Radiolab:

Once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

Paul Goodman:

A question of immense importance for the immediate future is, Which functions should be automated or organized to use business machines, and which should not? This question also is not getting asked, and the present disposition is that the sky is the limit for extraction, refining, manufacturing, processing, packaging, transportation, clerical work, ticketing, transactions, information retrieval, recruitment, middle management, evaluation, diagnosis, instruction, and even research and invention. Whether the machines can do all these kinds of jobs and more is partly an empirical question, but it also partly depends on what is meant by doing a job.

Michelle N. Meyer:

Why does one "experiment" (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms?

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh:

Imagine an adaptive robot that lives with and learns from its human owner. Its behavior over time will be a function of its original programming mixed with the influence of its environment and "upbringing." It would be difficult for existing liability laws to apportion responsibility if such a machine caused injury, since its actions would be determined not merely by computer code but also by a deep neural-like network that would have learned from various sources. Who would be to blame? The robot? Its owner? Its creator?

If we are going to live in a world with machines who act more and more like people and who make ever more "personal" choices, then we should insist that robots also be able to communicate with us about what they know, how they know it, and what they want.

Quinn Norton:

What I'd do next is: create a world for you to inhabit that doesn't reflect your taste, but over time, creates it. I could slowly massage the ad messages you see, and in many cases, even the content, and predictably and reliably remake your worldview. I could nudge you, by the thousands or the millions, into being just a little bit different, again and again and again.

William Davies:

At the same time that behavioural economics has been highlighting the various ways in which we are altruistic creatures, social media offers businesses an opportunity to analyse and target that social behaviour. It allows advertising to be tailored to specific individuals, on the basis of who they know, and what those other people like and purchase. These practices, which are collectively referred to as "social analytics", mean that tastes and behaviours can be traced in unprecedented detail. The end goal is no different from what it was at the dawn of marketing and management in the late 19th century: making money. What has changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like "contagions", in the hope of infecting much larger networks.