Wow! These are big questions. I can't answer all of them here, since you raise many of the central questions being debated in roboethics today. I would definitely recommend "Robot Ethics", published by MIT Press. It's a good primer on the ethical issues surrounding robotics. I use it to teach my Roboethics class.

Thanks for the comment.

No, Unfortunately I don\'t.

I can see the appeal. There's something fun about seeing my car parked in my driveway on Google, or someone I know who's been "snapped" by the Google Car during a street view drive-by. I wonder if anyone has put together a coffee table book (or more likely a Flickr Photostream) of Google Car Drive-Bys?

Interesting! I remember using those stereoscopes in my first-year geology class. I had no idea people still did the low alt. aircraft flyover for pics. I wonder how long it will be until we can just order up a set from one of the satellites way up there? Thanks for the replies, everyone.

In my teens I worked at a golf course. In the clubhouse they had an aerial photograph of the entire course, which I thought was pretty cool. I asked the manager how they got it. Apparently, they had hired a company that would fly a photographer over the course in multiple passes, to allow for a series of photographs to be taken. The pictures were then blown up and merged into a poster-sized picture of the entire area. Not cheap!

Over the years I noticed those photographs in different places: of the lakes that family cottages sit on; of the farms that have been in families for generations.

My brother just bought a cottage, but if he wants an aerial view of the lake I would imagine he can just google it and use it as his screen-saver.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply! We have a common background in Applied Physics...cool!

It appears that Turing would agree with you completely. There is no testable hypothesis offered by proponents of supernatural consciousness, or of emergent consciousness. If the Internet ever claims to be conscious, and we decide that settling the issue is important, we definitely have a problem.

However, in that case the supernaturalists might be able to sit easy and respond by simply claiming that God (or whatever) didn't give the Internet a soul, or whatever is responsible for supernatural consciousness. The naturalists (at least those proponents of strong AI and of emergence), will have the luxury of responding by taking the Internet at its word.

The ethicists, like myself, will be left dealing with the inevitable difficulties of trying to figure out how we ought to respond, how to deal with the supernaturalists, the naturalists and the Internet (as if dealing with humans, sentient animals and the rest of nature isn't difficult enough).

It's a really great debate. I teach an undergrad course in Roboethics and students spend a lot of time grappling with all these issues. Fun times we live in!

I would definitely recommend "Can Animals and Machines be Persons" by Justin Leiber, a fantastic little book about all this. It takes place in the near future and revolves around a court case meant to decide the fate of a space station set for decommissioning, and its resident chimp who is incapable of returning to Earth.

Hi Mike,
Interesting commentary for sure. But (there's always a but) I do have to take issue with your reading of the Turing Test. Turing was emphatically not trying to test for consciousness. Rather he was trying to come up with a good enough test for intelligence, given that we can't be certain about consciousness. The consciousness question is effectively bracketed out. This is a common misinterpretation of Turing's intent.

One other thing, people studying entanglement and non-local phenomena are studying "natural" sciences. Sawyer's claim about "super"natural stuff avoids that criticism too!

Great comment.

Ryan,
Yes, it is definitely a pressing challenge to understand the various ways that algorithms impact values, and to develop ways to mitigate the negative impacts and enhance the positive. I'll definitely take a look at the video. Thanks!

Wow! Layar looks really fun. (Full disclosure, I am NOT affiliated in any way to Layar).

Hi Bob,
First of all, thanks for reading, and I really appreciate the comment. You raise a very important point, one that I have been planning to write about. So here's a preview...

You are right that Facebook has a similar feature, but I would emphasize that Lists and Circles are NOT the "same" features. The difference is in the way the features are implemented on the two sites. Facebook lists are not meant to function as the default means of communicating information on Facebook. In fact, they make lists optional to the point that you would have to do some serious digging in order to both figure out how to use lists, and also to use them when posting on FB (it takes several clicks to get to the point where a post is filtered by list). Again, lists are in no way meant to be the default way of communicating on FB. They bury the lists feature as a means of discouraging its use.

On the flipside, Google doesn't allow you to communicate your information without making explicit choices about who to share that information with. You also can't "friend" anyone without making a similar choice. The shift in emphasis makes all the difference. Facebook and Google designers know that the vast majority of users of any technology use it with the default settings intact--major lawsuits (over IE as a default browser, for example) have been fought over the use of defaults as a way of "encouraging" a particular use of technology. By setting the default behaviour of Google+ to force a choice of who to communicate to, and how to characterize new Google+ contacts, Google+ scores huge points in terms of their respect for privacy.

I would go as far as to say that by burying the lists feature and making it an opt-in use of the technology, Facebook can't claim to have put together an architecture that has the same features as Google+ Circles. The choice of a default set of behaviour makes them vastly different features.