Please read the text and answer the one question that comes with it

The Lure Of Love Bots Gary Lucas couldn't stop looking across the maze of cubicles into the conference room on the other side of the office. His boss, Richard Matthews, was having what looked like a spirited discussion with a group of five people Gary had never seen before. Even without being in the meeting or being close enough to read people's lips, Gary knew what the meeting was about. The company he worked for, Why Wait, Date!, was struggling. Not only was competition fierce in the online matchmaking industry, but subscriptions at his company had been drying up due to a more challenging problem: The latest analysis of user statistics revealed that 15 percent of the total subscribers were female while 85 percent were male. How could the company retain subscribers if the competition between male users was so fierce? Many male subscribers were unable to find a match, even after months of trying. Unfortunately for Gary, the manager of customer retention, unhappy customers don't keep paying. Despite marketing efforts and discounted subscription offers aimed at female users, Gary had been unable to balance out the disproportionate customer base. He was worried that his job was on the line. His replacement might be sitting in that meeting with his boss right now. Gary looked back over at the conference room just in time to see Richard open the door and wave him over. Gary hastily made his way to the conference room. As he took a seat at the end of the table, Richard smiled at him and said, "Gary, I think these consultants have a plan that can bring this company back to life!" Gary sighed with relief. It sounded like his job was safe for now, but what kind of miracle had the consultants promised to make Richard so optimistic about the future? iMatch Thomas, the lead consultant, began his pitch to save the company. Richard nodded and smiled as Thomas explained his idea. "The key to maintaining subscribers on this type of site," Thomas explained, is keeping them interested. We need male users to have some sort of positive experience on the site before they reach their threshold of getting discouraged and cancel their subscription. Our consulting team has created a model based on all of your user data, and we are able to predict when a male user is on the verge of canceling his subscription with a high degree of accuracy." Gary interrupted, You have access to all of our user data?" He looked at Thomas with a distressed expression on his face, but Thomas motioned for him to calm down and keep listening to the pitch. Thomas continued, Now that we can predict when a customer is about to leave, we can take action to keep him interested. We know when customers need a potential 'match' in order to keep paying for the service. All we have to do is send them some messages from a dummy account so they think someone is interested. "Depending on how much you want to invest in our solution," Thomas continued, "we can even have these dummy accounts engage in complex interactions that take place over weeks or months. After several weeks or months, the dummy account will indicate that it has found someone else. There does not have to be any actual follow-through; the customer will just think that it didn't work out. The best part is that you won't have to pay employees to interact with customers, this can all be done with our Al platform. These long-term interactions will keep customers paying and inflate the hope that they will actually find someone using your site!" Al-Jedis An hour after the meeting, Gary was sitting at his desk with his head spinning. He was still trying to come to terms with what had happened in the conference room. His boss had directed him to cut all marketing efforts by 80 percent and start looking to hire new people to take charge of creating the dummy accounts. Richard had also signed a 6- month contract with the consultants; they would begin implementation of their customer retention tool starting the next day. Gary looked down at the business cards the consultants had given him after the meeting-they all worked for a company called Al-Jedis. Gary realized Al stood for "artificial intelligence. He couldn't believe they were going to essentially use robots to trick people into thinking they were about to find a match on the site. He suddenly felt chills down his spine...trick people? He was starting to wonder if this could be perceived as fraudulent or even illegal. What if someone found out about what they were doing? The company would be destroyed. Gary leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and let out a long sigh. Part of him wanted to go talk to Richard and tell him this was a bad idea; the other part of him decided that it might be time to start polishing his resume. The Ethics Guide in Chapter 10 introduced Kant's categorical imperative as one way of assessing ethical conduct. This guide introduces a second way, one known as utilitarianism. According to utilitarianism, the morality of an act is determined by its outcome. Acts are judged to be moral if they result in the greatest good to the greatest number or if they maximize happiness and reduce suffering. Using utilitarianism as a guide, killing can be moral if it results in the greatest good to the greatest number. Killing Adolf Hitler would have been moral if it stopped the Holocaust. Similarly, utilitarianism can assess lying or other forms of deception as moral if the act results in the greatest good to the greatest number. Lying to someone with a fatal illness that you're certain he or she will recover is moral if it increases that person's happiness and decreases his or her suffering. 4. Do you think Gary would benefit by trying to talk to Richard about the risk of using bots? How do you think people would respond if word got out that the company was using this type of technology to retain customers