Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it

More than 10 years ago I wrote about this challenge in my doctoral research. At the time it was not yet feasible, but as the story at this link shows, robots can now commit crimes (or at least perform actions that we would consider criminal).

http://fusion.net/story/35883/robots-are-starting-to-break-the-law-and-nobody-knows-what-to-do-about-it/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email

The issue that the referenced article doesn't consider is whether the acts are actually criminal. Did the robot have criminal intent or was it just randomized action on the part of a non-conscious machine? While we may consider these actions criminal I doubt the robot had any sense of the difference between the 'criminal purchases' and other randomized 'non-criminal' purchases.

Still, it highlights an interesting ethical issue, what do we do when criminal activities take place by non sentient, self directed, machines or programs? Perhaps at best we could deactivate the machine and aggregate its code or re-program it with more sophisticated coding that takes our sense of criminal activity into account. In more serious cases we could ask whether the creators of the machine or program had criminal intent and pursue them for their intent and action (enacted by proxy through the machine or program).

You can read more about my thoughts and research on these issues (although I did shift from Artificial Intelligence to Neuroscience):

http://www.dionforster.com/blog/tag/neuroscience

This article in Sci-WEB used some of my Artificial Intelligence research:

http://www.dionforster.com/blog/2010/4/14/sci-fi-meets-society-my-artificial-intelligence-research-use.html

Help required - Safari and Google search error

I am hoping that someone on the internets may be wise and benevolent enough to help with a problem I am having with Safari and Google Search.  I am currently using Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4) - every time that I try to do a search using google.com (or search using google in the address bar) I get an ERROR 403 (Forbidden)!!1 message.

Here is a screenshot (and below it is some of the technical data). Does anyone have an idea what the problem may be and how I could fix it?  By the way I have had this problem since upgrading to Lion some time ago, and each time that I 'restore' the contents of my Hard Drive onto a new computer it follows me...

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks, Dion

Update on Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 7:06AM by Dr Dion Forster

By the way, I have an idea of what may be causing the problem.  It has something to do with the user agent script in Safari.  When I enable the developer menu and choose a different user agent script my search results work fine.  However, each time that I open a new window, or restart Safari, it reverts back to the old user agent script.

I found this post on OS X Hints which I am going to try! I'll keep you posted!

Update on Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 7:42AM by Dr Dion Forster

OK, so the mystery has been solved and resolved! Wonderful!

Here's what I did.

First, enable the Developer menu in Safari - see this post for instructions.

Second, choose a new user agent (in my case I simply wanted Safari). Go to 'Develop', and then 'User Agent' in the drop down menu and choose what you want.

Third, navigate to http://www.whastmyuseragent.com

That will give you the text string for your user agent - since I am using Safari, mine is: 

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/536.30.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.5 Safari/536.30.1

Fourth, close Safari and then go to the Finder and choose 'Go' and paste the following ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist

Right click on that file (com.apple.Safari.plist) and open it in Binary text editor - I use BBedit.

Fifth, find the user agent string in the plist file and replace what you find there with the user agent string you want to use (naturally I used the one above).

Sixth, save your edited file in its original location.

Viola! Launch Safari and you are good to go! I hope that helps! It took me two years to figure this out!