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Who's Responsible When Your Semi-Autonomous Shopping Bot Purchases Drugs Online?
Nerval's Lobster writes Who's responsible when a bot breaks the law? A collective of Swiss artists faced that very question when they coded the Random Darknet Shopper, an online shopping bot, to purchase random items from a marketplace located on the Deep Web, an area of the World Wide Web not indexed by search engines. While many of the 16,000 items for sale on this marketplace are legal, quite a few are not; and when the bot used its $100-per-week-in-Bitcoin to purchase a handful of illegal pills and a fake Hungarian passport, the artists found themselves in one of those conundrums unique to the 21st century: Is one liable when a bunch of semi-autonomous code goes off and does something bad? In a short piece in The Guardian, the artists seemed prepared to face the legal consequences of their software's actions, but nothing had happened yet—even though the gallery displaying the items is reportedly next door to a police station. In addition to the drugs and passport, the bot ordered a box set of The Lord of the Rings, a Louis Vuitton handbag, a couple of cartons of Chesterfield Blue cigarettes, sneakers, knockoff jeans, and much more.
get my guy to call me back on time, now there is a bot that takes care of all the dirty work for me??!?!?!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I got this mental picture of a robot wearing jeans, high heels, clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag and a credit card strutting by and saying "I'm Shoppppppinnng!!!!" Stupid brain.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
http://xkcd.com/576/
Note that I can't prove that YOU are sentient and fully autonomous, much less my kid....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...the choice of target.
There are certain people out there willing to kill certain people out there for no money at all.
For bonus points, have the bot convince random people that it is a teenage girl, THEN get them to "off someone" in exchange for sexual favors.
Oldest "girl" with most kills wins.
It's OK. Turing would approve.
I know that from watching that Cabbagepatch movie.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens