The best thing to do is to find a free legal clinic in your area. I volunteered at a clinic in Toronto called Artists Legal Advice Services, which offered 1/2 hour of free legal advice to artists/creators/etc. There may be a similar clinic in your area.
If not (or in addition) I recommend you read a primer on Intellectual Property Law. I like the "Irwin Law" introduction to Intellectual Property.
Finally, questions about whether your game infringes someone's copyright or trademark often do not have right or wrong answers. That is precisely why we have a court system, and why we pay lawyers so much. These questions are argued and resolved at the time of trial. The best you can do is to be aware of the legal landscape and hope you can afford a good lawyer if it comes down to that.
The only reason Copyright exists is because some thinkers in the 17th century decided that a time-limited mechanism to reward the makers of new ideas would promote creation and exchange of ideas more than it would hinder it.
This is close to the truth but not entirely correct. The precursor to modern copyright were the licensing laws put into place with the invention of the printing press. Printing anything without a license was made into crime, and this license to print -the copyright- was given to a printer only after the work had been deemed to be non-blasphemous and non-seditious. In other words, the inception of copyright was a regime of censorship.
After the censorship regime was eliminated, the printers had become quite a powerful industry. They lobbied for the ability to continue charging money based on the printing rights they held. This is when the argument you spoke of comes into play. The printers argued that if copyrights are not granted, the production of art will slow down or cease because it will be too hard for creators to turn a profit.
Nonsense. Law is simply morality that's been codified. We believe killing people is wrong, so we make a law to reflect our shared morality. We have also decided that it's right that the people who create artworks deserve some reward for that work. The system to make that reward possible is copyright. Saying the system is not working properly, and that you want to change it, is a very different statement from saying that breaking copyright isn't about morality. This is, at its core, *completely* about morality...the question is only whether the law reflects your moral view (or, better, society's overall moral view).
You are 100% wrong in almost everything you just said. First, let me start out by pointing out that there are two classes of laws -moral/rights based laws and utilitarian/instrumental laws. Only the former is about morality. Laws in the latter class are not based in morality but are rather intended to achieve some particular goal. Copyright law, at least in the US, Canada, and the UK, (among others) is a utilitarian regime (France, for example, has a rights based system of copyright). This is why the US constitution limits the power of congress to create monopolies in works, requiring that such monopolies must be in service of the promotion of progress in science and the arts (that is the utilitarian aim of the law) and must be for a limited period of time (recognizing that granting a monopoly in intellectual products is or may be a necessary evil). In conclusion, you couldn't be more wrong in your opinion of copyright, which is a regime intended to promote progress in science and the arts. If it ever fails to achieve that, for example by preventing people's preferred enjoyment of intellectual products, then it has failed in its essential purpose and should be amended.
Your "private transaction" argument is also legally questionable. For physical things, (and in US law) if you buy something you have reasonable reason to believe is stolen you will also have committed a crime: Receiving Stolen Goods [jrank.org]. It's designed to allow the state to punish fences as well as the thieves themselves, but laws like this will be cited in any discussion of similar behavior online. If you have reasonable reason to conclude that the person you're dealing with is selling you an illegitimate copy of a game, you are not free from liability. Your liability is certainly less than the person selling the thing, but you're not completely innocent in the exchange.
Intellectual products are not physical things, and it is completely erroneous to use the analogy of physical property. Copyright was never even referred to as "property" until recent history, and this change in language was largely a rhetorical move by rights holders intended to shift the opinions of people like yourself. Turns out that this was a good strategy, judging by your overconfidence in your flawed views. Copyright is a system of rights that may or may not make the purchasing of infringing copies wrongful, but whether or not it does, and the extent to which it does, will be based on policy considerations concerning the goals of copyright, and not moral considerations about the wrong of "stealing" someone's "property". In Canada, for example, it is perfectly legal to accept a CD with infringing copies of music, even if you know them to be infringing. What is prohibited is the reproduction of the songs, not the accepting of them.
A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision found that the police can collect and examine your garbage without a warrant, even if it is in sealed, opaque bags, in a trashcan, within your property line. Decision: http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc17/2009scc17.html.
Islam is the only religion where you can be considered a moderate for not supporting terrorism. Surely that tells you something. Besides, moderate Islam and terrorist Muslims are standing on a par with respect to the rationality of their beliefs. Both groups of people have a view of the world colored by an irrational adoption of some ancient dogma. In supporting one you inevitably support the other, by granting credence to the idea that "faith" is a sensible (and indeed positive) way to go about forming your beliefs. Faith is a danger, no matter who is doing it, because all of our beliefs should be thought through. Moderates give aid and comfort to extremists by supporting the concept of faith and unchecked belief in superstition. There is no such thing as "true Islam" -all brands of Islam are equally fictional. If anything, extremists are closest to a "true Islam" because their behavior most accurately reflects Islamic texts and the life of Mohammad.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon since I made the mistake of ordering textbooks. Several weeks into the course I sent an e-mail asking why I haven't received my books. The response was along the lines of "wait X weeks to make sure they aren't already sent" (I think X was 6 weeks). After waiting and not receiving anything, I wrote back. They replied something along the lines of "we can't do anything if an order was placed more than X weeks ago" (yes, the same X). My order never did arrive and I had to issue a charge back. No explanation or apology was ever given.
I predict significantly more vandalism and self promotion with this project than with Wikipedia. That said, I still think it's a good idea. But the article had a very low content:words ratio, so I don't really have a good idea as to how it will be implemented.
All errors taken into account, the study has at least the following merit. It applies a consistent measure to various countries in various years, and that measure can plausibly be said to be a rough estimate (however biased and inflated) of privacy violations. We have, therefore, a useful measure for determining when respect for privacy is getting worse, if nothing else. Thus, the conclusion that privacy is decreasing worldwide is plausibly respectable.
I challenge you to produce a better measure of privacy. When you do, I suspect that it would not be impossible to obtain access to the data used to generate this chart, and then to produce your own -more accurate- chart. Good luck!
Computer vision, sorting, and chess playing are all, no doubt, interesting and complex tasks. None of them, however, require intelligence.
All of them (well, not 'sorting', but that example was not what I had intended) are considered part of AI.
Only in the sense that such break downs were not predicted - not because they could not be predicted.
My post essentially was arguing that it is important to study these systems before "releasing" them. This entails that I believe it is possible to predict their behavior (i.e. your comment was included in my post). The examples of unpredictable breaks in software were meant to illustrate that things go wrong in interesting ways. This is, I think, an important fact. Things don't just fall apart -they misbehave.
You have to agree that the robotic car you are describing is not really exploring anything. What it is doing is probably the opposite of intelligence.
The "opposite" of intelligence? Something tells me you have no training in either philosophy of mind or artificial intelligence. No offense and please correct me if I'm wrong. The robot is in fact a perfect example of emergent behavior. Perhaps if it memorized where it had been you would consider it exploring? This can be achieved by dropping markers as it travels and having a sensor to detect the markers. Though, if the purpose of the robot was to find a power source to recharge, you would find its wandering behavior meaningful (and describe it as exploring) even if it didn't remember where it had been (since the robot would probabilistically achieve its goal). Building intelligent systems -in this paradigm- is a matter of compounding subsystems that each interact with each other and the environment in interesting ways. As you give the robot more subsystems, its behavior is increasingly complex and increasingly intelligent.
Can one achieve this with "if...then" statements and "for" loops? Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think so.
Well, since there are finite inputs, finite outputs, and a finite amount of time, ANY type of behavior imaginable can be implemented through nothing but "if...then" statements. But this is a minor philosophic point (on par with the argument you are making). Also, the human brain could be understood as a complicated system of "if...then" statements; "IF neuron X234v fires, THEN the following neurons fire..." (yes, I know it is more complicated than that).
But to bring it back to reality.... The fact of the matter is no one is trying to build AI systems out of '"if...then" statements and "for" loops', as you put it. First, let's break up AI into task oriented systems that are simply meant to do something useful (computer vision, sorting, chess playing, etc) and systems meant to exhibit general intelligence (learning agents in virtual environments, robot brains, etc). The latter task is -nowadays- based largely on emergent properties. Programmers do not explicitly design a system line by line and response by response. Rather, a system of interrelated components are built which react with the environment in interesting -often unpredictable- ways.
As a very simple example, consider a robotic car with two sensors on the front aimed 45 degrees to the left and right. Program the robot simply to turn the opposite wheels from the sensor in reverse when the sensor is obstructed. With two lines of code (three if you count the code to move all wheels forwards normally) you have now produced a robot which will, when placed in an environment, exhibit behavior such as evading objects and corners, backing up when it gets stuck, and exploring its surrounding territory. If the wheels happen to wobble a bit, your robots exploring behavior will be even better. Intelligence seems to emerge from a reaction from simple components within a complicated environment. Another example -the complexity of the ants path is not based on anything in the ants brain but on the features of the environment the ant is navigating.
Now let's talk about when software breaks. It is often the case that, when software breaks, it breaks in unpredictable ways -this is almost true by definition. Sometimes there will be a simple crash, sometimes you might dump your database into the public, sometimes something interesting and useful will happen -your character might be able to walk through walls if you name him 'null'.
What might happen when autonomous software agents "break"? Should we start releasing such agents over the net? Should we build devices (mobile phones, palm pilots etc.) that house agents such as this? This becomes a greater concern as the complexity of these systems -and correspondingly their ways of breaking- increases. Further, the power that these systems have access to is increasing also. This is perhaps not an issue for us _right now_, but it would be foolhardy to dismiss these concerns as "science fiction" (especially considering the pace of development in the field). We need to carefully consider the scope of autonomous software agents, the ways in which they might break, the power we are providing them, and so on, as the field develops.
Does the vehicle have to be one piece? Specifically can it launch a UAV to provide a top down view of the street? This could be then used to avoid crowds (or head towards them), get around dead ends, and generally navigate the cities. The imagery we have is often horribly out of date and roads have moved, stopped existing, or new ones have popped up.
Yes. All of the equipment has to be on the vehicle. As far as communication goes: GPS is allowed, and a remote kill switch is allowed (required, actually). Other than that, everything is on board. Typical fare is regular cameras (which have good distance vision, but require some smart computer vision algorithms) combined with laser range finders. The winner of the last DARPA challenge was a robot named Stanley (from Stanford) who mapped laser range finding data onto the video images, thus identifying the safe path in the image to travel through.
Is the x-box not expensive enough already? I can have the option of buying an xbox or a new computer. This is getting stupid. I always tell people there are no good games for the xbox -I am baiting them for the obvious answer: "no, halo is a good game!" Yes, Halo is a good game. And Halo 2. And Halo 3. Microsoft admits they are keeping afloat on the Halo franchise. Which is why they should stop calling the system the xbox and call it what it is -the Halo Gaming Platform, or alternately, the H-Box. The H-box is the system of choice for suckers for advertising, and those people who can't identify a quality product.
Actually, the stories revolving around the three laws are how they always go wrong! My biggest problem around the three laws is that any robot supposed to be following them has to have ifninite knowledge. Let's say a janitor robot is cleaning up and comes across a hostage situation. The hostage taker says "come any closer and I'll kill a hostage!" Let's hope your janitor-bot has detailed files on human psychology or something bad might happen!
Programming control logic into robots is a good idea in principle, but having hard and fast rules like the three laws doesn't seem tenable -a better option would be to design the robots to be moral -make them feel good for doing nice things and bad for doing bad things. This is a complicated and fuzzy endeavor, but I think ultimately the way to go.
Interesting idea, but here are the immediate problems as I see them...
Captchas are now twice as annoying for the user, since you have to type two words (but maybe the fact that there is some value in it will appease the user).
Some algorithms these days are quite literally better than humans at detecting the hidden text in captchas. Pictures, not text, are better for this purpose.
Testing the answer against another users answer is a good idea in principle (its how they make sure no one is cheating in distributed computing projects) but giving the same answer as another user is not difficult when they are using the same algorithm. We can assume that any algorithm being applied against this captcha is trying to do loads of work (that is, after all, why you write such a program) and so it will be answering the same question multiple times.
I'm struggling to find the utility of the study. So, if we learned to see differently, we could see the world in a way different enough to not be fooled by certain optical illusions, and probably be fooled by others?
The program wasn't designed to detect optical illusions -it was a by-product of the training the system went through. The fact that it was tricked by a similar illusion without being programmed to do so might be taken as suggestive that our learning mechanisms are similar to the ones used by the program. From TFA:
The virtual robots in this study were driven solely by the statistics of their training history and used these statistics as the basis of their correct and subsequent incorrect decisions. Similarly, we believe the human brain generates perceptions of the world in the same way, by encoding the statistical relationships between images and scenes in our past visual experience and uses this as the basis for behaving usefully and consistently towards the sources of visual images
Sorry, I assumed that at some point in the future this will be used by police for crowd control. Of course, I would also like to know how they would react to a target deflecting the beam back to a soldier.
I carefully reread your post and I get what you're saying now. I don't know if this is a case of misreading on my part or miswriting on your part. Either way, I understand now the situation you are describing. If I'm not mistaken, my response to your original post is applicable to this case.
If he could see the colour in any sense at all then he should have some discriminatory ability. If he has no discriminatory ability, then we have no evidence that he experiences colour at all -do you understand? If he can't produce any evidence suggesting he can see colours, then he can't -period. We need evidence to believe things. If he can't discriminate at all then he is not experiencing colours -he is experiencing an artifact of unorganized neural crosstalk.
Let me put it another way, if he can't discriminate between colours in any way at all, then why should we believe his claim that he experiences colours in different ways? Why should we think he is experiencing colours at all? In fact, it would be bizarre to claim he is experiencing colours, because his so called experience of colours would be different when looking at precisely the same colour twice in a row. If it wasn't, then he COULD discriminate between colours (ie, by identifying the same colour by the experience he has). Do you understand yet?
One issue I find interesting in this context is the guy who was colour-blind (that is, he couldn't differentiate colours in certain parts of the spectrum). This guy had synesthaesia, and although he couldn't physically see certain colours, he could experience them through his synesthaesia. He referred to them as "Martian colours".
If he couldn't differentiate colours then how could he be said to be "experiencing colours" (albeit through synesthaesia) -if he was experiencing the colours in any non-random way then he should be able to differentiate them, and if it was random, then we are without question talking about some unorganized and unwanted crosstalk between brain areas, and not an experience of colours. Unless I have misread you somewhere.
It would be fair to assume that ordinary mice's brains did not even contain the "concept" or "perception" of red hardwired in, since what would the point be?
I think what you're suggesting is that colour concepts (or more accurately colour qualia -the particular experience of viewing a particular colour) are developed on the fly given the sensory stimulus (ie give the mice colour receptors and they will learn how to see colours). I agree with you. I think the article makes this point same -the research demonstrates the flexibility of brains -even in mice- of dealing with different types of information. Lots of research demonstrates this (fascinating) point, but we have yet to develop a generalized theory of cognition which accounts for it. Another example is using the tongue for sensory input -the tongue has very many sensors, and you can use the tongue as a USB port -just wire up a webcam to send its data to the tongue, and you can give vision to a blind person (after a little bit of training).
But then, now does this explain "Martian colours"?
I don't think I have enough information on the particular case you mentioned to answer your question properly. Most importantly, I don't know whether the person in question was able to demonstrate that his "martian colours" actually enabled him to discriminate between objects of different colour, or if what he was experiencing was simply neural noise. However, I can try to answer your question if we talk about the more general synesthaesia instead of this particular case. First of all, its worth noting that synesthaesia is a disorder, even though sometimes its sufferers are endowed with special abilities such as enhanced recall. What is going on is unwanted crosstalk between normally unrelated brain areas. So for example, someone might have crosstalk between an area normally dealing with quantity and an area normally dealing with colour -so they experience numbers as colour. What is happening -I think- is that colour areas of the brain are being recruited for additional processing from the math area (to use that case as an example). Because of general adaptability of the brain (as evidenced by the tri-colour mice and USB tongue) the information is actually processed properly by the wrong brain area. More processing power = better memory, which we see. The only interesting question that remains is the qualia -why should numbers be experienced differently just because they are being processed somewhere else in the brain? I suppose the only simple answer that can be given to this (without going into the much more cumbersome philosophical debate of why we should experience anything at all) is that different areas of the brain are fundamentally and intrinsically differentiated in the way they organize and interpret that data. Perhaps our colour processing area is intrisically designed to create a 3d worldmap on the fly, and our number area is intrinsically designed to contemplate quantity, etc. Thus, those with the disorder that I mentioned would experience numbers as 3-dimensional objects, which is what those with the disorder tell us the experience is like.
Slashdot Mirror
The best thing to do is to find a free legal clinic in your area. I volunteered at a clinic in Toronto called Artists Legal Advice Services, which offered 1/2 hour of free legal advice to artists/creators/etc. There may be a similar clinic in your area. If not (or in addition) I recommend you read a primer on Intellectual Property Law. I like the "Irwin Law" introduction to Intellectual Property. Finally, questions about whether your game infringes someone's copyright or trademark often do not have right or wrong answers. That is precisely why we have a court system, and why we pay lawyers so much. These questions are argued and resolved at the time of trial. The best you can do is to be aware of the legal landscape and hope you can afford a good lawyer if it comes down to that.
This is close to the truth but not entirely correct. The precursor to modern copyright were the licensing laws put into place with the invention of the printing press. Printing anything without a license was made into crime, and this license to print -the copyright- was given to a printer only after the work had been deemed to be non-blasphemous and non-seditious. In other words, the inception of copyright was a regime of censorship.
After the censorship regime was eliminated, the printers had become quite a powerful industry. They lobbied for the ability to continue charging money based on the printing rights they held. This is when the argument you spoke of comes into play. The printers argued that if copyrights are not granted, the production of art will slow down or cease because it will be too hard for creators to turn a profit.
You are 100% wrong in almost everything you just said. First, let me start out by pointing out that there are two classes of laws -moral/rights based laws and utilitarian/instrumental laws. Only the former is about morality. Laws in the latter class are not based in morality but are rather intended to achieve some particular goal. Copyright law, at least in the US, Canada, and the UK, (among others) is a utilitarian regime (France, for example, has a rights based system of copyright). This is why the US constitution limits the power of congress to create monopolies in works, requiring that such monopolies must be in service of the promotion of progress in science and the arts (that is the utilitarian aim of the law) and must be for a limited period of time (recognizing that granting a monopoly in intellectual products is or may be a necessary evil). In conclusion, you couldn't be more wrong in your opinion of copyright, which is a regime intended to promote progress in science and the arts. If it ever fails to achieve that, for example by preventing people's preferred enjoyment of intellectual products, then it has failed in its essential purpose and should be amended.
Intellectual products are not physical things, and it is completely erroneous to use the analogy of physical property. Copyright was never even referred to as "property" until recent history, and this change in language was largely a rhetorical move by rights holders intended to shift the opinions of people like yourself. Turns out that this was a good strategy, judging by your overconfidence in your flawed views. Copyright is a system of rights that may or may not make the purchasing of infringing copies wrongful, but whether or not it does, and the extent to which it does, will be based on policy considerations concerning the goals of copyright, and not moral considerations about the wrong of "stealing" someone's "property". In Canada, for example, it is perfectly legal to accept a CD with infringing copies of music, even if you know them to be infringing. What is prohibited is the reproduction of the songs, not the accepting of them.
A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision found that the police can collect and examine your garbage without a warrant, even if it is in sealed, opaque bags, in a trashcan, within your property line. Decision: http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc17/2009scc17.html.
Good discussion of the video on youtube:
video 1)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MrY7WmbWSn8
Video 2)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=t-1KwNQAXrs
...Let the people decide what should be on there...
Currently there is always a human in the loop to decide on the use of lethal force. However, this is set to change...
Sometimes I worry about this, but then I remember that there is never any shortage of humans willing to pull the trigger / blow themselves up.
Islam is the only religion where you can be considered a moderate for not supporting terrorism. Surely that tells you something. Besides, moderate Islam and terrorist Muslims are standing on a par with respect to the rationality of their beliefs. Both groups of people have a view of the world colored by an irrational adoption of some ancient dogma. In supporting one you inevitably support the other, by granting credence to the idea that "faith" is a sensible (and indeed positive) way to go about forming your beliefs. Faith is a danger, no matter who is doing it, because all of our beliefs should be thought through. Moderates give aid and comfort to extremists by supporting the concept of faith and unchecked belief in superstition. There is no such thing as "true Islam" -all brands of Islam are equally fictional. If anything, extremists are closest to a "true Islam" because their behavior most accurately reflects Islamic texts and the life of Mohammad.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon since I made the mistake of ordering textbooks. Several weeks into the course I sent an e-mail asking why I haven't received my books. The response was along the lines of "wait X weeks to make sure they aren't already sent" (I think X was 6 weeks). After waiting and not receiving anything, I wrote back. They replied something along the lines of "we can't do anything if an order was placed more than X weeks ago" (yes, the same X). My order never did arrive and I had to issue a charge back. No explanation or apology was ever given.
I predict significantly more vandalism and self promotion with this project than with Wikipedia. That said, I still think it's a good idea. But the article had a very low content:words ratio, so I don't really have a good idea as to how it will be implemented.
All errors taken into account, the study has at least the following merit. It applies a consistent measure to various countries in various years, and that measure can plausibly be said to be a rough estimate (however biased and inflated) of privacy violations. We have, therefore, a useful measure for determining when respect for privacy is getting worse, if nothing else. Thus, the conclusion that privacy is decreasing worldwide is plausibly respectable.
I challenge you to produce a better measure of privacy. When you do, I suspect that it would not be impossible to obtain access to the data used to generate this chart, and then to produce your own -more accurate- chart. Good luck!
Computer vision, sorting, and chess playing are all, no doubt, interesting and complex tasks. None of them, however, require intelligence.
All of them (well, not 'sorting', but that example was not what I had intended) are considered part of AI.
Only in the sense that such break downs were not predicted - not because they could not be predicted.
My post essentially was arguing that it is important to study these systems before "releasing" them. This entails that I believe it is possible to predict their behavior (i.e. your comment was included in my post). The examples of unpredictable breaks in software were meant to illustrate that things go wrong in interesting ways. This is, I think, an important fact. Things don't just fall apart -they misbehave.
You have to agree that the robotic car you are describing is not really exploring anything. What it is doing is probably the opposite of intelligence.
The "opposite" of intelligence? Something tells me you have no training in either philosophy of mind or artificial intelligence. No offense and please correct me if I'm wrong. The robot is in fact a perfect example of emergent behavior. Perhaps if it memorized where it had been you would consider it exploring? This can be achieved by dropping markers as it travels and having a sensor to detect the markers. Though, if the purpose of the robot was to find a power source to recharge, you would find its wandering behavior meaningful (and describe it as exploring) even if it didn't remember where it had been (since the robot would probabilistically achieve its goal). Building intelligent systems -in this paradigm- is a matter of compounding subsystems that each interact with each other and the environment in interesting ways. As you give the robot more subsystems, its behavior is increasingly complex and increasingly intelligent.
Can one achieve this with "if...then" statements and "for" loops? Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think so.
Well, since there are finite inputs, finite outputs, and a finite amount of time, ANY type of behavior imaginable can be implemented through nothing but "if...then" statements. But this is a minor philosophic point (on par with the argument you are making). Also, the human brain could be understood as a complicated system of "if...then" statements; "IF neuron X234v fires, THEN the following neurons fire..." (yes, I know it is more complicated than that).
But to bring it back to reality.... The fact of the matter is no one is trying to build AI systems out of '"if...then" statements and "for" loops', as you put it. First, let's break up AI into task oriented systems that are simply meant to do something useful (computer vision, sorting, chess playing, etc) and systems meant to exhibit general intelligence (learning agents in virtual environments, robot brains, etc). The latter task is -nowadays- based largely on emergent properties. Programmers do not explicitly design a system line by line and response by response. Rather, a system of interrelated components are built which react with the environment in interesting -often unpredictable- ways.
As a very simple example, consider a robotic car with two sensors on the front aimed 45 degrees to the left and right. Program the robot simply to turn the opposite wheels from the sensor in reverse when the sensor is obstructed. With two lines of code (three if you count the code to move all wheels forwards normally) you have now produced a robot which will, when placed in an environment, exhibit behavior such as evading objects and corners, backing up when it gets stuck, and exploring its surrounding territory. If the wheels happen to wobble a bit, your robots exploring behavior will be even better. Intelligence seems to emerge from a reaction from simple components within a complicated environment. Another example -the complexity of the ants path is not based on anything in the ants brain but on the features of the environment the ant is navigating.
Now let's talk about when software breaks. It is often the case that, when software breaks, it breaks in unpredictable ways -this is almost true by definition. Sometimes there will be a simple crash, sometimes you might dump your database into the public, sometimes something interesting and useful will happen -your character might be able to walk through walls if you name him 'null'.
What might happen when autonomous software agents "break"? Should we start releasing such agents over the net? Should we build devices (mobile phones, palm pilots etc.) that house agents such as this? This becomes a greater concern as the complexity of these systems -and correspondingly their ways of breaking- increases. Further, the power that these systems have access to is increasing also. This is perhaps not an issue for us _right now_, but it would be foolhardy to dismiss these concerns as "science fiction" (especially considering the pace of development in the field). We need to carefully consider the scope of autonomous software agents, the ways in which they might break, the power we are providing them, and so on, as the field develops.
Does the vehicle have to be one piece? Specifically can it launch a UAV to provide a top down view of the street? This could be then used to avoid crowds (or head towards them), get around dead ends, and generally navigate the cities. The imagery we have is often horribly out of date and roads have moved, stopped existing, or new ones have popped up.
Yes. All of the equipment has to be on the vehicle. As far as communication goes: GPS is allowed, and a remote kill switch is allowed (required, actually). Other than that, everything is on board. Typical fare is regular cameras (which have good distance vision, but require some smart computer vision algorithms) combined with laser range finders. The winner of the last DARPA challenge was a robot named Stanley (from Stanford) who mapped laser range finding data onto the video images, thus identifying the safe path in the image to travel through.
In other news, a recent survey taken by patrons of a library said that 55% of people think that libraries can take the role of a significant other.
Is the x-box not expensive enough already? I can have the option of buying an xbox or a new computer. This is getting stupid. I always tell people there are no good games for the xbox -I am baiting them for the obvious answer: "no, halo is a good game!" Yes, Halo is a good game. And Halo 2. And Halo 3. Microsoft admits they are keeping afloat on the Halo franchise. Which is why they should stop calling the system the xbox and call it what it is -the Halo Gaming Platform, or alternately, the H-Box. The H-box is the system of choice for suckers for advertising, and those people who can't identify a quality product.
Sounds more like taking control to me.
Actually, the stories revolving around the three laws are how they always go wrong! My biggest problem around the three laws is that any robot supposed to be following them has to have ifninite knowledge. Let's say a janitor robot is cleaning up and comes across a hostage situation. The hostage taker says "come any closer and I'll kill a hostage!" Let's hope your janitor-bot has detailed files on human psychology or something bad might happen!
Programming control logic into robots is a good idea in principle, but having hard and fast rules like the three laws doesn't seem tenable -a better option would be to design the robots to be moral -make them feel good for doing nice things and bad for doing bad things. This is a complicated and fuzzy endeavor, but I think ultimately the way to go.
Interesting idea, but here are the immediate problems as I see them...
Captchas are now twice as annoying for the user, since you have to type two words (but maybe the fact that there is some value in it will appease the user).
Some algorithms these days are quite literally better than humans at detecting the hidden text in captchas. Pictures, not text, are better for this purpose.
Testing the answer against another users answer is a good idea in principle (its how they make sure no one is cheating in distributed computing projects) but giving the same answer as another user is not difficult when they are using the same algorithm. We can assume that any algorithm being applied against this captcha is trying to do loads of work (that is, after all, why you write such a program) and so it will be answering the same question multiple times.
Am I right on these points? (I just woke up).
The program wasn't designed to detect optical illusions -it was a by-product of the training the system went through. The fact that it was tricked by a similar illusion without being programmed to do so might be taken as suggestive that our learning mechanisms are similar to the ones used by the program. From TFA:
Sorry, I assumed that at some point in the future this will be used by police for crowd control. Of course, I would also like to know how they would react to a target deflecting the beam back to a soldier.
Would you be charged with assaulting an officer if you deflected the beam back to the source?
I carefully reread your post and I get what you're saying now. I don't know if this is a case of misreading on my part or miswriting on your part. Either way, I understand now the situation you are describing. If I'm not mistaken, my response to your original post is applicable to this case.
If he could see the colour in any sense at all then he should have some discriminatory ability. If he has no discriminatory ability, then we have no evidence that he experiences colour at all -do you understand? If he can't produce any evidence suggesting he can see colours, then he can't -period. We need evidence to believe things. If he can't discriminate at all then he is not experiencing colours -he is experiencing an artifact of unorganized neural crosstalk.
Let me put it another way, if he can't discriminate between colours in any way at all, then why should we believe his claim that he experiences colours in different ways? Why should we think he is experiencing colours at all? In fact, it would be bizarre to claim he is experiencing colours, because his so called experience of colours would be different when looking at precisely the same colour twice in a row. If it wasn't, then he COULD discriminate between colours (ie, by identifying the same colour by the experience he has). Do you understand yet?
One issue I find interesting in this context is the guy who was colour-blind (that is, he couldn't differentiate colours in certain parts of the spectrum). This guy had synesthaesia, and although he couldn't physically see certain colours, he could experience them through his synesthaesia. He referred to them as "Martian colours".
If he couldn't differentiate colours then how could he be said to be "experiencing colours" (albeit through synesthaesia) -if he was experiencing the colours in any non-random way then he should be able to differentiate them, and if it was random, then we are without question talking about some unorganized and unwanted crosstalk between brain areas, and not an experience of colours. Unless I have misread you somewhere.
It would be fair to assume that ordinary mice's brains did not even contain the "concept" or "perception" of red hardwired in, since what would the point be?
I think what you're suggesting is that colour concepts (or more accurately colour qualia -the particular experience of viewing a particular colour) are developed on the fly given the sensory stimulus (ie give the mice colour receptors and they will learn how to see colours). I agree with you. I think the article makes this point same -the research demonstrates the flexibility of brains -even in mice- of dealing with different types of information. Lots of research demonstrates this (fascinating) point, but we have yet to develop a generalized theory of cognition which accounts for it. Another example is using the tongue for sensory input -the tongue has very many sensors, and you can use the tongue as a USB port -just wire up a webcam to send its data to the tongue, and you can give vision to a blind person (after a little bit of training).
But then, now does this explain "Martian colours"?
I don't think I have enough information on the particular case you mentioned to answer your question properly. Most importantly, I don't know whether the person in question was able to demonstrate that his "martian colours" actually enabled him to discriminate between objects of different colour, or if what he was experiencing was simply neural noise. However, I can try to answer your question if we talk about the more general synesthaesia instead of this particular case. First of all, its worth noting that synesthaesia is a disorder, even though sometimes its sufferers are endowed with special abilities such as enhanced recall. What is going on is unwanted crosstalk between normally unrelated brain areas. So for example, someone might have crosstalk between an area normally dealing with quantity and an area normally dealing with colour -so they experience numbers as colour. What is happening -I think- is that colour areas of the brain are being recruited for additional processing from the math area (to use that case as an example). Because of general adaptability of the brain (as evidenced by the tri-colour mice and USB tongue) the information is actually processed properly by the wrong brain area. More processing power = better memory, which we see. The only interesting question that remains is the qualia -why should numbers be experienced differently just because they are being processed somewhere else in the brain? I suppose the only simple answer that can be given to this (without going into the much more cumbersome philosophical debate of why we should experience anything at all) is that different areas of the brain are fundamentally and intrinsically differentiated in the way they organize and interpret that data. Perhaps our colour processing area is intrisically designed to create a 3d worldmap on the fly, and our number area is intrinsically designed to contemplate quantity, etc. Thus, those with the disorder that I mentioned would experience numbers as 3-dimensional objects, which is what those with the disorder tell us the experience is like.