Robots Are Starting to Break the Law and Nobody Knows What to Do About it Daniel Rivero - Fusion
go to original January 5, 2015

The 10 Ecstasy Pills the Random Darknet Shopper bought were vacuum-sealed in aluminium foil and placed inside a DVD case, so they would look like a DVD in a x-ray scan. (Mediengruppe Bitnik)

Maybe it’s a sign that robots are growing up, and thus hitting the rebellious stage.

The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.

The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

If this bot was shipping to the U.S., asks Forbes contributor and University of Washington law professor contributor Ryan Calo, who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself?

Read the rest at Fusion

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