Who is responsible when thinking machines break the law?

[thewayne]

Excellent article by Bruce Schneier. "Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market...all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased was benign­ -- fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers -- but it also purchased ten ecstasy tablets and a fake Hungarian passport."

Artificial Intelligence has been getting a lot of press recently with Elon Musk and Bill Gates talking about the danger of AI running wild. They have some valid points, but I'm not too worried about it: how long does your Windows machine go without crashing? ;-) Anyway, there's no way to implement Asimov's Laws of Robotics, it's debatable if we'll ever have an AI along the likes seen in HAL or Terminator. But who knows.

But I have to wonder: what would a computer do with a fake Hungarian passport?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/when_thinking_m.html

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

I think it would fall under the same law that says if you let your pet panther loose and it eats a baby it's your fault.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

My panther DID NOT eat those babies! It was dingos, I tell ya! Feral dingos who swam to Patagonia, made their way up and across the Panama Canal, then snuck across the border with Ebola-infected anchor babies! Yeah, that's what happened!

Right now, I think that's probably the case. But when you have self-programming machines and go a few generations down the code so that nothing remains of the original code, then what?

If you do own a panther, you are definitely assuming risk for having a dangerous animal, and there are laws about that. Same thing if you own venomous snakes and one gets loose and bites someone. And there are attractive nuisance laws against unfenced swimming pools and such.

Tech is always poorly understood by lawmakers, look at all of the attempts at trying to require back doors in to crypto systems, thinking that only their good spies could access it, ignoring that criminals would be gleeful at such a mandate.