Both the title of the article and that first phrase are sensationalistic and have almost nothing in common with the rest of the article.
Nebulus, Your statements do not match with the article - i.e. the law professor has made a valid point about the law vs. the issue. -- Tom
I thought the article was going to be something other than concise, interesting & unique. Surprisingly I found it to be the opposite. Thanks OP.
There is nothing wrong with the article itself, as it raises an interesting question. But the phrase "Maybe it’s a sign that robots are growing up, and thus hitting the rebellious stage." has no connection with the rest of the article and I find it to be sensationalistic. Getting back to the article itself, I think that the problem is simpler than it seems. If a human gives such instructions to a program/robot/etc. there the programmer itself is clearly guilty. Besides, it would be pretty hard to argue the "not knowing" case in a court of law, as long as you told that program to go specifically to the Dark Web and make purchases. The problem would become more interesting if you would let the robot search for shopping sites itself and make a purchase every day and then you discover that it boought something from the Dark Web by accident...
There's the idea that everything that gets sent out from a computer, or router, isn't always the wants of the person using it- which is legit. The internet is a wonderful world of "do not want", with shock sites being a good example. Or just clicking ANY link, downloading ANY file- you really have no idea what's going to appear until it does. But you can't entertain that they'd actually let you keep any contraband that does end up in your possession, regardless of how it ended up there. That's why they go for hard drives- to show that the person had intent on keeping everything.
Thanks for clarifying what you actually meant by "sensationalistic". As for guilt, you are jumping to a conclusion, as it was explained in the article about the "intent" being for art's sake rather than otherwise for which there appear to be some legal precedence - intent being the major operative word in determining guilt. -- Tom
In other news, but on the same idea: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/20...-want-to-kill-people-prompts-police-response/
