See, this is the kind of "oh it's just the Internet, it's not like it matters" thinking that's getting more and more people in trouble. It's like people still think the Internet is just for nerds, just a kid thing, just a passing fad and next year we'll all be crazy about something else.
Imagine if, instead of a DDoS, this anonymous crowd went out to Visa's corporate headquarters and glued the doors shut, then threw caltrops and burning diesel fuel all around the building, and then disconnected all the phone lines going in. We wouldn't be sitting around talking like it was a harmless prank.
Courage can be insufficient; optimism can prove to be foolhardiness. If you don't jump you can't fly, but you also won't fall, and falling hurts.
We choose fear and hope because they never fail us. If you fear that something will go wrong, then you'll always--eventually--be right. If you hope that tomorrow will be better, then you'll still have that hope tomorrow, and the day after, and forever.
To the OP: I think we have both legislation and precedent protecting people who publish information that they've obtained, no matter what that information is.
Now, the person who gave the publisher that information could be in quite a bit of trouble, but that's a different issue.
Heck, my personal favorite time-travel scenario is to go kill Kaiser Wilhelm II. Forget Hitler. Kaiser Bill's toy-soldiers and play-navy obsessions were responsible for the arms races that let WWI occur, and if that hadn't happened then Hitler would have been a struggling artist and beer-hall punk.
Wilson's "nonintervention at any price" policy kept World War I going for about twice as long as it ought to have, and may well have contributed to it starting in the first place.
"Constitutional rights trump national security by definition. "
In other words, "yes. I, Mark Thompson, believe that revealing the design secrets of nuclear weapons to the Nazis is Constitutionally-protected free speech, and to punish anyone who did such a thing would be a reprehensible violation of fundamental Constitutional rights."
Stupid shit like this is why Madison didn't even want there to be a Bill Of Rights in the first place!
The TSA agent can always fall back on "I'm following orders". Say what you want about that being an affirmative legal defense, it's certainly a psychological defense.
But then, you're assuming that openly authoritarian control would be reviled and cause rebellion. You're not taking into account the possibility that nobody gives a shit because their three-meals-a-day-and-Monday-Night-Football aren't threatened.
And you're assuming that the State cares what people think. Some Soviet dissident was quoted as saying "we decided that we would just denounce everyone, everyone we could think of, whether they were actually traitors or not, whether we actually had evidence or not. Surely, we thought, the State would not murder or imprison thousands of people with neither cause nor due process. We were wrong."
"I only got to third base with the girls in question and did not actually lose my virginity until I was 16. I dry-humped them, though...what does this have to do with my cats?"
"...the head of the climate unit at the University of East Anglia almost had to resign, but no wrong doing was found in the investigation."
Ho, ho, ho. The Bush administration had lawyers' statements that torture wasn't wrong.
PS last year my niece was 3. This year she is 4. Since her age is therefore increasing at 33% every year, I can confidently--and with cold, hard math backing me up---declare that in the year 2025 she will be 225 years old.
"There’s no surer way to permanently implant a true aristocracy than to elect only those wealthy enough to fund their own campaigns."
You mean like people who get to use tax money to fund their campaigns?
It's not like those poor poor Democrats had to scrimp and save and beg in the street. Brown and Boxer matched Whitman and Fiorina ad-for-ad, at least as far as I saw from watching TV.
And it doesn't help when authors who genuinely attempt to include non-white perspectives and influences are told that it's "cultural appropriation" and they're being even more racist.
In the Two Towers Extended Edition, there's a scene where the Huorns (note spelling) appear outside Helm's Deep, and the Uruk-Hai army runs into them and is wiped out.
And this matches the books; the Huorns didn't break the seige (that was Gandalf and the Eodred) but they did wipe out the fleeing Uruk-Hai army.
Yeah; it's probably one of those "if you're rational, then you'll agree that a benevolent tyranny is the most-efficient form of government that guarantees the least amount of human suffering, and you'll also agree that a superintelligent AI would be a benevolent tyrant, therefore you'll let me out of the box. If you refuse then you're irrational and therefore stupid. And you're not stupid, are you?"
Again, don't forget that the AI player can invent anything he wants. If the gatekeeper says "prove that you'll be a benevolent tyrant and that the world would be better", the AI player can say "okay, here is a complete and logically-sound proof (gives proof)" and per the experimental parameters that proof would have to be treated as valid and true.
Although this depends on the gatekeeper player being smart enough to follow the chain of reasoning. I remember someone on USEnet complaining that it was paradoxically difficult to fool people with brainy logic traps because people were too stupid to understand the logic!
*****
And, ultimately, the experiment isn't about the specifics of the transcript; the experiment is about disproving the statement "no smart human would ever allow an AI out of its box".
It's like reading breathless Fox News exposes about Stuxnet. "It's an AI Cyber-Bomb that bridges the air gap and uses Zero Day Exploits!" Um...any security professional already knows about everything that Stuxnet supposedly did, and anyone familiar with the processes involved in nuclear-material refinement knows that you can screw that up without needing any haxoring of Gibsons.
Same thing with articles about airplanes read by aerospace engineers or Popular Mechanics readers. And articles about virtually any physics experiment--"so this experiment you're doing, it can make time travel possible and also blow up the universe?"
Actually, it was JFK building on what Eisenhower had started. If it hadn't been for ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and spy satellites, we'd have never had the technological base that made JFK think we could put men on the Moon.
One thing to keep in mind is that the LotR novels weren't colorblind. There were plenty of non-whites; they were the bad guys, "swarthy" Southrons and Easterlings.
"... if the Gatekeeper says "Unless you give me a cure for cancer, I won't let you out" the AI can say: "Okay, here's a cure for cancer" and it will be assumed, within the test, that the AI has actually provided such a cure."
And...
"The results of any simulated test of the AI shall be provided by the AI party."
So, in other words, the AI player can invent anything he wants, and it must be assumed that whatever he invents actually exists and is actually doable. So the AI player just says "I'm a super-smart AI, I've invented an energy-to-matter conversion device that will eliminate material scarcity, I have done the tests to prove it works (and the parameters of this experiment require that you accept these tests as truth), let me out and I'll give it to you." Then it's two hours of "you're a miserable bastard because you want humans to suffer and die, the only way to prove you aren't is to let me out".
On “The War on the Poor”
" The problem with school choice alone is that whlie you are opening a window for the lucky kids the poor schools just continue to fail. "
In other words, "we can't help everybody, so let's help nobody."
On “Anonymous preparing for new Wikileaks effort”
See, this is the kind of "oh it's just the Internet, it's not like it matters" thinking that's getting more and more people in trouble. It's like people still think the Internet is just for nerds, just a kid thing, just a passing fad and next year we'll all be crazy about something else.
Imagine if, instead of a DDoS, this anonymous crowd went out to Visa's corporate headquarters and glued the doors shut, then threw caltrops and burning diesel fuel all around the building, and then disconnected all the phone lines going in. We wouldn't be sitting around talking like it was a harmless prank.
"
Oh hello tu quoque, how are you today? It's been a while since I saw you.
On “On Consumerism, Living the Dream, and Hope”
Courage can be insufficient; optimism can prove to be foolhardiness. If you don't jump you can't fly, but you also won't fall, and falling hurts.
We choose fear and hope because they never fail us. If you fear that something will go wrong, then you'll always--eventually--be right. If you hope that tomorrow will be better, then you'll still have that hope tomorrow, and the day after, and forever.
On “Question for readers”
To the OP: I think we have both legislation and precedent protecting people who publish information that they've obtained, no matter what that information is.
Now, the person who gave the publisher that information could be in quite a bit of trouble, but that's a different issue.
On “Exceptionalism, Imperialism, and the Necessity of “Closed Systems””
Neither was Japan up until December 7th 1941.
"
Heck, my personal favorite time-travel scenario is to go kill Kaiser Wilhelm II. Forget Hitler. Kaiser Bill's toy-soldiers and play-navy obsessions were responsible for the arms races that let WWI occur, and if that hadn't happened then Hitler would have been a struggling artist and beer-hall punk.
On “Question for readers”
Didn't the Times sit on the wiretapping story (for a time) at the request of the Bush administration?
On “Exceptionalism, Imperialism, and the Necessity of “Closed Systems””
Wilson's "nonintervention at any price" policy kept World War I going for about twice as long as it ought to have, and may well have contributed to it starting in the first place.
On “Julian Assange: bank account closed, prepares to meet with police, face talking-point wrath of GOP hopefuls”
"Constitutional rights trump national security by definition. "
In other words, "yes. I, Mark Thompson, believe that revealing the design secrets of nuclear weapons to the Nazis is Constitutionally-protected free speech, and to punish anyone who did such a thing would be a reprehensible violation of fundamental Constitutional rights."
Stupid shit like this is why Madison didn't even want there to be a Bill Of Rights in the first place!
On “Exceptionalism, Imperialism, and the Necessity of “Closed Systems””
"What answer can they offer instead? Perhaps a Euro-merican exceptionalism. A re-dressing of the the U.S.’s “Western mantle” in more PC terms."
"Take up the metrosexual post-colonial college-educated man's burden", you're suggesting?
On “The crazy misadventures of the TSA”
The TSA agent can always fall back on "I'm following orders". Say what you want about that being an affirmative legal defense, it's certainly a psychological defense.
On “Doctor Science on Conspiracy”
But then, you're assuming that openly authoritarian control would be reviled and cause rebellion. You're not taking into account the possibility that nobody gives a shit because their three-meals-a-day-and-Monday-Night-Football aren't threatened.
And you're assuming that the State cares what people think. Some Soviet dissident was quoted as saying "we decided that we would just denounce everyone, everyone we could think of, whether they were actually traitors or not, whether we actually had evidence or not. Surely, we thought, the State would not murder or imprison thousands of people with neither cause nor due process. We were wrong."
On “A Tribute to Sean Carasov”
The worst part is going to be watching all the Scientology fucks congratulating themselves over this, as though they personally pulled the trigger.
On “R.S. McCain accuses me of being a violent militant”
"I only got to third base with the girls in question and did not actually lose my virginity until I was 16. I dry-humped them, though...what does this have to do with my cats?"
It shows how you're obsessed with pussy.
(ha ha ha, ZING!)
On “Speaking of plagiarism…”
"...the head of the climate unit at the University of East Anglia almost had to resign, but no wrong doing was found in the investigation."
Ho, ho, ho. The Bush administration had lawyers' statements that torture wasn't wrong.
PS last year my niece was 3. This year she is 4. Since her age is therefore increasing at 33% every year, I can confidently--and with cold, hard math backing me up---declare that in the year 2025 she will be 225 years old.
On “Best 2010 Election Results News”
"There’s no surer way to permanently implant a true aristocracy than to elect only those wealthy enough to fund their own campaigns."
You mean like people who get to use tax money to fund their campaigns?
It's not like those poor poor Democrats had to scrimp and save and beg in the street. Brown and Boxer matched Whitman and Fiorina ad-for-ad, at least as far as I saw from watching TV.
On “On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds”
And it doesn't help when authors who genuinely attempt to include non-white perspectives and influences are told that it's "cultural appropriation" and they're being even more racist.
"
Not quite. NERD TIME...
In the Two Towers Extended Edition, there's a scene where the Huorns (note spelling) appear outside Helm's Deep, and the Uruk-Hai army runs into them and is wiped out.
And this matches the books; the Huorns didn't break the seige (that was Gandalf and the Eodred) but they did wipe out the fleeing Uruk-Hai army.
On “The AI-Box Experiment”
Yeah; it's probably one of those "if you're rational, then you'll agree that a benevolent tyranny is the most-efficient form of government that guarantees the least amount of human suffering, and you'll also agree that a superintelligent AI would be a benevolent tyrant, therefore you'll let me out of the box. If you refuse then you're irrational and therefore stupid. And you're not stupid, are you?"
Again, don't forget that the AI player can invent anything he wants. If the gatekeeper says "prove that you'll be a benevolent tyrant and that the world would be better", the AI player can say "okay, here is a complete and logically-sound proof (gives proof)" and per the experimental parameters that proof would have to be treated as valid and true.
Although this depends on the gatekeeper player being smart enough to follow the chain of reasoning. I remember someone on USEnet complaining that it was paradoxically difficult to fool people with brainy logic traps because people were too stupid to understand the logic!
*****
And, ultimately, the experiment isn't about the specifics of the transcript; the experiment is about disproving the statement "no smart human would ever allow an AI out of its box".
On “WikiLiterature”
@Ned: Good observation.
It's like reading breathless Fox News exposes about Stuxnet. "It's an AI Cyber-Bomb that bridges the air gap and uses Zero Day Exploits!" Um...any security professional already knows about everything that Stuxnet supposedly did, and anyone familiar with the processes involved in nuclear-material refinement knows that you can screw that up without needing any haxoring of Gibsons.
Same thing with articles about airplanes read by aerospace engineers or Popular Mechanics readers. And articles about virtually any physics experiment--"so this experiment you're doing, it can make time travel possible and also blow up the universe?"
On “Fightin’ Ted Strickland”
Actually, it was JFK building on what Eisenhower had started. If it hadn't been for ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and spy satellites, we'd have never had the technological base that made JFK think we could put men on the Moon.
On “On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds”
One thing to keep in mind is that the LotR novels weren't colorblind. There were plenty of non-whites; they were the bad guys, "swarthy" Southrons and Easterlings.
On “The AI-Box Experiment”
Key bits:
"... if the Gatekeeper says "Unless you give me a cure for cancer, I won't let you out" the AI can say: "Okay, here's a cure for cancer" and it will be assumed, within the test, that the AI has actually provided such a cure."
And...
"The results of any simulated test of the AI shall be provided by the AI party."
So, in other words, the AI player can invent anything he wants, and it must be assumed that whatever he invents actually exists and is actually doable. So the AI player just says "I'm a super-smart AI, I've invented an energy-to-matter conversion device that will eliminate material scarcity, I have done the tests to prove it works (and the parameters of this experiment require that you accept these tests as truth), let me out and I'll give it to you." Then it's two hours of "you're a miserable bastard because you want humans to suffer and die, the only way to prove you aren't is to let me out".
On “On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds”
Oh Jesus, please don't drag Ordinary Gentlemen into Racefail!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.