Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill →

The kind of thing I loved thinking about, reading Asimov's robot series. The kind of thing that's moving from science fiction literature into the real world:

When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the driving.

So it’ll come as no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether (see “Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities”). These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. And yet they can never be perfectly safe.

And that raises some difficult issues. How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random? (See also “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions.”)

The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society. Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?

So can science help? Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Jean-Francois Bonnefon at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and a couple of pals. These guys say that even though there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, public opinion will play a strong role in how, or even whether, self-driving cars become widely accepted.

Greenland Is Melting Away →

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

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For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Scientists know that the melting of Greenland is accelerating. As the temperature rises, large lakes form on the surface of the ice, which in turn create a network of rivers.

“The rivers melt down faster than the surrounding ice, like a knife through butter,” Dr. Smith said.

Powerful admiral punishes suspected whistleblowers, still gets promotion →

Critics say the previously undisclosed investigations into one of the Navy’s top SEALs underscore the weakness of the military’s whistleblower-protection law and how rarely violators are punished.

Under the law, commanders or senior civilian officials are prohibited from taking punitive action against anyone who has reported wrongdoing in the armed forces to the inspector general or members of Congress.

In comparison with other federal employees, whistleblowers working in the military or national security agencies must meet a higher burden of proof to win their cases. The odds are stacked against those who seek redress.

Of the 1,196 whistleblower ­cases closed by the Defense Department during the 12 months ending March 31, only 3 percent were upheld by investigators, records show.

“There’s no teeth,” said Mandy Smithberger, a military reform analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington advocacy group. She called the military’s whistleblower law “a trap, because people think they have protection, but they don’t. It’s sad.”

Earthquake Strikes Afghanistan and Pakistan, Multiplying War’s Woes →

A deadly earthquake hit northern Afghanistan and Pakistan on Monday afternoon, causing heavy damage and sowing panic across one of the world’s most impoverished and war-torn regions.

At least 208 were reported killed, 131 or more of them in Pakistan, and that figure seemed likely to rise significantly, officials in both countries said.

Buildings broke down in the shaking, sending people pouring into city streets in Peshawar and Islamabad in Pakistan, and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The Strange Police Killing of Corey Jones →

So should we apply Occam's Razor at this point and consider the likelihood that both men incorrectly identified the other as a potentially dangerous threat? Raja was not in a police uniform and was not in a marked police vehicle. If the police description is accurate, Raja didn't see or even realize Jones was there when he stopped his car and must have been startled. But what actually happened next is what we don't know.

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If Jones panicked and shot first, few would argue that Raja's response was inappropriate or poorly considered. But if Raja panicked and shot first, what then? It matters because earlier in the month two experts investigated the abrupt police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot to death in a Cleveland park while carrying an air gun, and determined that the officer was justified. All that mattered in that case, according to these experts, was that the police officer feared a threat. That the threat did not actually exist did not matter. It is apparently reasonable for police to shoot to kill (according to these reports) on the basis of what they fear might happen.

But let's consider a hypothetical scenario. If Jones had panicked, shot first and killed Raja, would he have been entitled to the same defense? Remember, Raja was not in uniform and not in a marked police car. Is Jones entitled to the same authority to react from the fear of what Raja might have done? I suspect that very few people would defend Jones shooting first, and I particularly suspect that those who would defend Raja shooting first would be less likely to defend Jones shooting. This hypocritical transformation of fear into the justification for an acceptable response by police officers is contributing to the distrust of law enforcement officials.

For Some Refugees, Safe Haven Now Depends on a DNA Test →

When Muna Guled, her husband and youngest daughter were granted refugee status in America two-and-a-half years ago, their first priority was to bring over Guled’s three other children, still stranded in Ethiopia after escaping famine and violence in Somalia.

That dream will soon become reality — but for only two of the children. The third, 17-year-old Roda, is not technically Guled’s daughter. She is her niece, who Guled unofficially adopted after the girl’s mother went missing and her father and grandparents died.

In the past, this might not have been an obstacle. But the United States now requires refugees hoping to reunite with their families to prove that they’re related — either through a DNA test, or with official adoption paperwork, which can be impossible to obtain in war-torn countries. So when Guled’s two biological children board a plane to meet their mother and sister in Ohio in the coming months, Roda will likely be left behind.

In Defense of the New York Times →

There's a lot in this article: the spat between Amazon and the New York Times in Medium; the craziness (compared to just a few years ago) about the NYT relying on any other publisher; aging print media being less and less directly connected to subscribers, sustained by ad money that had nowhere else to go. And this:

The fact of the matter is that The New York Times almost certainly got various details of the Amazon story wrong. The mistake most critics made, though, was in assuming that any publication ever got everything completely correct. Baquet’s insistence that good journalism starts a debate may seem like a cop-out, but it’s actually a far healthier approach than the old assumption that any one publication or writer or editor was ever in a position to know “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet. It’s a good thing that Amazon can post to Medium, and it’s healthy that Baquet responded. My alma mater the University of Wisconsin declared back in 1894:

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

The New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon. Amazon, though, along with the other platforms that, as described by Aggregation Theory, are increasingly coming to dominate the consumer experience, are increasingly powerful, even more powerful than governments.

It is a great relief that the same Internet that makes said companies so powerful is architected such that challenges to that power can never be fully repressed, and I for one hope that The New York Times realizes its goal of actually making sustainable revenue in the process of doing said challenging.

Why We Should Be Talking About Russell Simmons’ RushCard Fiasco →

...When one month is flush and the other is fallow, it’s hard to maintain a balance, which leads to fees and other hits to your income. The FDIC found that more than 57 percent of unbanked households said they didn’t have enough money to keep an account or meet a minimum balance, while 35.6 percent of underbanked households said the same. Likewise, almost 1 in 3 unbanked households reported “high or unpredictable fees” as one reason they did not have bank accounts. Disproportionately black, Latino, and Native American, they rely on banking alternatives like payday lenders, check cashers, and pawn shops who, while predatory, are at least flexible.

Which brings us to “RushCard,” the financial product from hip-hop and fashion mogul Russell Simmons...

In reality, however, it’s a trap. In exchange for early access to their money, users face a web of fees and charges that add up to money you must pay to use your money. On top of a monthly fee, RushCard customers pay to withdraw from ATMs, to make point-of-sale transactions, to make signature transactions, and to receive paper statements. They also pay if their account is dormant.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has proposed “postal banking” as a federally sponsored alternative to payday lenders and services like RushCard. “USPS could partner with banks to make a critical difference for millions of Americans who don’t have basic banking services because there are almost no banks or bank branches in their neighborhoods,” she wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed last year...

...During the Taft administration—following the Panic of 1907—Congress relented, and from 1911 to 1966 (when, ironically, it was abolished under Lyndon Johnson), the United States operated the Postal Savings System. “By 1934, postal banks had $1.2 billion in assets—about 10 percent of the entire commercial banking system—as small savers fled failing banks to the safety of a government-backed institution,” notes Baradaran. “Deposits also reached their peak in 1947 with almost $3.4 billion and 4 million users banking at their post offices.”