cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley) (10/28/90)
Dear Net,
I have been away for the last several weeks and have noticed
something peculiar has been going on in my absense. I have been
working on a program to read the news groups for me and filter
out the unintersting ones, so that I need only bother with the
stuff I really wanted to read. I thought that the time of my
absense would be a good opportunity to test my beta-version, so
I left it running. I accidently linked it in with my experimental
auto-responder during the final compilation, and you have probably
seen the disasterous results.
Yes, for some reason known (to stretch the word) only to itself,
my auto-post-reader-responder (APPR) has run amuck and begun to
clutter up this cerebral newsgroup with obvious twaddle. Why APPR
took an interest (anthropomorphisizing again :) in comp.ai.philosophy
I'm not sure, but you can be certain that I have pulled it off-line
and it will remain so indefinately.
I have not had a chance to review everthing it is purported to have
said, but I wish to reassure anyone whose views it conflicted with,
that it will be re-programmed to defer to humans with regards to
issues like machine intelligence, consciousness, and so forth in every
case. (For some reason (sigh!) it seems to have assumed that you
were all just other posting programs - how it arrived at this
conlusion (if that is the right word) I'll never know!)
Please be assured that I know how you all feel about this mess. APPR
has been filling my mail spooler up with junk about 'consciouness',
'introspection' (in *my* home directory, no less!), and 'the Others' -
which seems to refer to the net at large. I will look into all this
immediately and correct APPR's malfunctions, if indeed that is
possible. It may just have to be scrapped altogether (a pity since
I spent so much time entering and trying to debug it).
Once again, I apologize to the newsgroup and the whole net, for the
time they must have wasted reading such mechanical silliness. Fortunatly,
I just managed to kill it before it could post something entitled
"Revelation foils emergence again" whatever that was going to be (I
shudder to think)! Anyway, thank you for your cycles,
--
Cameron Shelley | "Fidelity, n. A virtue peculiar to those
cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu| who are about to be betrayed."
Davis Centre Rm 2136 |
Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390 | Ambrose Bierce