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| | Description | An insightful guide to understanding and navigating the ethical issues faced by anyone affected by the ethical dilemmas associated with current and emerging technologies
Ethics of Emerging Technologies provides the background, insight, and tools for approaching and solving ethical dilemmas across a broad range of topics. The text discusses ethical problems, using examples and reasoning tools that will aid engineers, scientists, managers, administrators, and the public who wish to understand risks, benefits, and possible approaches to resolving conflicts associated with new technologies in the context of the global community.
Solutions we choose to ethical dilemmas accompanying new technologies will profoundly affect future generations. Scientific facts and guides to decision-making for all associated with emerging technologies are presented. Some of the topics are:
* Human health and environmental effects of alternative energy production methods
* Communications and privacy
* Plagiarism and authorship
* Genetic modification of organisms
* Human and animal experimentation
* Synthetic biology and bioterrorism
* Confidentiality in science, engineering, and business communications
* Risks and consequences of enhancing human beings through new technologies
* Cloning of human beings and stem cell research
* Brain modifications
* Space exploration | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Thomas F. Budinger | | Hardcover: | 512 pages | | Publisher: | Wiley | | Publication Date: | April 07, 2006 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0471692123 | | Product Length: | 9.54 inches | | Product Width: | 7.6 inches | | Product Height: | 1.18 inches | | Product Weight: | 2.31 pounds | | Package Length: | 9.5 inches | | Package Width: | 7.9 inches | | Package Height: | 1.2 inches | | Package Weight: | 2.3 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 14 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 14 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Wish this had been part of my curriculum Oct 14, 2009
By kdea473
This book closely resembles (and perhaps is intended to be) a textbook. For someone without interest in the topic, the text and layout may seem a bit dry. Ethics is an interesting, and often overlooked subject.
For anyone with an interest in the topic (which should be many, many people), it is great. I have an engineering degree and graduate degree, and yet was never required to take an ethics course (nor was one even offered). This book made me realize a lot of the ethical challenges that the scientific community faces.
Highly recommended for science, engineering, and technology majors, along with a host of other people whose lives/jobs/decisions are influenced by emerging technologies. (Even if *not* required as part of your degree program...)
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 informative and valuable Jul 17, 2009
By Silea
In the days of stem cell research and cloning and online maps with pictures that show private citizens and residences, one wonders if a text like this should be mandatory reading for everyone in science and technology.
As other reviewers have noted, this textbook, being a textbook, is a bit dry, and a bit neutral. It focuses on giving information, not livening it up for a lay audience. Anyone considering this for recreational reading should probably think twice, unless they're an academic who reads this sort of material all the time.
My own two complaints about the book are as follows:
1) They really, really strained to get their Four As. It'll be hard for students to remember at first, because they're not all verbs or all nouns, and frankly it just feels clumsy.
2) Some of the example ethical quandaries aren't quandaries at all, but more shooting fish in a barrel. It makes it easy to find at least one thing to castigate the characters for, but it also detracts from the reality.
Despite those complaints, i do wish that this had been the text for a business ethics course i took a few years ago.
Exhaustive. Lists myriad issues on a wide variety of situations. Should be required reading for all aspiring professionals Sep 16, 2009
By Abhinav Agarwal
Exhaustive and detailed. Excellent as a reference too. Most situations are not black-or-white. Instead they require asking the right and often difficult questions, and answers may not always be straightforward. Technology can often help, but exacerbate the issues at hand at times.
While the Preface states that the book should be useful for just about anyone interested in pursuing a "career in various areas of the engineering, medical, chemical, and biological sciences", the presentation and organization of the book is academically oriented and should not be confused with a pulp-business thriller.
The title of the book is "Ethics of Emerging Technologies", and it is the last chapter in the book which actually deals with such fast emerging areas in technology as Nanotechnology, Neuroenhancements, Deep Brain Simulators, Brain-Computer Interfacing, Psychopharmacalogy, Human Space Exploration, and even a section on "Ethics in Colonization of the Moon and Mars". These can be considered the "emerging" technologies even within the broader category of "emerging technologies".
So what are the earlier chapters all about then?
There is an introduction, where the authors lay out their framework using which solutions to ethical issues and issues prevented: "Acquire Facts", "Alternatives", Assessment", and "Action". Then there is a chapter on the general ethical issues surrounding scientific research, "Responsible Authorship", "Stealing and Copyright", "Conflicts of Interest, etc...
The other chapters are devoted to Information Technology Ethics, Business Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Ethics of Genetically Modified Organisms, Medical Ethics, Human Experimentation, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Stem Cell Technologies, and Enhancement Technologies.
To take two examples:
In the chapter on medical ethics, the following are discussed:
- conflicts of interest can arise in several situations. The three specific areas the authors outline are opportunity for personal gain beyond ordinary reimbursement, when "providing care for patients who are undergoing research procedures when the physician has an interest in the outcome other than that of acquiring unbiased scientific data...", and "between a physician's goal of providing the best care and the goal of the health care organization to make the most profit"
- ethics of futile care, where the treatment is "unlikely to result in the improvement in the condition of the patient"
- patients' right to information: where informed consent is considered a must
- issues of confidentiality, and the resultant laws passed in the US to protect patient data, or ownership of patient data
- refusal or treatment, where questions that arise are whether coercion should be an option, the patient's family should be involved, whether manipulation is ok, and so on.
A controversial chapter may well be the one on animal experimentation. Why? Because attitudes towards animal experimentation, at least in some parts of the world, have been informed for millennia by religious beliefs. Sample this:
"Controversy in this area dates back to biblical times and the story of creation:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. .... replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." [page 289]
The utility of animal experimentation cannot be denied under certain circumstances, but in other cases the "knowledge gained does not warrant this malfeasance." [page 290]
Today, federal laws (in the US and elsewhere) have been drafted since 1966 to regulate the use of animals in research, and ameliorative options such as animal imaging, transgenic animals, mircoarrays, etc...
The chapter on Information Technology ethics has a sort of a blooper, on page 82. An email joke has been doing the rounds for several years now that starts off with a customer trying to order a pizza over the phone. Since the pizza chain has access to all sorts of information about the customer, including his eating habits, medical history, his brushes with the law, etc... the joke is on how a lack of information privacy has intruded into peoples' lives. This email is fictional, but all that the book describes it as is "Anonymous e-mail".
Other areas covered in the chapter are invasion of privacy, loss of confidential data, poss of privacy as a result of monitoring, selling and other unauthorized uses of personal information, ethics of camera surveillance, misuses of intellectual property, hacking, hoaxes, fraud, censorship, spam, and more. One topic that could have been covered is the ability available now to stalk someone as a result of programs like those offered by Google to allow users to publish their locations via cell phones on to the net. Working in this industry, while I felt the information on this topic could have been more detailed, I also realize that this topic is perhaps worthy of a separate book(s) itself.
This book is written in a very accessible manner, and should be required reading for graduate students.
An important book, should be a required course at all technical colleges and business schools. Aug 30, 2009
By Anjana Nigam
This is a textbook designed for an ethics course but makes fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the ethical dilemmas that come with advent of technology. It made me think of business school where Ethics was a required course and a majority of the students voted for it as the best course they took during business school. What made this course so very powerful and personal was that it was designed around real cases and moral dilemmas (e.g. Enron, Fortune companies overlooking child labor). Through discussion we realized what paths were possible and what paths were actually taken by the leaders of the companies. At the end of the class the professor always left us with a question hanging in the air "What would you do if you were in this situation?". It was always sobering as the class sat in silence, minutes after the professor left, reaching deep into their psyche to determine what they might have done given similar circumstances. The answers were not always pleasant and differed based on cultural differences (cultural relativism)or "duty ethics", some of the concepts discussed in this book. It was a life defining course for me, and helped me understand how small business decisions can have far reaching consequences.
I gave so much background about my business school experience to make the argument that ethics should be a mandatory course for any undergraduate and graduate college. And this book is a good text book for such a course. Although it focuses on technology and will be especially relevant to technical students - engineering/medical, it should be required for all colleges as technology touches us in every aspect of life.
Often we make decisions which concern technology even in our daily lives - to use material found on the web in our write up, or to send spam mail, without thinking about ethics and consequences of our actions. This book lays out the basic premises in the beginning and then delves into each of the emerging technology topics one by one. The "Problem Sets" at the end of each chapter are designed so that they can be undertaken before you delve into the chapter. Some of them require legwork, such as, going to a store and asking them how they will use the information acquired when signing up for the club card. Or email sites who do not have an explicitly stated privacy policy. Others require research - such as forming an opinion on the Kyoto protocol or discuss how far they would go to implement projects that have environmental impact. This is the first book I have seen on this subject and although some technologies may have already advanced beyond what is stated in the book, the fundamental questions remain the same.
Here is how the book is laid out:
-Ethical Principles - At the beginning the book defines the various principles as applied to reasoning/decision making.
- Ethics in Scientific Research
- IT Ethics
- Business Ethics
- Environmental Ethics
- Ethics of genetically modified organisms
- Medical ethics
- Ethics of human and animal experimentation
- Ethics of assisted and reproductive technologies
- Ethics of stem cell technologies
- Ethics of Enhancement technologies (Gene therapy etc.)
- Ethics of Emerging technologies
As you can see from this list there is no subject that you may have not thought about as all of these touch us in our daily lives, if only through media hype. This is a good text book and will give college students the right material to delve into the ethics of the decisions they will be making in their future lives.
Dry but Helpful Aug 27, 2009
By George P. Wood
The Budingers wrote this textbook to help students, professionals, and interested laypersons develop a ethical framework for evaluating the moral issues that arise from emerging technologies. Chapters address the ethics of scientific research, information technology, business , environmentalism, genetic modification, medicine, human and animal experimentation, reproductive technologies, stem cell technologies, enhancement technologies, etc. The opening chapter lays out a framework for moral analysis referred to as "the Four A's": acquisition of facts, alternatives, assessment, and action. It also defines and outliens the strengths and weaknesses of various traditional ethics, from deontology to utilitarianism, concluding that no one ethical "school" is adequate to solve every ethical dilemma.
On the upside, this book is fairminded, comprehensive, includes numerous case studies in each chapter, and has extensive bibliographies. On the downside, it's written like a textbook (dry, academic language); and it would've benefited from a bit more focus, say, by focusing on emerging technologies in medicine, rather than emerging technologies as such. Nonetheless, if you're looking for an introduction to ethical debates about emerging technologies, this book is a must have, whether you agree with its authors' analysis and assessments or not.
See all 14 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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