A high-tech scanner that detects light deep inside the brain has been developed. It could boost cancer treatments and AI (artificial intelligence) and even lead to a screening program for Alzheimer's disease. The optical approach uses MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to map how light spreads in opaque environments capturing dynamic changes in colors of tissue. It could map neuron-stimulating fibers during experiments or monitor patients receiving light-based therapies for tumors. "We can image the distribution of light in tissue, and that's important because people who use light to stimulate tissue or to measure from tissue often don't quite know where the light is going, where they're stimulating, or where the light is coming from. Our tool can be used to address those unknowns," says senior author Alan Jasanoff, a professor of biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, as well as nuclear science and engineering, at MIT, in a statement.

Recent controversies related to topics such as fake news, privacy, and algorithmic bias have prompted increased public scrutiny of digital technologies and soul-searching among many of the people associated with their development. In response, the tech industry, academia, civil society, and governments have rapidly increased their attention to "ethics" in the design and use of digital technologies ("tech ethics"). Yet almost as quickly as ethics discourse has proliferated across the world of digital technologies, the limitations of these approaches have also become apparent: tech ethics is vague and toothless, is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives, and has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design rather than on the structures and cultures of technology production. As a result of these limitations, many have grown skeptical of tech ethics and its proponents, charging them with "ethics-washing": promoting ethics research and discourse to defuse criticism and government regulation without committing to ethical behavior. By looking at how ethics has been taken up in both science and business in superficial and depoliticizing ways, I recast tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central fault line is not whether it is desirable to be ethical, but what "ethics" entails and who gets to define it. This framing highlights the significant limits of current approaches to tech ethics and the importance of studying the formulation and real-world effects of tech ethics. In order to identify and develop more rigorous strategies for reforming digital technologies and the social relations that they mediate, I describe a sociotechnical approach to tech ethics, one that reflexively applies many of tech ethics' own lessons regarding digital technologies to tech ethics itself.

In a world where personal information is ubiquitous and accessible, shouldn't you have the right to be forgotten? How should we deal with traces of our online selves? These are just two of many questions and issues explored in Sheila Jasanoff's new book, The Ethics of Invention, which published this week. Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, explores ethical issues that have been created by technological advances--from how we should deal with large-scale disasters such as Bhopal or Chernobyl to the more hidden conundrums of data collection, privacy, and our relationship with tech giants like Facebook and Google. Jasanoff believes we don't sufficiently acknowledge how much power we've handed over to technology, which, she writes, "rules us as much as laws do."