Agenda Item Week 4

On NMR: From Computer Power and Human Reason, by Joseph Weizenbaum 

Weizenbaum discusses about Artificial Intelligence programs like Eliza and Doctor and highlights his concerns over people who see computers as assuming an intimate human role.  He highlights that some suggest Doctor should be employed a human role of psychotherapist (370).  Because the line between humans and machines are drawing closer together, he warns that "computer applications that either ought not to be undertaken at all or if they are contemplated, should be approached with the utmost caution" (268).  As he raises the question over the proper place of computers in the social order, it would be interesting to hear others take on this thought.

I feel that getting a human-like response from a computer is threatening and in a lot of ways discouraging. By blurring the lines of human intelligence and artificial intelligence you begin to question the validity of your own answers in comparison to a 'script'. It is clearly understood that computers cannot understand emotions and Weizenbaum elaborates on this idea. He shares his fear on the idea that some people have considered that a machine can pose as a psychotherapist, for example, and that humans have become immensely dependent on techonology by stating that "science may also be seen as an addictive drug"(372).  Weizenbaum questions the morality of creating machines who come very close to human capabilities, in which I also am curious about. I, personally, feel that allowing computers to take on the roles of human is practically inhumane and in a lot of ways ridiculous.

Agenda Item Week 3

On the video: "Get Creative"
CC's signature animated film covers the basics of why we formed, what we do, and how we do it.

Notes on the video:
- "Creative Common wants to allow some uses to their work" and is said to "compliment Big C (copyright)"
- CC says "some rights reserved" where the Big C says "all rights reserved"
- "get creative. it's easy when you skip the intermediaries"
- "We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
- Creative Commons licenses are expressed in three different formats: the Commons Deed (human-readable code), the Legal Code (lawyer-readable code); and the metadata (machine readable code).  

As 'creative' Creative Commons is, I still feel that its lacking in its aspirations.  It automatically grants permission to reuse people's thoughts and ideas with much freedom. Much like GNU General Public License it functions to allow people to reuse, modify, and redistribute information. Wikipedia can be seen as a type of Creative Commons where anyone can post entries about anything they want to say and share it in the common.  Yet, many entries must go through criterias before it is allowed to even be public or shared. Therefore, what does the term free mean?

Free in this case means "copyleft" (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) where the public domain has access to shared thoughts and ideas but it is under copyright law. Free means allowed access to everyone but that doesn't mean it is not entirely free where credit is not given to the original creator for putting forth the idea. Creative Commons looks at free software and observes that in a public domain people build off of others ideas and can make profit off of it. An example of this is Disney who has taken something publicly shared that is free and making money off of that. In this way, free is not free but free is freedom (http://creativecommons.org/about/)