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

[silveradept]

Clearly it needs the passport to permit an agent to enter the country and secure it access to more powerful computers. It's Person of Interest territory now.