LINK DUMP

So people send me articles, videos, and other interesting stuff all the time, and I enjoy and appreciate it but I rarely find the time to do a proper write up. Usually, the articles sit as open tabs in my browser, waiting for me to post them here with some analysis, and are lost after a restart or a browser crash.

So instead of letting these articles live and die on my computer, I’ll just post link dumps every once in a while. I’d like to save these articles for posterity and give credit where credit is due, but I don’t really have the time to do proper commentary. I hope you don’t mind.

If an autonomous machine kills someone, who is responsible? (Guardian)

Yet another official-sounding body, this time The Royal Academy of Engineering, puts together a report on the ethical implications of machine autonomy.

“If you take an autonomous system and one day it does something wrong and it kills somebody, who is responsible? Is it the guy who designed it? What’s actually out in the field isn’t what he designed because it has learned throughout its life. Is it the person who trained it?

“If we can’t resolve all these things about who’s responsible, who’s charged if there’s an accident and also who should have stopped it, we deny ourselves the benefit of using this stuff.”

As if these issues are any easier in the case of humans…

(thx Jon!)

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. (Slate)

Great article on the relation between seeking behavior and dopamine, and how the translates into high tech ‘addictions’.

Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, “where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy”… “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It’s why… experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

This article made me think about the very idea of drugs as ‘substances’, and how hard it is to fit seeking behavior as a reward in itself into a hedonist paradigm.

(thx Kirk!)

Would You Gamble With Your Twitter Followers?

The very idea of social networking is grounded in the assumption that individuals seek out and individually cultivate their own network. Using these networks as a commodity to trade around arbitrarily (and through the use of a giant Gorilla) is quite disruptive and I find it very interesting.

(thx @bruces followers!)

The Rise of Network Fog
Network everything! Clouds are neither thick nor thin; they have shape but no container. Taking steps away from the Data Center model is one way to ensure a genuinely neutral net.

(thx @darthjulian)