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Physicists, philosophers, professors, authors, cognitive scientists, and many others have weighed in on edge.org's annual question 2015: What do you think about machines that think? See all 186 responses here
Also, what do you think?
My 2¢: There's been a lot of focus on potential disasters that are almost certainly not going to happen. E.g. a robot uprising, or mass poverty through unemployment. Most manufacturers of artificial intelligence won't program their machines to seek self preservation at the expense of their human masters. It wouldn't sell. Secondly, if robots can one day produce almost everything we need, including more robots, with almost no human labour required, then robot-powered factories will become like libraries: relatively cheap to maintain, plentiful, and a public one will be set up in every town or suburb, for public use. If you think the big corporations wouldn't allow it, why do they allow public libraries?
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday January 23 2015, @09:54AM
But the powerful publishers' lobby was determined to prevent the public from taking advantage of the power of their computers, and found copyright a suitable weapon. Under their influence, rather than relaxing copyright to suit the new circumstances, governments made it stricter than ever, imposing harsh penalties on readers caught sharing.
Whoever wrote that needs to do some serious research into their subject, or at the very least learn to distinguish between motion pictures and books. The motion picture lobby was the one that pushed hard for absurdly long copyright lengths, though it had nothing to do with the public: the largest companies (e.g. Disney) didn't want their older films to be open for other companies to sell or make money off of.
The book publishing lobby works both for the publishers and the authors — you know, those still-living individuals that work full-time for 1-3+ years on each book, after years of practice becoming proficient (or preferably much better) at their craft — which are also everyday citizens using the power of their computers. Most feel that the copyright system is damaged, but that until we have a better way for them to be rewarded fairly for their efforts, it's better than nothing.
Rather than try to clumsily explain why the current situation is a very bad one for both writers and book-lovers, I'll link to a great post that Jason Scott (the guy at the Internet Archive that's project leader for the Internet Arcade & other major stuff) made in his blog recently, because he explains it far better than I can [textfiles.com].
As a side note, most writers that are anti-copyright are either hobbyists (self-published, but no more interested in being the equivalent of a traditional professional author than they are in earning a doctorate in Victorian lit), or they're trading heavily on an established name like Cory Doctorow, who entered the field when there was no competition and had a famous SF author with the same surname in his family. If Doctorow hadn't been related to anybody and tried to join the field now, chances are that his views would be very different.