Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

Source: Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Demon-Haunted World

Software – whose basic underlying mechanism is ‘‘If this happens, then do this, otherwise do that’’ – allows cheaters to be a lot more subtle, and thus harder to catch. Software can say, ‘‘If there’s a chance I’m undergoing inspection, then be totally honest – but cheat the rest of the time.’’

what happens when the things you own start to cheat you?

Wannacry was a precursor to a new kind of cheating: cheating the in­dependent investigator, rather than the government. Imagine that the next Dieselgate doesn’t attempt to trick the almighty pollution regulator (who has the power to visit billions in fines upon the cheater): instead, it tries to trick the reviewers
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these forms of cheating treat the owner of the device as an enemy of the company that made or sold it, to be thwarted, tricked, or forced into con­ducting their affairs in the best interest of the com­pany’s shareholders. To do this, they run programs and processes that attempt to hide themselves and their nature from their owners, and proxies for their owners (like reviewers and researchers).

The software in gadgets makes it very tempting indeed to fill them with pernicious demons, but [the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986) and section 1201 of the Digital Millen­nium Copyright Act (1998)] criminalize trying to exorcise those demons.

Source: The hunted becomes the hunter: How Cloudflare’s fight with a ‘patent troll’ could alter the game | TechCrunch

every lawyer must pass an ethics exam that states it’s a violation for an attorney to “acquire a cause of action,” then to go and sue someone over it. The same ethics exam precludes attorneys from splitting their fees with non-attorneys.

Cloudflare is also filing a complaint with the ethics committee of the Federal Bar Association and, perhaps most interestingly, crowdsourcing prior art to invalidate not only the patent that Blackbird is using to sue Cloudflare and Fastly, but with an eye toward invalidating all of Blackbird’s patents.

We aspire to extend empathy to every being that warrants moral concern … “In general, which types of beings merit moral concern?” Or, to phrase the question as some philosophers do, “Which beings are moral patients?”

For this preliminary investigation, I focused on just one commonly endorsed criterion for moral patienthood: phenomenal consciousness, a.k.a. “subjective experience.”

Source: 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood | Open Philanthropy Project, by Luke Muehlhauser
* Notice: approximately 139,000 words, 347 pages, 9 appendices, 422 footnotes *

Let me be clear, then, that I am not a specialist on these topics. This report is long not because it engages its subject with the depth of an expert, but because it engages an unusual breadth of material — with the shallowness of a non-expert.
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my more modest goals for this report are to:

1. survey the types of evidence and argument that have been brought to bear on the distribution question,
2. briefly describe example pieces of evidence of each type, without attempting to summarize the vast majority of the evidence (of each type) that is currently available,
3. report what my own intuitions and conclusions are as a result of my shallow survey of those data and arguments,
4. try to give some indication of why I have those intuitions, without investing the months of research that would be required to rigorously argue for each of my many reported intuitions, and
5. list some research projects that seem (to me) like they could make progress on the key questions of this report, given the current state of evidence and argument.

…
I focused on finding out whether I could convince myself of any non-obvious substantive claims about the distribution of consciousness.

Presumably a cognitively unimpaired adult human is a moral patient, and a rock is not. But what about … ?

Such questions are usually addressed by asking whether a potential moral patient satisfies some criteria for moral patienthood. Criteria I have seen proposed in the academic literature include:

• Personhood or interests. (I won’t discuss these criteria separately, as they are usually composed of one or more of the criteria listed below.)
• Phenomenal consciousness, a.k.a. “subjective experience.” See the detailed discussion below.
• Valenced experience: This criterion presumes not just phenomenal consciousness but also some sense in which phenomenal consciousness can be “valenced” (e.g. pleasure vs. pain).
• Various sophisticated cognitive capacities such as rational agency, self-awareness, desires about the future, ability to abide by moral responsibilities, ability to engage in certain kinds of reciprocal relationships, etc.
• Capacity to develop these sophisticated cognitive capacities, e.g. as is true of human fetuses.
• Less sophisticated cognitive capacities, or the capacity to develop them, e.g. learning, nociception, memory, selective attention, etc.
• Group membership: e.g. all members of the human species, or all living things.

Note that moral patienthood can be seen as binary or scalar, and the boundary between beings that are and are not moral patients might be “fuzzy”.

it seemed that the four most important factors influencing my “wild guess” probabilities were:

1. evolutionary distance from humans (years since last common ancestor),
2. neuroanatomical similarity with humans,
3. apparent cognitive-behavioral “sophistication” (advanced social politics, mirror self-recognition, abstract language capabilities, and some other PCIFs [potentially consciousness-indicating features]), and
4. total “processing power” (neurons, and maybe especially pallial neurons).

In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons.

Source: DRM Is Toxic To Culture | Meshed Insights Ltd

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. In my personal opinion the problems are (very concisely) that they:

1. quantise and prejudge discretion,
2. reduce “fair use” to “historic use”,
3. empower a hierarchical agent to remain in the control loop, and
4. condemn content to become inaccessible.

It’s clearly right to “pay the labourer a wage” but is that enough excuse to also condemn culture into the memory hole and enforce an economy of constant repayment for the same stuff? Is there a solution?

If there is, it will surely involve a fundamental rethink of rights legislation – patents and copyrights – that goes back to the social contract on which both are based, giving limited and temporary one-time rights to the producer in exchange for the enrichment of society.

Source: The US Supreme Court just decided access to Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat is fundamental to free speech — Quartz, by Ephrat Livni

Today (June 19), the justices unanimously held that states can’t broadly limit access to social media because cyberspace “is one of the most important places to exchange views.”

Acknowledging that every advance in technology leads to new abuses by criminals, the notion that states can bar access altogether is anathema to the high court. The opinion noted that convicted criminals, perhaps more than others, would benefit from joining the societal conversation. The justices write:

Social media allows users to gain access to information and communicate with one another on any subject that might come to mind. With one broad stroke, North Carolina bars access to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.