Reading 12

Trolling is a very interesting topic to me because of its extreme prevalence in Internet culture. To me trolling is using inflammatory comments to try and get a response out of someone. My definition of trolling limits the comments to be fairly harmless and while provocative could not be construed as harassment. Trolling to me is not being misogynistic or saying you are going to murder someone. That is just plain harassment. From the Guardian article, they provide a different and more detailed definition of trolling, “There’s a term for this brand of gratuitous online cruelty: we call it internet trolling. Trolling is recreational abuse – usually anonymous – intended to waste the subject’s time or get a rise out of them or frustrate or frighten them into silence. Sometimes it’s relatively innocuous (like asking contrarian questions just to start an argument) or juvenile (like making fun of my weight or my intelligence), but – particularly when the subject is a young woman – it frequently crosses the line into bona fide, dangerous stalking and harassment. “ I agree with parts of this definition but once the actions become more malicious I do not think it is trolling anymore. I think the base root of trolling based on my definition is simply there are a lot of bored people on the Internet. However, the more malicious and hurtful troll definition is caused by something worse. In the Guardian article it discusses how one troll was a spewing hate on the internet because of his own insecurities and this is probably the case for most people who try to hurt and put down others on the Internet.

I think companies have some obligation to prevent trolls, but they cannot begin to overly censor their users or else they will lose them. I think what twitter is doing by improving their reporting function is a step in the right direction. Morally and ethically they are responsible to a point because they are providing a conduit for abuse to happen but their obligation to fixing it is somewhat limited due to peoples’ desire to have free speech.

I believe anonymity is a blessing on the Internet. It provides far more help for people who are in trouble and can’t use real IDs than the cost of allowing some people to abuse the anonymity by sending hate over the Internet. The slate article had some very good points regarding this issue, “‘Real names’ policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people…Among the types of people listed (other than dissidents in a repressive states) for whom pseudonymity is important: people who are LGBT, abuse survivors, “people from small communities,” politically active people or religious people who may suffer discrimination at work if their beliefs became known, etc.” This shows that the anonymity of the Internet has a tangible benefit for a lot of members of society. Most people believe that by using real IDs on the Internet that trolls will disappear but this again is simply not the case according to the slate article, “Research about online identity shows that “real ID” policies are not as effective as their proponents claim. Disqus, an online commenting platform, conducted an informal analysis of about 500 million comments by 60 million users and found that pseudonymous users wrote better comments (and more of them) than those who were using their real names, with anonymous users being responsible for the bottom-feeder-quality comments.” This shows that even with real IDs people still aren’t accountable for their actions. Therefore, I believe that the anonymity of the Internet is a blessing and far outweighs its costs.

In my life I have not really dealt with trolls, but I would follow the common advice of “not feeding them.” Based on my definition of a troll I do not think it is an issue, but once it crosses into the harassment stage where there is stalking and threats of violence I believe this is an issue on the Internet that needs to be addressed.

Reading 11

According to the article on Computerworld, artificial intelligence (AI) is a sub-field of computer science. The overall goal of AI is to develop computers that are able to complete tasks that are normally done by people. It does not matter how the AI accomplishes the task so long as it mimics what an intelligent human could accomplish. There are two camps of AI, “strong” and “weak.” The strong group is trying to genuinely simulate human reasoning but there are currently no real world examples of this. The weak group is currently what we have for AI machines that mimic human behavior and respond in normal fashions like Siri. There is a grey area for the group that merges the two ideas and the result is IBM Watson. For me AI is currently a long ways away from human intelligence because computers are able to think in ways of answering questions even if they are abstract, but they cannot synthesize the information and use it to develop and improve themselves which is a distinct characteristic of human intelligence.

In regard to AlphaGo, Deep Blue and Watson, I feel it is a mixed bag on whether they are real AI or just gimmicks. Deep Blue and Watson are definitely tricks/gimmicks because they are not learning or adapting, they either simply search a database for an answer based on key word inputs or evaluate a board with a program that gives value to chess positions. However, AlphaGo is definitely more AI and interesting as a result because Go takes much more intuition and there are no set “rule books” for a program to follow and get the best result. According to the Quantamagazine article, “Instead, by analyzing thousands of prior games and engaging in a lot of self-play, AlphaGo created a policy network through billions of tiny adjustments, each intended to make just a tiny incremental improvement. That, in turn, helped AlphaGo build a valuation system that captures something very similar to a good Go player’s intuition about the value of different board positions.” The way that AlphaGo got better at Go is in a sense the exact same way a human player would, by trying different strategies and slowly developing and learning what works.

I do not think the Turing Test is a valid measure of true AI. The basis of AI is whether they can think on their own. The Turing test does not prove this because it is simply an imitation game and not true thought. Also, Turing himself stated that using the test to decide if machines can think is meaningless and not worth discussion.

Finally, I do think a computer system could become a mind once it has the ability to abstract, synthesize and develop its own thoughts and ideas. Currently, computers have not reached that point so they do not have minds in the sense that humans have minds. I do think of the human brain as a biological computer, it in a way runs calculations telling our body what it needs to survive, it gives commands to our body and is essentially what controls everything within us. For ethical implications, I do think eventually we could have to consider basic rights for computers, if the computer is able to have sentient and individual thought it should be treated just like a member of our society (or else it might turn on us).