I found this a fascinating article to stumble upon right after seeing the film "Her." There will be some who will deny that we as a culture will never become so dependent on computers and AIs as to allow them to shape and control our lives as much as Theodore does in "Her."
Well, let me present a theoretical case to you. You're a fan of science fiction, and of scifi writing, TV, and movies. As such, you'd love to go to the most prestigious ceremony for such things, the annual Hugo Awards. But the awards are being held at Worldcon, a big gathering of scifi folk in another city, and you can't afford to go there, so you tune in via the streamed video feed of the event. And everything's going great. You're enjoying the speeches and the clips from the TV shows and movies and all of a sudden the feed is cut, and replaced with a blank screen containing the words: Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement. This actually happened, and it was done by 'bots. There was not a human in the loop when the copyright police 'bots used by Upstream (the streaming video provider for Worldcon) shut down its broadcast. These censor-bots just decided that something was being seen that they didn't think *should* be seen, according to what they had been told by their programmers, and so they just shut the whole feed down. When Upstream found out what happened and tried to restart the feed (according to them), they couldn't. The censor-bots' word turned out to be final. Go figure. http://io9.com/5940036/how-copyright-enforcement-robots-killed-the-hugo-\ awards <http://io9.com/5940036/how-copyright-enforcement-robots-killed-the-hugo\ -awards>
