. Several experts give a rundown of the main concerns. Read the rest

I just read Marco Arment's lament for the dire state of the USB-C ecology, where you never know if any given machine, gadget or cable will do the thing you want it to. I thought about all the ports in my life, over the years, and my experiences of the moral qualities thereof.

Previously: Shopping Cart Alignment Chart Read the rest

Ayelet Waldman is a novelist, non fiction author, and former federal public defender. Her latest book is called A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. I interviewed her this morning.

Why did you start microdosing?

I started microdosing because I was profoundly and dangerously depressed. I have a mood disorder and for many, many years my medication worked great. I took it, I did what my doctor told me and everything was fine. But at some point my medication stopped working. I tried all sorts of different things. And nothing helped. I was getting worse and worse and more and more full of despair and more and more full of rage and more and more unstable and I became suicidal. I started doing things like googling the effects of maternal suicide on children and I was so terrified that I was going to do something to myself, that I was going to hurt myself, that I decided to do something drastic and something that some people might think is crazy -- I decided to try microdosing with L.S.D.

Did it work?

Oh absolutely. It worked for sure. It's sub-perceptual. In fact, if I told you right now, "Hey Mark, I slipped a microdose of LSD. in your coffee," you wouldn't even know the difference. The effect for me was instantaneous. My depression lifted right away. The book is called A Really Good Day because at the end of that very first day, I looked back and I thought, "that was a really good day." It wasn't like everything was perfect. Read the rest

Carl Plantinga's talk, "Spectator Judge: Affect and Ethics in Narrative Film and Television," delivered to the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, argues that movies powerfully instill moral values in the people who watch them, by cueing us to "judge, believe, and feel emotions in various ways." This is the thesis of the novel I'm working on, so I read the summary of the talk with great interest: Read the rest

The Pew Research Center’s 2013 Global Attitudes survey asked 40,117 respondents in 40 countries what they thought about eight topics often discussed as moral issues: extramarital affairs, gambling, homosexuality, abortion, premarital sex, alcohol consumption, divorce, and the use of contraceptives. For each issue, respondents were asked whether the behavior is morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or not a moral issue.

Explore the results (and see larger versions of charts like the one above) here. Read the rest

God-Man Commandeth that you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and that you do Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER. Read the rest

WE INVITE you to visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and ENCOURAGE you to follow RUBEN BOLLING on the TWITTER. Read the rest

RECOMMEND: Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER. Read the rest