Posts by zonardave

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Hacking at MIT

I can't vouch for the 1950s, but by the 60s when I was at MIT, a "hack" (N) and "hacking around" (V) both referred to ingenious and relatively harmless tricks, always involving technology, which occupied our "idle" time. NOTE: We didn't really have time to have idle time, so hacking was in lieu of the many "important" things we were supposed to be doing, effectively avoiding real work; but since it had a technical design and implementation character, we could justify it as being as educationally useful as the real work.

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

The only hope is to replace politicians with AI systems, thereby inserting a healthy portion of dysfunctionality into the decision neural network, since irrationality is required to optimize politics. This insertion of random, counterproductive behavior will cause a high enough level of failure to perform as predicted to serve as a check on unfettered deployment of LAW systems by the AI masters who will be making the decision.