Category: Ethics

Big Tech Critic

With Amazon’s Alexa spying on her owners, a massive data breach masterminded by Cambridge Analytica, and evidence of election interference promulgated by Facebook, tech policy has never had more significant implications for our society and democracy. Goldman School of Public Policy Dean Henry Brady talks with Roger McNamee—noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor—about how he came to realize the serious damage that Facebook and other social media giants are doing and how he has committed to try to stop them.

Roger McNamee spent a 34-year career investing in Silicon Valley, co-founding Integral Capital Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Elevation Partners. He was an early investor in Facebook and an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg from 2006 to 2009. Since 2016, Roger has worked to reform the tech industry. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Zucked, Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Watch Facebook, Privacy, and Creating Better Tech Policy with Roger McNamee.

Privacy, Practicality, and Potential: The Use of Technology for Healthy Aging

That wearable fitness device on your wrist is measuring so much more than your exercise levels. Digital tools offer unprecedented opportunities in health research and healthcare but it can come at the cost of privacy. Six days of step counts are enough to identify you among a million other people – and the type of inferences that can be made from other everyday behaviors is growing rapidly.

Camille Nebeker, EdD, MS is Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. She discusses the ethical considerations of informed consent and potential harms and benefits of these technologies. She also shares ideas on how we can work together to create systems that define and encourage safe digital health research and practice.

Watch — The Digital Revolution: Ethical Implications for Research on Healthy Aging

Our Impact on the Earth

“Mother Nature is not happy right now and she’s trying to tell us, in many ways,” says Kimberly Prather, Professor of Climate, Atmospheric Science, and Physical Oceanography at UC San Diego.

New weather patterns and events are causing concern but how do we know these changes are caused by human activity? Climate scientists are looking at trends over time to determine our impact on the planet.

Prather discusses recent CAICE studies aimed at advancing our understanding of how the oceans influence human and planetary health including novel experiments being conducted in a unique ocean-atmosphere simulator.

Watch — How Do We Know Humans are Impacting the Health of Our Planet? – Exploring Ethics

E-Cigarettes: What We Know, What We Need to Learn

In 2014 with vaping newly on the rise, Dr. Laura Crotty Alexander joined us to talk about the potential health risks https://uctv.tv/shows/E-Cigarettes-Vaping-and-MRSA-Health-Matters-28132.

Five years later, we revisit the topic to see how the research is bearing out how e-cigarettes and their usage has evolved. Dr. Alexander shares a physician’s view of the specific dangers of vaping.

For more programs bringing the public and scientists together to explore how science can best serve society, watch Exploring Ethics https://uctv.tv/exploring-ethics/

Watch — How Bad Are E-cigarettes? – Exploring Ethics

Imaging Studies: A Revealing Look

Research imaging studies are crucial to finding effective treatments and therapies. Protocols are in place to protect both the study participant and the science, but what if the images reveal a previously unknown condition? Or a false positive or negative? Unraveling this question is more than a simple task and the consequences can range from unnecessary worry to wrong treatment decisions.

Kathryn Fowler, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Radiology, walks you through how studies are designed to avoid this scenario and the ethics of patients and physicians being made aware of research results if they are not verifiably accurate.

Watch — If Researchers Find a Tumor, Should They Tell You? – Exploring Ethics