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An Uber Ethical Dilemma: Examining The Social Issues At Stake, Florence Chee Mar 2019

An Uber Ethical Dilemma: Examining The Social Issues At Stake, Florence Chee

Florence Chee

This paper aims to engage with the social issues emerging from the increasing reliance upon app-driven services, as they pertain to precarious labor and ethical standpoints in a digital era. Popular ride services such as Uber have been lauded for bringing much needed transportation services that are superior to expensive taxis or unpleasant or inaccessible public transit.

Design/methodology/approach

As a result of over three years of ongoing research and analysis, this paper is a comprehensive assessment of a number of social issues facing the integration of practices both signified and enacted in an economy driven by apps such as Uber. …


Computers, Gualtiero Piccinini Feb 2008

Computers, Gualtiero Piccinini

Gualtiero Piccinini

I offer an explication of the notion of computer, grounded in
the practices of computability theorists and computer scientists. I begin by
explaining what distinguishes computers from calculators. Then, I offer a
systematic taxonomy of kinds of computer, including hard-wired versus
programmable, general-purpose versus special-purpose, analog versus
digital, and serial versus parallel, giving explicit criteria for each kind.
My account is mechanistic: which class a system belongs in, and which
functions are computable by which system, depends on the system’s
mechanistic properties. Finally, I briefly illustrate how my account sheds
light on some issues in the history and philosophy of …