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Russian Communist Party MP and Nobel Prize-winner Zhores Alferov has urged restrictions on internet access, saying unlimited access to information can harm people's morals and mental health.
"The internet must have limitations and it must not be available to everyone," Alferov stated in a recent interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. He went on to explain that in his opinion the total lack of control and restrictions of the net can affect people's behavior and damage publicly-accepted moral guidelines.
"By making fools of our population today we will have a lot of problems," he said.
In the same interview, Alferov said he personally did not expect any conflicts between humanity and artificial intelligence in future, but stated that it was wrong to "fully trust a machine."
Alferov is a world-renowned physicist, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also a State Duma MP representing the largest opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
But... Who will I argue with if there aren't any commies on the Internet?
Source: https://www.rt.com/politics/418544-internet-should-not-be-accessible/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday February 13 2018, @01:39AM (17 children)
He is not wrong. A lot of people cannot handle what they find on the internet.
But if you're gonna restrict, then someone has to make a list. And that's why it's a terrible idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday February 13 2018, @02:49AM (6 children)
/agree.
I've had this same discussion about voting rights, and reproduction rights too. I think there are lots people who should be restricted from doing either.
But, for such a system to exist, someone else gets to decide who gets to vote or who gets to reproduce.
So despite my sense that there are people who shouldn't vote or reproduce or access the internet for that matter... I favor no restrictions in all cases, because giving someone else the power to decide who is eligible is inevitably a worse solution.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 13 2018, @06:30AM
We all know someone who we think should not <insert activity here> and there are people who know us who think we should not <insert activity here>.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 13 2018, @04:15PM (4 children)
The problem is that if you have no controls, then you get an unstable state and a bad outcome.
The answer is relatively simple: we need someone to be in charge of limiting peoples' freedoms. Because we can't trust other people to do that, we need to build an AI to do it.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:27PM
You started perfect, then you suddenly veered off and ignored millennia of tradition.
Gods are pissed.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 13 2018, @10:04PM (1 child)
AI, er...you mean, a program written by humans, right? You know, garbage in, garbage out...why would we trust, let alone bow down to, an AI?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:04AM
If it's intelligent, it's not just "a program written by humans", though it could have biases inherited from that legacy. Are you stuck with all the same viewpoints that your parents had?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:56PM
AI is going to obey somebody.
It is possible for a suitably emerging AI to take decisions like a reasonable human, but this is not the direction AI is developed currently, nor the reason.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 13 2018, @02:49AM (2 children)
It's similar to the Chinese philosophy on social order... and don't fool yourself, "the message" is shaped in so called free Western societies as well. The fact that it's getting harder to control the shaping of the message is scary, for everyone.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 13 2018, @09:30AM (1 child)
If only there were centralized propaganda hubs billions of people would visit several times a day on their portable little devices...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday February 13 2018, @09:05PM
... That only respected when Central Authority has decided that something is Fake News or Hate Speech and should therefore not be shown to anyone on that platform ...
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 13 2018, @03:42AM (4 children)
What exactly do you mean by "cannot handle"?
If you're referring to all the nonsense "information" that's out there, I'll just point out that propaganda and disinformation and just flat being wrong aren't anything new in human history, and just because that's happening on computers and smartphones doesn't make it fundamentally different from when it came from the mouths of would-be leaders ranting in the town square.
If you're saying they get shocked and triggered by some of the images or words, then I'll just say that if you don't want to view goatse or similar kinds of things, then don't. And again, this isn't anything new: Smut has been available in all kinds of forms for as long as humans have had leisure time available to them.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday February 13 2018, @07:52AM (3 children)
It's the easy and anonymous availability that makes it worse than the town square.
If you went to the library and asked for books about the proper way to commit suicide, went to the town square to find a jihadist to explain to you why killing infidels is the answer to your shitty life, or had to go across town and hide behind a four-inch tree to stalk your ex, you would hit roadblocks to help you think about your actions. You could still do each of those things, the same way that you can hurt people with a Swiss army knife, but the internet is like a loaded weapon: if you're not capable of handling it (how it can feed your demons), the best we all hope for is that you only injure yourself.
And Tide pods, clearly. Because the internet rewards dangerous and stupid with fame, on a scale that makes trash TV jealous.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 13 2018, @02:35PM (1 child)
Right. That's why, before the Internet came about, purveyors of complete nonsense were before the advent of the Internet completely unable to start religious [scientology.org] cults [wikipedia.org], terrorist [wikipedia.org] groups [wikipedia.org], and popular [wikipedia.org] conspiracy [wikipedia.org] theories [wikipedia.org]. Often relying on anonymity and pseudonyms to do so.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:24PM
Words.
They have a meaning.
You should try to understand their meaning, before you spend a lot of time responding to them.
The words you want to consider reading again are my "easy" and "worse", and how they relate to your "completely unable", or not.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 14 2018, @09:44PM
Doing bad things would be more difficult if doing things were more difficult. This is a valid reasoning, mind you, BUT it is not applied to other systems. Transportation, old style Communication, Automation, and to the deadliest and faster weapon on earth, money.
You know why?
Because some people control money. And they don't control the internet much. yet.
The whole fake news movement is about this. Internet was a godsend for control, once accepted it is being closing down. No surprise.
Besides, you can shut down anything by polluting it first and then claiming it must not be permitted for the common good.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday February 13 2018, @04:42AM (1 child)
A lot of people can't handle what they find in life.
A lot of people should probably not be running around loose in the world.
But the burden of babysitting them is approximately the same as picking them up and dusting them off, or shoveling them under when they do themselves in. And nobody likes to be told what to do.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday February 13 2018, @09:08AM
There already are a lot of people not running about loose in the world. Have you heard of America, the Prison Country?