Reilly Center Releases 2017 List of Emerging Ethical Dilemmas and Policy Issues in Science and Technology

Edublocks – By 2026 we may have a large marketplace of informal experts and learners exchanging skills and knowledge for money, buying and selling education piece by piece.

Brain hacking – Wearable devices that measure EEG waves are easy to come by, but a simple hack into your headset could reveal a whole host of your most private information.

The self-healing body – There are at least two projects going on now that aim to create bots so small they can move through your blood or attach to your nerve endings. Either by electrical stimulation or a release of chemicals, these bots may regulate our bodies before we even know something is wrong.

Medical ghost management – Pharmaceutical companies can hire firms to perform their clinical trials, write up the research, find academics to put their names on publications, place them in journals and run their marketing campaigns. An invisible and monumental conflict of interest.

Predicting criminality – Two researchers are returning to the pseudoscience of physiognomy, claiming they can program a computer to guess with great accuracy whether or not someone is a criminal.

Automated politics – What can we do about the thousands of Twitter bots that post hundreds of times a day with the purpose of misleading voters and skewing public opinion?

The robot cloud – A combination of massive data transfers between robots and programming robots to solve problems in their “dreams” means it’s time to talk about how much autonomy we should give them.

The Reilly Center explores conceptual, ethical and policy issues where science and technology intersect with society from different disciplinary perspectives. Its goal is to promote the advancement of science and technology for the common good.

More information on these issues is available at reillytop10.com and reilly.nd.edu. You can vote on the issue(s) you find most compelling here.