Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagVoter fraud allegations (in U.S.)

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Internet law concept

Can a Robot be Arrested and Prosecuted?

An Uber driver is held liable if he runs over someone. But what if a driverless taxi ran over someone?

The title, “Can a Robot Be Arrested? Hold a Patent? Pay Income Taxes?”, is bound to attract clicks and attention. Posted on the IEEE Spectrum site, a podcast transcript by that name reports Steven Cherry’s interview of Ryan Abbott about artificial intelligence and the law. Abbott, a physician, lawyer, and professor, wrote the aptly titled book, The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. To the point: Can a robot be arrested? Technically, an arrest occurs when a person is forcibly but lawfully detained. Of course, one can forcibly detain a robot – we’ve seen that done in many science fiction movies. Abbott was talking specifically about how criminal law should apply to actions taken by artificial intelligence (AI) Read More ›

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How the Explanatory Filter Can Help Quash Conspiracy Theories

I found Dembski’s explanatory filter quite helpful in investigating voter fraud claims

William Dembski’s explanatory filter is a decision strategy for identifying events that are unlikely to have happened purely by chance. The filter proceeds in three main steps, which can be illustrated via the plot device in Contact, a novel (1985) by Carl Sagan, followed by a film (1997): Eliminate events of large probability (necessity): A radio telescope receives a pattern of beeps and pauses. Perhaps the pattern seems strange to us but we could just be overinterpreting inevitable space noise. Eliminate events of medium probability (chance): The pattern turns out to be a sequence of prime numbers. However, large randomly generated numbers sometimes feature apparent patterns (five 5s in a row, for example) that don’t signify anything. Specify the event Read More ›