How Should the Law Think About Robots?
An anonymous reader writes "With the personal robotics revolution imminent, a law professor and a roboticist (called Professor Smart!) argue that the law needs to think about robots properly. In particular, they say we should avoid 'the Android Fallacy' — the idea that robots are just like us, only synthetic. 'Even in research labs, cameras are described as "eyes," robots are "scared" of obstacles, and they need to "think" about what to do next. This projection of human attributes is dangerous when trying to design legislation for robots. Robots are, and for many years will remain, tools. ... As the autonomy of the system increases, it becomes harder and harder to form the connection between the inputs (your commands) and the outputs (the robot's behavior), but it exists, and is deterministic. The same set of inputs will generate the same set of outputs every time. The problem, however, is that the robot will never see exactly the same input twice. ... The problem is that this different ...
agency
android
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legislation
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roboticist
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Benghazi and Boston toward a Working Definition of Terrorism
How the term terrorism is officially defined and applied is under review here in the United States. The US Congress will convene this week to further investigate the attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya and to discuss the related sequelae.
benghazi
boston
congress
definition
libya
terrorism
united states
NIMH Distances Itself From DSM Categories, Shifts Funding To New Approaches
New submitter Big Nemo '60 writes with news that the National Institute of Mental Health is seeking to modernize the diagnosis of mental illness through the use of neuroscience, genetics, etc. From the article: "The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's 'bible' — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — questioning its validity and stating that 'patients with mental disorders deserve better.' This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5." More importantly, they are going to be shifting funding to research projects that seek to define new categories of mental illness using modern medical science, ignoring the current DSM categorizations: "The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been 'reliability' .. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus ...
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national institute
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neuroscience
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reliability
revision
science
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validity
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weakness
Adobe's Flash Professional Gets Improved Support For HTML5 Publishing, Real-Time Mobile Testing And A New Code Editor
Flash may be dead, but Adobe’s Flash Professional has already gone beyond just being a Flash tool and it’s getting a major update today. The new version, Adobe says, has been “rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, modular, extensible, reliable, more focused and more efficient than before.” That’s quite a promise, but new version does indeed sport quite a few new features and improvements. The company has re-engineered Flash Professional as a 64-bit application, which should make it more stable and allow users to easily manage multiple large files. The app, which Adobe says is now far more responsive, now also allows Flash developers to export their content in high definition video and audio, “all without dropping frames.” The tool now also sports a streamlined user interface to make dialog boxes and panels more intuitive. Users can now also choose between a dark or light interface. With this new version, Adobe is introducing enhanced HTML5 support – something most of us ...
adobe
android devices
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createjs
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flash
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improvements
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Even Better In-Browser Mockups with Node.js
Designing in the browser has all sorts of benefits, like producing more accurate, comprehensive results and removing the extra step of converting from image file to markup and CSS. But even sites designed in a browser still require pasting in content, faking interactions with the server, and creating placeholder JavaScript that isn’t usable on the live site. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go from just designing layouts and interactions to designing the whole client side of the application during the same process? This is where Node comes in. Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform. It isn’t a web server, but it allows you to easily create one. It also lets you create utilities that run on web servers, like setup and minification utilities and general-purpose command line tools. Node started in 2009 and generated considerable interest, probably because it gave JavaScript developers an opportunity to write server-side code even if they lacked a server-side background. It didn’t ...
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minification
node
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