Chapter 3 - networked communications
Chapter three talks about network communication. In the movie, Major uses mind-comns to communicate with her teammates. They are connected to the same internet, so they could communicate secretly.
Also, freedom of speech has been talked about in Chapter three. In the movie, despite the fact that she didn’t really own the body, since it belonged to the company as well as her memories, she had the very basic human right such as freedom of speech, since she was still human because she owned her consciousness and she could think as a human being. The company could not impose any censure on her speech because it had no control over her “ghost”, which is referred to her consciousness.
Chapter 4 - intellectual property
Our character, Major, in the movie has a cyborg high tech body, which was connected with her brain. She received the body from the company called HANKA and neither paied nor gave her consent to get the body. This raises an intellectual property question in our minds - does the body belong to her or it is an intellectual property of the company? If we look at the deal from the standpoint of the company, it should own her body since it is their invention and they spent a lot of resources to build it, however, it is completely not ethical from the view of Major, since it seems like she doesn’t even have the rights to her own body, that she is part of. And in case if the company considers her as a not valuable asset, and wants to destroy the body, they can not do that without killing Major’s brian, which becomes unethical.
Chapter 5 - Information privacy
The company’s scientists have access to everything she has seen and witnessed, as well as her memories. She is completely deprived of her own thoughts and memories, since everyone in the company can monitor her 24/7. She also did not have access to her own memories of the past and obtained it only in the end. It is completely unethical for the company to do this because they gave Major the illusion that she had cyontrol over what the company did with her memories, when in actuality they were completely controlling what she did and didn’t remember.
chapter 6 - Privacy and the government
The company technically owned Major since they had constructed her cyborg shell, but they had a contract with the government which allowed her to work for a specialized task force along with other humans (some had various technological enhancements). We wanted to examine whether or not the government’s decision to allow the Major experiment to be used as a means of law enforcement, is ethical or not. Something important to consider when framing this argument is that from the movie, it seems that the government knew this type of project was in development by the robotics company Hanka, however they didn’t appear to know how Hanka was acquiring the minds to be integrated with the shells. This was done by capturing people from the lawless zone and discarding their human bodies for the robot shell replacement. The government's decision can be seen as unethical because Major did not give consent for her mind to be used in the experiment, and she is under constant 24/7 surveillance by Hanka which allows her no privacy. The government seemed content with how Hanka was treating Major since they were also receiving a massive benefit from the project.
chapter 7 - computer and network security
In chapter 7, it talks about computer and network security. In the movie, Kuze, the failure from the former experiment, hacked other computer’s and could control their actions, as well as he made use of the other robots to kill people for him. The people who have the mind enhancement in the movie were hacked by the Kuze. They lost their own consciousness and follow the order from Kuze to kill the professor. From this example, we could notice that it is dangerous if the robots are hacked because they can threaten humans’ lives. Also, hackers can control others’ computers now. In the future, they could even control other people’s bodies, because parts of their bodies are enhanced by computer and mechanics. We can conclude that it is dangerous to connect the robots to the the same network because once a single robot gets corrupted, all the other ones in the network become hacked as well.
chapter 8 - computer reliability
In chapter 8, it talks about computer reliability. In the movie, those guests, who trust that robots would not hurt them and have not protection at all, was killed by the robots that have been hacked. Plus, the company trust that the implanted memories can cover her own memories, however, there are glitches of her own memories appear when she sees relative scenes. So, we think we should not be fully trusted to computers because it is hard to design a program without any defects and we should take into consideration about the risks of failures associated with computer programs. Especially in the future, when there is more ai and machine learning programs are created, it is difficult to find the defects in the operation.
chapter 10 - work and wealth
Chapter 10 talks about work and wealth with the development of technology. In the movie, Batou lost his eyes during one of the missions. After that, he got new mechanic eyes. The mechanic eyes could scan the building and is even better than his original eyes were. As a result, in the future, disabled people still have the chance to get to work. The enhanced body on human beings also changed the way people work, which actually increased productivity in any career. However, the movie does not mention the cost of enhanced bodies, and whether it is wide-spread or not.