CS 440 Final

In what way are the constructionist educational model and the generative vision of the Internet alike?

Both rely on "the curiosity and intellectual passion of ... individuals" as a primary engine.

3 capabilities a "full ethical agent" must possess

Consciousness, Intentionality, Free Will

Bottom-up approach

Creating an environment where an agent explores courses of action and learns and is rewarded for behavior that is morally praiseworthy

Of the urge to create new technology, and the aspiration to be free, which does Kaczynski think is the more powerful human impulse?

Creating new technology

What event does Vinge say must probably precede the emergence of superhuman intelligence in machines?

Creation of hardware that is as powerful as the human brain or better

T or F: Brain imaging studies showed that the "fat man" version of the "trolley case" ethical dilemma evokes less emotional response than does the "switching tracks" version.

False: more

T or F: According to Lessig, knowledge is a rivalrous resource.

False: nonrivalrous

T or F: According to Solove, the emergence of the Internet and the accompanying ease of global communication has accelerated society's abandonment of "small-town" methods for enforcing social norms."

False: small-town methods include humiliation, which the Internet specializes in.

T or F: According to Solove, if you publish a blog listing the names of persons who are HIV-positive, you have not publicly disclosed private information, because the HIV status of those persons is public virtue of its being known to many members of those persons' HIV support groups.

False: the individual still expected privacy because the people he told weren't likely to spread the information since they "cared about him . . . or because they also had AIDS."

Why does Vinge think the "The Singularity" might force us to rethink our definition of "good" and "evil" ?

Good and evil based on individuals is gone. High-bandwidth networking makes it impossible to determine whose idea a crime was.

Artificial Moral Agent

Moral agents (artificial intelligence) beyond just human beings. Robots or AI Computers that behave morally.

T or F: A generative technology is one that enables and encourages its users to find new and innovative uses for it.

True

T or F: According to Lessig, a nonrivalrous resource can never be exhausted.

True

Why does Kaczynski think revolution, rather than reform, is necessary to prevent the evolution of our technological society from progressively encroaching on our personal freedoms ?

Revolution will be able to solve all the problems at once, reform will only be able to solve small social problems.

Why does Kaczynski think "revolution is easier than reform"?

Revolutionaries are more passionate than reformers

Through what mechanism does Kaczynski see technology contributing to aggression in modern society?

Technology causes urbanization. Farm to cities and crowding causes society stress.

Why does Vinge think that the creation of a machine with superhuman intelligence would cause an "Intelligence explosion"

That machine can create something with greater intelligence than itself.

What is "OLPC"?

The "One Laptop Per Child" project.

What is the "end-to-end argument" ? How is it related to the development of the Internet?

The "end-to-end argument" states that most features in a network should be implemented at its computer endpoints, by those computers' programmers -- rather than "in the middle" of the network, taken care of by the network itself and designed by the network's architects. Network should not be designed to do anything that can be taken care of by its users. The Internet was developed intentionally in accordance with the end-to-end argument.

Free Will

The ability of agents to make unconstrained choices (without metaphysical, physical, social, and mental constraints)

What is an "XO"?

The laptops designed for use by children in the "One Laptop Per Child" project.

Intentionality

The power of minds to be about, represent, or stand for things, properties and states of affairs

Consciousness

The quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself

Full Ethical Agents

Those that can make explicit moral judgments and are generally quite competent in justifying such decisions. Considered to require some sort of capacity for consciousness, intentionality and free will

Operational Morality

Tools that don't have the ability to act morally as they have no autonomy or sensitivity, however can be designed to abide by moral standards, for example a safety on a gun.

Contrast the 2 approaches to implementing moral values

Top-down defines what is/not moral, Bottom-up must be discovered or constructed

What are the "two types of technology" Kaczynski describes ? Which type does Kaczynski feel is a threat?

small scale (without outside assistance), ORGANIZATION-DEPENDENT (requires large-scale social organization) technology

According to Zittrain, in what beneficial way can an XO function as a tethered appliance?

"A laptop can be an effetive way to distribute textbooks, because it can contain so much data in a small space and can be updated after it has been distributed."

Why does Vinge think it unlikely that mankind would choose to build only "safe" super intelligent machines ?

"Competitive advantage" is too strong , an incentive to create "unsafe" (= "more powerful") machines.

What is the "procrastination principle"? How is it related to the development of the Internet?

"The network should not be designed to do anything that can be taken care of by its users." The Internet was developed intentionally in accordance with the procrastination principle.

Name three prominent and successful "open code" projects cited by Lessig that grew out of the "commons for code" movement typified by Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation

(1) GNU/Linux (2) Apache (3) Perl

According to Zittrain, what are the five defining features of a generative system?

(1) Leverage (2) Adaptability (3) Ease of Mastery (4) Accessibility (5) Transferability

What does Zittrain say are the two keys to avoiding a future in which the Internet becomes less generative as a response to various forms of network abuse?

(a) "Give the market a reason not to abandon or lock down the (generative) PC's that have served it so well." (b) "Give most governments reason to refrain from major intervention into Internet architecture."

Four reasons Zittrain suggests might explain why proprietary network services like Compuserve and AOL did not exploit the potential generativity of their networks by making their servers more open to third-party code contributors.

(a) No revenue would be realized if they had no formal relationship with 3rd party developers (b) Poorly coded or rogue apps posed a risk of compromising their servers (c) They thought of their subscribers only as consumers, not as potential developers (d) They thought that all possible important applications had already been invented

What are the three ways in which Zittrain says tethered appliances can control the behavior of their users?

(a) Preemption (b) Specific injunction (c) Surveillance

3 approaches to building "conscious" robots proposed by Owen Holland

1. Identify the components of consciousness, and implement all of them in a machine. 2. Identify the components of the machine that produces consciousness (the brain) and copy them. 3. Identify the circumstances in which consciousness arose, copy them, and hope that consciousness emerges again.

What does Kaczynski mean by the term "surrogate activity"?

An activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the "fulfillment" that they get from pursuing the goal

What is a tethered appliance?

An appliance that maintains ongoing proprietary communication with its vendor/developer/supplier or other such centralized non-user agency/entity.

Ethical Impact Agents

Any machine that can be evaluated for its ethical consequences. Essentially replacing people for robots for jobs which could be considered dangerous

According to Kaczynski, what does "freedom" mean ?

By "freedom" we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization.

Top-down approach

Decompose a task into simpler subtasks. Components are assembled into modules that individually implement these simpler subtasks, and then the modules are hierarchically arranged to fulfill the goals specified by the original project

T or F: In the ethics of Catholic theology, a "sin of omission" is more blameworthy than a "sin of commission."

False: less

T or F: According to Lessig, if the resource(s) held in common that constitute a particular commons are "rivalrous" resources, then that commons cannot survive.

False

T or F: According to Bill Gates (as quoted in The Future of the Internet) Microsoft designed the Xbox to be a special-purpose computer (essentially, an appliance) dedicated to gaming.

False: Bill Gates sees the Xbox as at the center of the future digital ecosystem, rather than at its periphery: "It is a general purpose computer..."

T or F: According to Zittrain, the key to the success of the OLPC project will be providing extensive training in the use of the XO to both students and teachers.

False: The XO dissemination plan is remarkably light on both student and teacher training.

T or F: According to Zittrain, "the future unfolding right now will be one of generative platforms (PC's) attached to a generative network (the Internet)."

False: The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.

T or F: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act makes Internet service providers (ISP's) and others hosts of online forums legally liable for defamatory content posted by their users.

False: They are not liable for content posted by their users.

T or F: When wireless access points first became widely available to consumers, most ISP's contracts permitted their use in order to promote network neutrality.

False: When wireless access points first came to market, which allowed people to share a single physical Internet point throughout their houses the way that cordless telephones could be added to their telephone jacks, most ISPs' contracts forbade them. Some vendors marketed products for ISPs to ferret out such access points when they were in use.

T or F: "Network neutrality" is the principle whereby an Internet service provider guarantees identical access to Internet resources to all of the provider's customers by carefully regulating the gateway between its customers and external content and/or other service providers.

False: faraway ISPs would not be permitted to come between external content or service providers and their customers

T or F: According to Wallach and Allen, extensive experimental evidence exists suggesting that humans do follow a well-defined (probably neurobiologically-based) but as-yet unknown formal procedure when making moral decisions.

False: humans do not follow a well-defined procedure

T or F: According to Zittrain, packaging Internet innovations into appliancized Internet applications is bad.

False: it's good.

T or F: According to Lessig, during the 1970's and 1980's early attempts to create an intellectual commons in the form of online repositories of public domain works were hindered by the high cost of the Internet's physical layer and the closed nature of its code layer.

False: the physical layer was cheap; the code layer was open.

T or F: According to the National Research Council, vertical integration in the Internet arena will increase the amount of innovation and creativity that takes place outside the confines of vertically integrated corporations.

False: vertical integration could cause a change in the Internet market, with innovation and creativity becoming more the province of vertically integrated corporations.

What are the two main tasks that Kaczynski says must be undertaken now to prevent the disaster he claims will otherwise be caused by the rapid growth of technology ?

First is to take action to weaken the system, second devise and widely propagate an ideology that is anti-technology

Under what circumstances does Vinge think "The Singularity" might not happen ?

If our estimate of the computational power of the human mind is far too low

4 categories of ethical agents in Moor's hierarchy

Impact, Implicit, Explicit, Full

According to Kaczynski, why do scientists "do science"?

It's a surrogate activity

Vinge or Kaczynski: " We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. "

K

Vinge or Kaczynski: "A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on."

K

Vinge or Kaczynski: "It is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises."

K

Vinge or Kaczynski: "Non-attainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if non-attainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals."

K

Vinge or Kaczynski: "The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way."

K

Vinge or Kaczynski: "[The continued development of technology] will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries."

K

Implicit Ethical Agents

Machines designed in an effort to not have negative ethical effects, by addressing safety and critical reliability concerns during the design process

Explicit Ethical Agents

Machines that reason about ethics using ethical categories as part of their internal programming

Do robots need emotions in order to function as "full ethical agents"?

No, robots do not need emotions to function as full ethical agents. As mentioned previously, they simply need consciousness, intentionality and free will in order to be considered a "full ethical agent". None of these three things by definition is directly related to emotion. Also, as is mentioned on pages 196-197, introducing emotions into a robot/machine could create more problems than it solves.

With respect to rapid societal evolution and change, what difference does Kaczynski see between the condition of modern industrial society and the 19th century frontier society of the Amercian West ?

Old west people changed by choice. Modern change is forced upon you. Modern man has the sense that change is imposed on him, where as 19th century frontiersmen had the sense that they created change themselves.

Contrast the 2 moralities

Operational applies to tools/devices that have no autonomy or sensitivity, whereas functional applies to those that do. Functional, however, does not exist, according to the book.

What is "socialization" ? What is "oversocialization" ? According to Kaczynski, is it possible for mankind to act "in a moral way" in modern industrial society ? If not, why not?

People are restricted by the rules. So many rules that they can't help but break them... No, because there are too many constraints

Functional Morality

Range from systems that act within acceptable standards of behavior to intelligent systems capable of assessing some of the morally significant aspects of their own actions.

What is the primary tenet of Papert's constructionist educational model?

Teach students how to learn by asking them to undertake projects that they find relevant to their everyday lives.

T or F: Historically, (appliancized) proprietary networks preceded the (generative) Internet.

True

T or F: According to Lessig, the Internet philosophy of net neutrality gives the "endpoints" - that is, the Internet's users - the power to decide between freedom and control, and therein lies the beginning of a classic "tragic of the commons," since keeping the Internet open provides a benefit for all, but closing individual links provides a benefit to individuals. Thus the Internet is doomed to "naturally" evolve away from being a commons, as private incentives for control displace the public benefit of net neutrality.

True

T or F: According to Lessig, the proliferation of broadband technology (which moves data faster downstream than upstream) is causing the Internet to be optimized more for (commons-unfriendly) "broadcast" mode, which will make it more difficult for (commons-friendly) peer-to-peer structures (which are equally fast upstream and downstream) to evolve.

True

T or F: According to Lessig, whether there is sufficient incentive for potential producers of a resource to actually produce that resource, is an issue for both rivalrous and nonrivalrous resources.

True

T or F: According to Malcom Gladwell (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation") Paul Revere and modern blogs share at least one important characteristic: both are connectors.

True

T or F: According to Malcom Gladwell (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation") in order to proliferate exponentially, the information comprising rumor and gossip must be "sticky" - that is, it must be information that inspires people to keep talking about it, information that is "contagious."

True

T or F: According to Richard Posner (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation"), the great speed at which information propagates on the Internet benefits the victims of malicious online gossip, because it allows truth to proliferate as fast as lies.

True

T or F: According to Solove, because social network websites often do not provide more gradations of "friendships" than simply friend versus not-friend, they implicitly encourage users to share information "with others who might otherwise not be privy to it."

True

T or F: According to Solove, freedom of speech is meaningless if rumor and gossip have diminished a speaker's credibility by undermining his or her reputation

True

T or F: According to Solove, one of the primary problems with social networking websites is that they are designed to encourage people to expose considerable information about themselves with very little consideration of the potential consequences; as evidence of this, Solove notes that the default privacy setting on Myspace allows any member of the public to view one's profile.

True

T or F: According to Solove, the best way to counteract malicious online rumors is to use the Internet to spread correct information as rapidly as possible.

True

T or F: According to Solove, the type of anonymity currently afforded to users of the Internet is best described as traceable anonymity.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, because the Internet's original design aimed to promote generativity by deliberately relying on few central control mechanisms, there is no way to accurately measure how many users the Internet has.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, if the Internet had been designed with security as its primary goal, it would never have achieved its early success.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, one positive attribute of tethered appliances is that they make it easy to verify the age of their users.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, one reason why abuse of the Internet was not a problem in its early days was that the people using it were the very people designing it, and they had a vested interest in ensuring that the network worked.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, the Internet was able to develop into a ubiquitous highly generative technology because it was so little noticed that no one tried to regulate its evolution.

True

T or F: According to Zittrain, the fundamental cybersecurity problem of the Internet and its PC endpoints - regardless of what OS the PC's run - arises because the PC's primary value is that it can run new software from any source.

True

T or F: According to law professor Tracy Meares (as quote in "The Future of Reputation") "social norms are better and more effective constraints on behavior than law could ever be."

True

T or F: According to social networking researches Judith Donah and Dana Boyd, simply knowing what someone else's social networking "friends" are, can constitute a significantly revealing breach of privacy.

True

T or F: According to sociologist Steven Nock (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation"), "reputation" is "a shared, or collective, perception, perception about a person."

True

T or F: According to the Restatement of Torts (one of the most influential documents considered by courts applying the tort of public disclosure [of private information]): "There is no liability when the defendant merely gives further publicity to information about the plaintiff which is already public."

True

T or F: According to the legal historian Lawrence Friedman (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation"), "American culture and law put enormous emphases on [providing] second chances."

True

T or F: According to the philosopher John Stuart Mill (as quoted in "The Future of Reputation") laws should regulate your conduct only to the extent that your conduct harms others; the law has no business attempting to regulate your conduct if your conduct (such as posting embarrassing information about yourself on your own blog) only harms yourself.

True

T or F: An appliancized technology is one that is intentionally designed to restrict what users can do with it.

True

T or F: Credit reporting agencies have "fair-credit-reporting" obligations under federal law which protect those upon whom they report. Chris Hoofnagle, a researcher at UC Berkeley, proposes requiring similar legal obligations on the part of employers who Google prospective employees.

True

T or F: In "The Future of Reputation" Solove claims that the greatest changes that the emergence of the Internet was wrought on the nature of rumor and gossip is that they proliferate faster and farther, they are more easily accessible since they are "searchable," and they are effectively permanent.

True

T or F: One opponent of the "open spectrum model" asserts (as cited by Lessig) that the idea of a "(frequency) spectrum commons" is motivated by analogy to the architecture of the Internet, which seriously misallocates scarce bandwidth resources because its content cannot easily be prioritized under the existing Internet protocols, so that "the brain surgeon cannot read the life- or-death CT scan because the Internet backbone is clogged with junk email."

True

T or F: According to Solove, if person A posts private information about person B on his (person A's) blog and person C posts excerpts from person A's blog on his (person C's) blog, only person A (and not person C) should be liable for damages.

True (person A's blog was already public, person C only reposted)

Vinge or Kaczynski: "And yet we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is."

V

Vinge or Kaczynski: "I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence."

V

Vinge or Kaczynski: "Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: that humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. "

V

Vinge or Kaczynski: "We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light."

V

According to Kaczynski, does society face an immediate threat from advancing technology? If not, then why does Kaczynski feel compelled to act against advancing technology immediately ?

Yes

"The PC integrated the ava_________ of the appliance with the mod________ of the large generic processor -- and began a revolution..."

availability, modifiability

"The story of the PC versus the information appliance is the first in a recurring pattern. The pattern begins with a g_________ platform that invites contributions from anyone who cares to make them. The contributions start among amateurs, who participate more for fun and whimsy than for profit. Their work, previously unnoticed in the mainstream, begins to catch on, and the power of the market kicks in to regularize their innovations and deploy them in markets far larger than the amateurs' domains. Finally, the g_________ features that invite contribution and that worked so well to propel the first stage of innovation begin to invite trouble and reconsideration, as the power of openness to third-part contribution destab_____ its first set of gains.

generative, generative, destabilizes

"Just as information processing devices can be appliance, mainframe, PC, or something in between, there are a variety of ways to design a network. The choice of configuration involves many tradeoffs...and...different network configurations lead not only to different levels of g___________ , but also to different levels of r___________ and c_______.

generativity, regulability, control