JohnStrangeII
Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.
2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).
3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.
4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.
Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.
Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."
What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.
It's still obvious that the modern use of the master/slave combo comes from centuries of slavery, not from any prior meanings. As OP said, that can be shown by studying their meanings outside the technical context. The original meaning was retained in Academia but merely as jargon. Magister artium is a "master degree." There is no "slave degree", though. There is also "mastery", master/apprentice, and so on.
In other words, the offensive component of the combo is "slave", not "master." You can safely continue to use the master/apprentice combo.
Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.
So, no, not a bullshit artist at all in my opinion.
If at all, we could try to implement conforming with systems of laws as hard constraints, so at least robots would not openly break the law. The rest of moral behavior could then be learned. Or, so one might think. However, even that is not possible. It is well-known from the philosophy of law that systems of law are not contradiction free. There are conflicts between opposing laws. This is studied in normative systems research and there are solution to it (essentially, by logicians in the computer science tradition). However, these require some form of defeasible rules, and among the myriad of nonmonotonic logics that can express some form of nonmonotonic reasoning, not a single one has a normative justification. So again, as long as human standards are not coherent enough, it's going to be impossible to make a machine conform to them in a way that is satisfying.
Related to that, I believe there are two main issues that you haven't addressed in your post:
1. Different standards for blame and accountability: The standards for blame and correctness of decision making are completely different between machines and humans. Even very intelligent AI would be judged at much higher standards as humans. I simply don't believe that we would accept robots that commit murder, just as long as they commit murder less often than humans. By the same token, we do expect machines to make substantially less errors, and in certain areas would not allow errors at all. So it's not just about teaching them to follow human ethical standards - they need to excel at this and may not break the law. However, as I tried to show with the above examples, we don't know and agree on our own standards well enough to be able to start making sure AI fulfills these high expectations. There is also a much higher need for transparency of decision making for machines than from humans. An idiot driver is an idiot driver. If a car is driving like an idiot by itself, however, you'd expect to be able to at least retrospectively find out why it did what it did.
2. The political dimension: Laws are the result of a political process. Appointed judges resolve potential conflicts between laws and interpret them. More broadly, whatever standards we expect AIs to fulfill hinges on ethical positions and personal preferences. It can ultimately only be decided as the outcome of a political process as well. For example, a safe a self-driving car needs to be, how it makes decisions (e.g. "Should I try to save my driver or save the pedestrian, or not have any priority at all?"), and which standards it needs to fulfill is up for debate. That is not decided by moral philosophers. It needs to be decided by the publicly accountable, democratically elected representatives of the people. The idea of teaching a machine to behave morally is fine, but there are also strict standards of safety and transparency it has to fulfill. This is a political problem and can only be solved in a broader context, within the debate of how much AI should be allowed at all. For example, should AI judge your creditworthiness? If so, what false positive rate would be tolerate? I believe using AI for such purposes should be strictly prohibited. Others disagree - I'm sure AI is already used for that. Such issues can only be resolved politically.
I considered your post a bit naive, because you omitted these two crucial issues, the higher standards we expect from AI, and the political dimension. Other than that, I agree with much of what you've said.
One thing that the author does not address in enough detail is the simple fact that there are many different ethical traditions that come to different conclusions about particular normative issues, and that there are plenty of authors in ethics who (still) consider their business a normative one. A "bottom up" machine-learning based approach to this would invariably fail and miss the whole point. There are some ethicists who consider it mostly a descriptive endeavor - Schopenhauer was one of the first, for example -, but they are in a minority.
As long as experts in ethics cannot agree what the "right" ethics is, it's hard to see how we would be able to teach it to machines. Many meta-ethicists including me would even deny that there can be an "expert" about moral and particularly about ethical questions at all. However, I have no doubts that various robotics companies will implement those ethical rules and approaches that best serves their interests as companies.
That's why I think robot ethics is kind of misguided. What we need is laws that regulate AI and put its use into a legal framework and closes loopholes. This is a political, not just an ethical issue.
For a long time, up until recently, mathematics was way ahead of the applications of mathematics to physics. In Ancient Greece there was a general consensus that infinity and real numbers do not exist. But then some people found out that the side of a triangle must sometimes be a real number. However, you cannot ever measure SQRT(2) precisely. Whatever number you extract from the physical world is only a rough finite approximation. You need to represent the number in a different way and solve the problem algebraically. Many scientists in Ancient Greece rejected this idea vigorously. Still, real numbers are very useful for describing the physical world, so useful that we couldn't possibly do without them today.
Imaginary numbers are another example. They were ridiculed as abstract nonsense when they were described for the first time and widely conceived to have no physical reality or application at all. Despite all that, they play a vital role in modern physics.
There are many more examples like that. To cut a long story short, at least until recently mathematics was always ahead of physics (now they seem to go more in tandem). This fact makes the idea very implausible that mathematical structures are merely useful abstractions from the physical world we invented to describe it. It simply doesn't describe what happened in mathematics. And I find the idea that mathematicians just came up with arbitrary imaginations equally implausible.
> no external authority you can appeal to which will state definitively that when mathematicians all agree on something their experience of "true" is absolutely and objectively correct, and not a distorted and limited artefact of human cognition
That is true for everything, it's just a radical skeptic position. Nevertheless, mathematics has the highest standards of rigor for proofs among all disciplines.
It's also worth noting that physical and mathematical existence are based on completely different criteria. For non-constructionists mathematical objects exist once they are not demonstrably contradictory (although the absence of contradictions often cannot be proved in an absolute sense). In contrast to this, for physicists an object exists once it can be measured, where measurement is ultimately tied to sensual experience. There are also theoretical entities in physics that cannot be directly measured, but their existence is usually downplayed, they're not supposed to "really" exist but only as theory-dependent entities. In any case,the two "kinds of existence" are very different from each other.
I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".
If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?
Recently, almost the whole pro audio market has shifted in a similar way. They realized that they can make more money by targeting hobbyists and musicians instead of studio owners, so now most companies offer 70% to 90% sales from time to time. Others have started to launch software at a tenth of the price that used to be normal - $30 instead of $300.
I prefer that to the "free plus pro" version model. But I admit that I have no clue about marketing and sales and don't know the downsides of aiming at consumer and professionals at the same time.
Even in the B2B market successful open source companies often use dual licenses and release the open source version as a sort of crippleware by keeping essential libraries and tools proprietary or under very restrictive open source licenses.
What an excellent way to end up watering plants with Brawndo - because that's what plants crave.
Unfortunately, this definition is rarely used, because it doesn't match the political goals of states. First, it follows from the definition that there is widespread state terrorism. Second, countries that send military occupation forces to other countries have a vested interest to brand asymmetric warfare against their military as terrorism, but this is not covered by the definition.
Fact is that if the virus escaped a lab, the incident could have occurred in any other lab, too. It likely evolved naturally, though, and another fact is that it could have occurred naturally in many places in the world - e.g. in the Middle East or in Africa -, and a more dangerous virus could evolve in many regions of the world at any time.
Many people just don't want to accept this, especially those who reacted in the wrong way to the pandemic initially. It's always easier to blame someone else.