No, the implication of the post to which you were responding is not that restriction is inherently good, but rather that restriction is not inherently bad.
The GPL is not ouroboros. Restricting the freedom to restrict is not at all comparable to the PATRIOT Act. It is more akin to the Bill of Rights, or other such laws preventing certain types of laws from being made.
I think it would be helpful to be clearer as to why you disagree with the analogy rather than simply calling it stupid.
If I had to guess, I would suspect that your real issue is that you do not find the things being restricted to be comparable (i.e., human life/will vs. the use of software), rather than believing that the comparison is somehow invalid for other reasons.
Really, the only thing the GPL restricts is your ability to restrict.
(Incidentally, this is comparable to restricting the freedom to enslave; it is a restriction on restriction.)
If you think the GPL somehow "imposes an ideology on others" but literally any other license does not, I am curious as to how. (Hint: a license cannot "impose an ideology"; if you do not agree, you are free to avoid it and stick with BSD code, or whatever else might suit your fancy.)
Yeah, I'm not talking about morality at all here. Our technological prowess, resulting from the application of our intelligence, has enabled us to wipe out entire species.
> How can we say that by the time we have such wondrous machines that we as a species will not have found ways to move ourselves forward to a place on equal footing with whatever we create?
How can we find ways to move ourselves forward if we don't talk about and actively explore how to do so?
I see a lot of very opinionated dissent to even discussing the ideas presented in this article. Let me try to paraphrase in a way that hopefully levels the playing ground and maybe removes some biases or irons out some personal wrinkles we all may have for one reason or another:
It is conceivable that we (humanity) may one day obviate ourselves. Arguably, most of us would prefer that does not happen.
That's it. That's really what I see the discussion being about. I think it's a worthwhile discussion to have.
Sort of. 'Bad' here is of course an extremely subjective term. And it may not be the case that the machines do not understand the longer-term consequences of their actions; they could understand full well, but they could know that the preservation of humanity is not important (for whatever reason). So, we might not matter to them. We matter to us though, so that would be a problem for us as things stand now.
1. Machine intelligence, traditionally called artificial intelligence, which surpasses human intelligence.
2. Your category (b) is generally the primary concern in these types of discussions.
3. The anecdote of the progress of humanity. Compare the impact of human life/intelligence vs. evolutionary relatives like chimpanzees. I do not know that chimps have hunted species out of existence, for instance, but people have. We have also incidentally wiped out populations in efforts to make our lives better (via things like leveling forests, etc.)
It has been my experience that the more a particular person attempts to understand and control machine intelligence, the more she grows to fear it and its potential.
How do we ensure a proper association between the samples taken and the person in question, in particular as described in the case from the article, especially without some sort of formal framework and authorization before hand?
I am not entirely sure what you are saying here, but the way I have always understood it is: data is knowledge; the ability to apply knowledge is intelligence.
Netflix has a considerable amount of data (knowledge) and its algorithms exemplify some efforts to apply that knowledge (intelligence). As it stands presently, though, humans still tend to be more intelligent than any algorithms we have created. (Generally speaking, of course.)
I think we are trying to say the same things here, right?