Zecco made the error. Zecco eats the consequences. Period. Why should people be held liable for someone else's mistakes?
So you drive into work, and manage somehow to park your car in the wrong spont, belonging to and reserved for a neighboring business. Upon leaving the office to head home, you discover the mistake, and find the parking spots owner has stripped it down to the frame and sold all the parts on craigslist.
Explain why you should eat these consequences.
If maybe your neighbor had called a tow truck and had the vehicle impounded, sure I could see you having to eat that.
But I'm not following why you should have to eat your neighbors blatant theft of something he knew wasn't his. Just because you put the car in his spot is not a valid reason for him to think its now his car. Similarly, if the bank makes a mistake in your favor with your account, its not valid to assume the money is yours. The bank should eat all the costs of fixing their mistake, but if you attempt to try and keep or use the money that isn't yours, you become liable for that. Their is lots of supporting precedence for this too.
I happen to be shopping for a house. I find possible matches via a realty site, and then find the house on google maps. I find it really handy to see an actual photo of the house. I can see the neighborhood, the nearby houses, and the general layout of the street and land. I find this really helpful, because often it saves me from driving out and wasting my time.
I happen to be shopping for a house too. Streetview is only worth beans if its really recent. If only we didn't have to wait years for google to drive their van through town again... if only they'd set up live cameras every few hundred meters. That'd be so great! It would save me so much time shopping for a home. We should totally do it just for that reason alone!
your bunker? Try in your house.... or behind your fence.... or, really, anywhere not visible from the PUBLIC street.
Your missing the point.
Hell, you could drape a sheet over your house and people can do shit to see what's behind it.
Is that what you are seriously suggesting people should have to do if they don't want to be part of google streetview project?
I'm curious what you think of victims of upskirt photos. Is it "Hey, you could drape a sheet over your entire body if you want some reasonable privacy." or is it "Hey, if you want to wear a skirt or dress in a public place without being upskirt photographed that's pretty reasonable."
Also, I don't know why your problem seems to be with the scale. You're not that important - your house will be right up there with the billions of other houses visible on google. If anything, you're protected by the relative anonymity and by the crowd of other, equally boring images surrounding you.
Right, and if we put a camera in everyone's shower, hey, nobody would ever look at yours with all the billions of other equally boring shower cams right? No one at work / school / neighborhood / slashdot would try to look in at you or your wife or family, for their sick amusement or just to embarrass or harrass you... no that would never happen.
If I don't want MY house on google, and I support the right of anyone else who doesn't want pictures of their houses on google, why should that be a big deal to you?
I mean, I'm not stopping you from posting all the pictures of your house on the internet that you want. Go nuts.
You have written: "systematically photographed and geotagged for inclusion in some corporations for profit database" about 14 times in this one thread. Are these rules specific for a reason?
No. They serve to illustrate the opposite end of the continuum from 'random vacation photos'.
What if I... [ intermediate weasel point on the continuum ]
Good question. I illustrated the far end of the continuum. Its not really surprising that issues might arise before one reaches it.
Can't you just accept that your house is public?
Can't you just accept that simply because something is public, that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it?
You can drive on a public road but you can't pitch a tent on one.
You can take a picture of a tree in a public park at will, but you can't film a blockbuster movie there without all kinds of permits.
You can pick blueberries off the bushes in a public park for a snack, but you can't open a jam business harvesting those same bushes.
Why do you find it so unacceptable that there should be a reasonable limit on what you can do with images of private property you can see from public property. Nobody is trying to saying you aren't allowed to look. Nobody is even saying you can't take photos. What people are saying is that perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to harvest them on a massive systematic scale... In precisely the same way you are allowed to eat blueberries as you wander through the park, but at the same time you aren't allowed to hire a berry picking team to systematically harvest them to make jam.
That's laughable. Good luck getting your local prosecutor's office to agree with you,
Really, if someone made a point of photographing all my stuff and putting pictures of it online, moreoever while while taunting me about it: "you can't do shit", etc... it would hardly be laughable. It would be bona fide harrassment/stalking.
especially in a case where a company is doing what Google's doing. In other words, you're not special, you're not being singled out
So its stalking and harassment if you just followed me around taking pictures of me and my stuff... but if you find a way of using technology to do it to a whole bunch of people then everything is just peachy? That's a rather fascinating position. I don't follow the logic.
I absolutely have the legal right to put pictures of your public stuff all over the Internet. There's not a damned thing you can do about it, either unless you decide to go the assault route....
I'd actually go after you for stalking and/or harassment.
A random collection of photographs of a public space, tagged with vague location info can easily be converted into a 3D model you can virtually walk around. Have you seen Photosynth's Notre Dame Demo?
Its not an invasion of privacy until someone actually collects all the photos and constructs the virtual space from them. But at that point they aren't a collection of photos randomly scattered across the internet anymore.
They've been systematically aggregated, indexed, and stitched together into something else.
1) You have to understand that my post about filming kids changing was to illustrate just how ridiculous the assertion that "cameras only catch light that falls in them so they can't possibly invade privacy" was.
2) As to "where I draw the line", I draw it at "what the subject would likely think", because that is the considerate thing to do.
If people simply exercised good manners and common sense, we wouldn't need piles of laws to clumsily try to regulate acceptable behavior and common sense. Yeah... I dream of an impossible utopia. I know.
We've agreed (by virtue of participating in society) to be tolerant when someone takes an inoffensive picture of our property from a public vantage point.
However we never agreed to allow our property to be systematically photographed and geotagged for inclusion in some corporations for profit database, and for it to be indexed and published online. That's an abuse of our tolerance.
Its pretty sad that 'acceptable behaviour' is defined by 'is it legal?'.
But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us people will be happy to pass a law. The books are full of stupid laws trying to regulate asshat behaviour.
Because a few vacation photos, over a hundred tourists, equates to the same thing.
Except that it doesn't equate to the same thing at all.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Because I'd like to see where I'm going when I plan my tourist trip.
And you need a complete step-by-step photo walkthru down every residential side street? I can see the value of google street view for finding a business; and given the choice, most of them will opt in to such a system. But why do you need a photo of every residence in the city?
Besides If you are visiting someone, and their house is THAT hard to find, then they can send you a picture.
Because it really isn't harming you.
That's an argument usually put forth by those who don't understand the value of politeness and good manners.
They were only taking picture of light that was over the public road. Cameras don't reach out and take things.
By that logic, standing in a bucket truck filming the children changing for bed between the slats in their blinds with a telephoto lens and uploading it to the internet isn't at all an invasion of privacy either.
IANAL, but anything plainly viewable from public property is not considered private.
Agreed. However there should be a distinction between "seeing something from public property" and "systematically capturing a complete record of everything that can be seen from public property and uploading it into a for profit geo tagged database".
Its the same polite distinction we use with the 'have a penny / take a penny jar'. Its perfectly socially acceptable to grab a penny or two to round out the change in a purchase from this spare change. Its completely socially unacceptable to systematically go to each establishment and take all their 'spare change' once a week.
Don't want to have people seeing your private shit? Don't keep it out in the open, in public view.
Or perhaps we could develop a social contract that balances things private and public so that I don't have to hide my stuff in a bunker in order to insure you don't feel you have a right to put pictures of it on the internet in a massive geo-tagged database you make available for your private commercial gain.
Don't want interlopers driving through your community?
I'm happy to allow tourists to drive through my community. I don't even mind if they take a few pictures, I don't even mind if they pop them up on their vacation blog.
I don't see why that should mean I should be happy to allow someone to systematically photograph every single part of my community visible from a public vantage point, and then upload it to the internet though.
Why can't we reach an understanding where its perfectly ok to take a few private photographs, but completely unacceptable to systematically photograph everyone/everthing and upload it into a for profit geo-tagged database?
You do realize that by saying tracert instead of traceroute you've just outed yourself as a complete and total idiot?
Since when does admitting to being a windows user amount to outing yourself as complete and total idiot? Especially as most *nix users are also windows users.
People who enjoy these shows really have no business criticizing shows on Foxnews, for example, given that ultimately it's the same thing.
Please explain why you think it is inappropriate to criticize the "Fox News Network" for having the same level of journalistic integrity as a fake news show on the comedy network!!
Can someone explain to me why I'd want to make a phone call over a crappy VOIP system from a cell phone that I bought to be able to uh.. make phone calls?
Because the cell phone provider charges you an arm and a leg for phone calls. And all you REALLY want from them is cellular data so you can use a crappy voip system.
Cellular long distance rates are stupid high.
Even prime time cellular minutes stupid expensive unless you fit neatly into some bizarre rate plan dart board where you only call 5 friends during the day, and all your other calls are 'in-network', except on weekends...
Yes I have. Ever wonder why the word for stress is different from the word for pain? Perhaps because they are completely different things?
An experience such as you describe could easily result in the death of the subject from the related stress, and is not far removed, at least in essence, to what I believe is referred to, in the current vernacular, as waterboarding.
The experience i described would surely be stressful. But stressful isn't painful.
And to compare it to waterboarding if fucking absurd. Waterboarding is simulated drowning. From your own wikipedia link:
"[Waterboarding] can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, ultimately, death"
Care to explain how being submerged in a pool at most neck deep can cause 'extreme pain', 'dry drowning', brain damage from oxygen deprivation'?
What I described was 'scary', would cause 'fear' and 'stress', but not pain.
So, having successfully described a method of mental torture, how do you now feel about your "I'd hardly call anything the human experiences throughout the ordeal as pain" comment?
I never said it would be acceptable to do this to someone. But if you did, yes, it would qualify as torture. But my statement that it doesn't cause pain is accurate.
Your proof depends on the inference that lobsters feel no pain, based only on the assumption that robots feel no pain. You haven't proven anything.
Thank you captain obvious. That's precisely why I explicitly said I was making no actual judgement about lobsters. I was only showing the invalidity of "concluding something does feel pain" by looking at the cooking pot.
A suitably complex robot should theoretically experience something analagous to pain. I have no basis to assume your robot is not suitably complex. and especially if the heat it is trying to escape threatens its existence, I would say this is very analagous to pain.
My robot, was clearly described as a simple temperature sensor, with programmed response to preserve itself by moving away from inhospitable temperatures. This would mean it would likely thrash about in a cooking pot.
What's next, are you going to argue that cars feel 'pain' when their thermostats open, and the cars brains respond by taking steps to further regulate temperature, to protect the integrity of the engine...? Its absurd.
Furthermore, complexity of the AI or perception of threat level of is irrelevant.
You can put a human being into a room and start pouring water into it. As it gets deeper with no sign of stopping, the average person will quickly deduce that if the trend continues this situation threatens its existence and will seek an exit, and feel panic, etc. Suppose, we raise the water to neck level, and then drain it.
I'd hardly call anything the human experiences throughout the ordeal as pain.
but if this line of reasoning is sound, then we can take it all the way to the ultimate conclusion that pain itself does not exist and absolutely EVERYTHING is simply a dumb reflex.
You could at some bio-chemical-electrical level call everything a dumb reflex. However, some of these dumb reflexes map to what we think of as 'pain' and some don't.
The question is: Do crustaceans feel pain. And I don't know the answer.
But conflating "pain" with "behavior" is clearly absurd. My example robot feels no pain, even if its programmed to simulate it. My human example also feels no pain, even though it is "complicated AI" (no actually its straight up intelligent), with a presumed ability to feel pain. And is put in a situation that it deems is life threatening. I'm he'd feel a lot of things, but not pain.
You REALLY have to dig down and look at what crustaceans can sense, and how the information is processed/perceived in the brain before you can say they experience pain.
Humans experience pain. My example robot doesn't. Its conceivable some ultra sophisticated robot of the future could. And I don't know about crustaceans.
A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain...
Acting 'as if its in terrible pain' is not the same thing as being in terrible pain.
If I build an extremely rudimentary AI with a temperature sensor, and a programmed response to "move somewhere else" when the temperature is outside of a given range. And a response to "move somewhere else quickly" when the temperature reaches a certain point. And I stick this simple program in a simple robot.
And I then start raising the temperature...
And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.
So now its intellectual gymasistcs and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see my robot feel pain?
A lobster is like an insect... both almost programmed like simple robots.
I'm not going to say whether they can feel pain or not, I don't know enough about what is physically required to feel pain, or whether these creatures have it. But I'm not going to be convinced by a silly cooking anecdote: "See... it thrashes..."
Who ever promised this data would be anonymous? Do you really expect privacy when posting personal stuff on line, even if you don't sign your name in advance?
1) People still assume that if don't sign their name on the internet then its anonymous. People need to be educated otherwise. Articles like this help.
2) While a lot of people are still grappling with #1 above, there are a lot of more sophisticated people who need to learn that even if they ARE behind 7 proxies, using tor, ssh, on a hacked wifi they are accessing via a pringles can-tenna from across state or even national lines... and then use that super anonymous connection to participate anonymously in 'social networking' sites like twitter, facebook, etc... even if they never reveal a single personal detail about themselves, their place within the social network itself can be reliably used to unmask them once they've had their anonymous account linked to real friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a car analogy is due.
Zecco made the error. Zecco eats the consequences. Period. Why should people be held liable for someone else's mistakes?
So you drive into work, and manage somehow to park your car in the wrong spont, belonging to and reserved for a neighboring business. Upon leaving the office to head home, you discover the mistake, and find the parking spots owner has stripped it down to the frame and sold all the parts on craigslist.
Explain why you should eat these consequences.
If maybe your neighbor had called a tow truck and had the vehicle impounded, sure I could see you having to eat that.
But I'm not following why you should have to eat your neighbors blatant theft of something he knew wasn't his. Just because you put the car in his spot is not a valid reason for him to think its now his car. Similarly, if the bank makes a mistake in your favor with your account, its not valid to assume the money is yours. The bank should eat all the costs of fixing their mistake, but if you attempt to try and keep or use the money that isn't yours, you become liable for that. Their is lots of supporting precedence for this too.
Canada is a country and recognising Quebec as somehow special is what created this mess in the first place.
Stuff like recognizing Quebec is precisely why Canada isn't the USA. Multiculturalism vs the Melting Pot and all that.
I happen to be shopping for a house. I find possible matches via a realty site, and then find the house on google maps. I find it really handy to see an actual photo of the house. I can see the neighborhood, the nearby houses, and the general layout of the street and land. I find this really helpful, because often it saves me from driving out and wasting my time.
I happen to be shopping for a house too. Streetview is only worth beans if its really recent. If only we didn't have to wait years for google to drive their van through town again... if only they'd set up live cameras every few hundred meters. That'd be so great! It would save me so much time shopping for a home. We should totally do it just for that reason alone!
your bunker? Try in your house.... or behind your fence.... or, really, anywhere not visible from the PUBLIC street.
Your missing the point.
Hell, you could drape a sheet over your house and people can do shit to see what's behind it.
Is that what you are seriously suggesting people should have to do if they don't want to be part of google streetview project?
I'm curious what you think of victims of upskirt photos. Is it "Hey, you could drape a sheet over your entire body if you want some reasonable privacy." or is it "Hey, if you want to wear a skirt or dress in a public place without being upskirt photographed that's pretty reasonable."
Also, I don't know why your problem seems to be with the scale. You're not that important - your house will be right up there with the billions of other houses visible on google. If anything, you're protected by the relative anonymity and by the crowd of other, equally boring images surrounding you.
Right, and if we put a camera in everyone's shower, hey, nobody would ever look at yours with all the billions of other equally boring shower cams right? No one at work / school / neighborhood / slashdot would try to look in at you or your wife or family, for their sick amusement or just to embarrass or harrass you... no that would never happen.
If I don't want MY house on google, and I support the right of anyone else who doesn't want pictures of their houses on google, why should that be a big deal to you?
I mean, I'm not stopping you from posting all the pictures of your house on the internet that you want. Go nuts.
You have written: "systematically photographed and geotagged for inclusion in some corporations for profit database" about 14 times in this one thread. Are these rules specific for a reason?
No. They serve to illustrate the opposite end of the continuum from 'random vacation photos'.
What if I ... [ intermediate weasel point on the continuum ]
Good question. I illustrated the far end of the continuum. Its not really surprising that issues might arise before one reaches it.
Can't you just accept that your house is public?
Can't you just accept that simply because something is public, that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it?
You can drive on a public road but you can't pitch a tent on one.
You can take a picture of a tree in a public park at will, but you can't film a blockbuster movie there without all kinds of permits.
You can pick blueberries off the bushes in a public park for a snack, but you can't open a jam business harvesting those same bushes.
Why do you find it so unacceptable that there should be a reasonable limit on what you can do with images of private property you can see from public property. Nobody is trying to saying you aren't allowed to look. Nobody is even saying you can't take photos. What people are saying is that perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to harvest them on a massive systematic scale... In precisely the same way you are allowed to eat blueberries as you wander through the park, but at the same time you aren't allowed to hire a berry picking team to systematically harvest them to make jam.
Since anyone could then collect the photos together from say flickr and build their own 3D model of a public space
A famous high profile public space maybe.
A normal persons home in the suburbs - not so much.
That's laughable. Good luck getting your local prosecutor's office to agree with you,
Really, if someone made a point of photographing all my stuff and putting pictures of it online, moreoever while while taunting me about it: "you can't do shit", etc ... it would hardly be laughable. It would be bona fide harrassment/stalking.
especially in a case where a company is doing what Google's doing. In other words, you're not special, you're not being singled out
So its stalking and harassment if you just followed me around taking pictures of me and my stuff... but if you find a way of using technology to do it to a whole bunch of people then everything is just peachy? That's a rather fascinating position. I don't follow the logic.
I absolutely have the legal right to put pictures of your public stuff all over the Internet. There's not a damned thing you can do about it, either unless you decide to go the assault route....
I'd actually go after you for stalking and/or harassment.
A random collection of photographs of a public space, tagged with vague location info can easily be converted into a 3D model you can virtually walk around. Have you seen Photosynth's Notre Dame Demo?
Its not an invasion of privacy until someone actually collects all the photos and constructs the virtual space from them. But at that point they aren't a collection of photos randomly scattered across the internet anymore.
They've been systematically aggregated, indexed, and stitched together into something else.
From what I can see, so far it's just minor isolated incidents, not the "will of the people".
People need to know and understand the ramifications before they can reject them. People are notoriously dense.
Where do you draw the line, and *why*?
1) You have to understand that my post about filming kids changing was to illustrate just how ridiculous the assertion that "cameras only catch light that falls in them so they can't possibly invade privacy" was.
2) As to "where I draw the line", I draw it at "what the subject would likely think", because that is the considerate thing to do.
If people simply exercised good manners and common sense, we wouldn't need piles of laws to clumsily try to regulate acceptable behavior and common sense. Yeah... I dream of an impossible utopia. I know.
Why?
Its an abuse of the public.
We've agreed (by virtue of participating in society) to be tolerant when someone takes an inoffensive picture of our property from a public vantage point.
However we never agreed to allow our property to be systematically photographed and geotagged for inclusion in some corporations for profit database, and for it to be indexed and published online. That's an abuse of our tolerance.
But not illegal.
Its pretty sad that 'acceptable behaviour' is defined by 'is it legal?'.
But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us people will be happy to pass a law. The books are full of stupid laws trying to regulate asshat behaviour.
Because a few vacation photos, over a hundred tourists, equates to the same thing.
Except that it doesn't equate to the same thing at all.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Because I'd like to see where I'm going when I plan my tourist trip.
And you need a complete step-by-step photo walkthru down every residential side street? I can see the value of google street view for finding a business; and given the choice, most of them will opt in to such a system. But why do you need a photo of every residence in the city?
Besides If you are visiting someone, and their house is THAT hard to find, then they can send you a picture.
Because it really isn't harming you.
That's an argument usually put forth by those who don't understand the value of politeness and good manners.
They were only taking picture of light that was over the public road. Cameras don't reach out and take things.
By that logic, standing in a bucket truck filming the children changing for bed between the slats in their blinds with a telephoto lens and uploading it to the internet isn't at all an invasion of privacy either.
IANAL, but anything plainly viewable from public property is not considered private.
Agreed. However there should be a distinction between "seeing something from public property" and "systematically capturing a complete record of everything that can be seen from public property and uploading it into a for profit geo tagged database".
Its the same polite distinction we use with the 'have a penny / take a penny jar'. Its perfectly socially acceptable to grab a penny or two to round out the change in a purchase from this spare change. Its completely socially unacceptable to systematically go to each establishment and take all their 'spare change' once a week.
Don't want to have people seeing your private shit? Don't keep it out in the open, in public view.
Or perhaps we could develop a social contract that balances things private and public so that I don't have to hide my stuff in a bunker in order to insure you don't feel you have a right to put pictures of it on the internet in a massive geo-tagged database you make available for your private commercial gain.
Don't want interlopers driving through your community?
I'm happy to allow tourists to drive through my community. I don't even mind if they take a few pictures, I don't even mind if they pop them up on their vacation blog.
I don't see why that should mean I should be happy to allow someone to systematically photograph every single part of my community visible from a public vantage point, and then upload it to the internet though.
Why can't we reach an understanding where its perfectly ok to take a few private photographs, but completely unacceptable to systematically photograph everyone/everthing and upload it into a for profit geo-tagged database?
I didn't realize that public roads were your private shit.
Were they really taking pictures of the public road?
You do realize that by saying tracert instead of traceroute you've just outed yourself as a complete and total idiot?
Since when does admitting to being a windows user amount to outing yourself as complete and total idiot? Especially as most *nix users are also windows users.
People who enjoy these shows really have no business criticizing shows on Foxnews, for example, given that ultimately it's the same thing.
Please explain why you think it is inappropriate to criticize the "Fox News Network" for having the same level of journalistic integrity as a fake news show on the comedy network!!
Can someone explain to me why I'd want to make a phone call over a crappy VOIP system from a cell phone that I bought to be able to uh .. make phone calls?
Because the cell phone provider charges you an arm and a leg for phone calls. And all you REALLY want from them is cellular data so you can use a crappy voip system.
Cellular long distance rates are stupid high.
Even prime time cellular minutes stupid expensive unless you fit neatly into some bizarre rate plan dart board where you only call 5 friends during the day, and all your other calls are 'in-network', except on weekends...
That said, I'm not a fan of skype either...
Er ... Ever heard of stress?
Yes I have. Ever wonder why the word for stress is different from the word for pain? Perhaps because they are completely different things?
An experience such as you describe could easily result in the death of the subject from the related stress, and is not far removed, at least in essence, to what I believe is referred to, in the current vernacular, as waterboarding.
The experience i described would surely be stressful. But stressful isn't painful.
And to compare it to waterboarding if fucking absurd. Waterboarding is simulated drowning. From your own wikipedia link:
"[Waterboarding] can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, ultimately, death"
Care to explain how being submerged in a pool at most neck deep can cause 'extreme pain', 'dry drowning', brain damage from oxygen deprivation'?
What I described was 'scary', would cause 'fear' and 'stress', but not pain.
So, having successfully described a method of mental torture, how do you now feel about your "I'd hardly call anything the human experiences throughout the ordeal as pain" comment?
I never said it would be acceptable to do this to someone. But if you did, yes, it would qualify as torture. But my statement that it doesn't cause pain is accurate.
Your proof depends on the inference that lobsters feel no pain, based only on the assumption that robots feel no pain. You haven't proven anything.
Thank you captain obvious. That's precisely why I explicitly said I was making no actual judgement about lobsters. I was only showing the invalidity of "concluding something does feel pain" by looking at the cooking pot.
A suitably complex robot should theoretically experience something analagous to pain. I have no basis to assume your robot is not suitably complex. and especially if the heat it is trying to escape threatens its existence, I would say this is very analagous to pain.
My robot, was clearly described as a simple temperature sensor, with programmed response to preserve itself by moving away from inhospitable temperatures. This would mean it would likely thrash about in a cooking pot.
What's next, are you going to argue that cars feel 'pain' when their thermostats open, and the cars brains respond by taking steps to further regulate temperature, to protect the integrity of the engine...? Its absurd.
Furthermore, complexity of the AI or perception of threat level of is irrelevant.
You can put a human being into a room and start pouring water into it. As it gets deeper with no sign of stopping, the average person will quickly deduce that if the trend continues this situation threatens its existence and will seek an exit, and feel panic, etc. Suppose, we raise the water to neck level, and then drain it.
I'd hardly call anything the human experiences throughout the ordeal as pain.
but if this line of reasoning is sound, then we can take it all the way to the ultimate conclusion that pain itself does not exist and absolutely EVERYTHING is simply a dumb reflex.
You could at some bio-chemical-electrical level call everything a dumb reflex. However, some of these dumb reflexes map to what we think of as 'pain' and some don't.
The question is: Do crustaceans feel pain. And I don't know the answer.
But conflating "pain" with "behavior" is clearly absurd. My example robot feels no pain, even if its programmed to simulate it. My human example also feels no pain, even though it is "complicated AI" (no actually its straight up intelligent), with a presumed ability to feel pain. And is put in a situation that it deems is life threatening. I'm he'd feel a lot of things, but not pain.
You REALLY have to dig down and look at what crustaceans can sense, and how the information is processed/perceived in the brain before you can say they experience pain.
Humans experience pain. My example robot doesn't. Its conceivable some ultra sophisticated robot of the future could. And I don't know about crustaceans.
A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain...
Acting 'as if its in terrible pain' is not the same thing as being in terrible pain.
If I build an extremely rudimentary AI with a temperature sensor, and a programmed response to "move somewhere else" when the temperature is outside of a given range. And a response to "move somewhere else quickly" when the temperature reaches a certain point. And I stick this simple program in a simple robot.
And I then start raising the temperature...
And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.
So now its intellectual gymasistcs and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see my robot feel pain?
A lobster is like an insect... both almost programmed like simple robots.
I'm not going to say whether they can feel pain or not, I don't know enough about what is physically required to feel pain, or whether these creatures have it. But I'm not going to be convinced by a silly cooking anecdote: "See ... it thrashes..."
Who ever promised this data would be anonymous? Do you really expect privacy when posting personal stuff on line, even if you don't sign your name in advance?
1) People still assume that if don't sign their name on the internet then its anonymous. People need to be educated otherwise. Articles like this help.
2) While a lot of people are still grappling with #1 above, there are a lot of more sophisticated people who need to learn that even if they ARE behind 7 proxies, using tor, ssh, on a hacked wifi they are accessing via a pringles can-tenna from across state or even national lines... and then use that super anonymous connection to participate anonymously in 'social networking' sites like twitter, facebook, etc... even if they never reveal a single personal detail about themselves, their place within the social network itself can be reliably used to unmask them once they've had their anonymous account linked to real friends.
People REALLY need to be educated about this.