New news on the possible fate of landbots

Those damn ambiguous names!

Three girl catfight! Woot!

Lol I luved it.
I give up, even my charms can't covert these 2, I pale into insignificance <sob>
I just want less Lag :/

Last I checked... Bots ARE controlled by humans.

No, they are run by computer programs. That is what makes them bots.

Bots ARE computer programs... and they are COMPLETELY controlled by humans.

They don't have free will, they don't do anything they weren't specifically instructed to do... and only under the situations and conditions in which they were programmed to respond to.

If you have a house guest that thinks it's funny to set an alarm clock for 4AM and hide it in your bedroom... Who do you hold accountable? The clock? Or your annoying houseguest?

Hello, Neo.

anyway.. I'd blame the clock, since its broken currently... >.>

Sorry, there is not a human sitting behind a keyboard directing each and every move the bot makes as it is made. So no, it is not completely controlled by a human.

When it comes down to it, the human should be held accountable. No one disagrees about that. The human is responsible for the bot, period. The bot does not appear out of thin air.

I actually met a bot today, he was kinda cute, looked like an egg
Was an interesting experience, we were looking at a plot for sale, egg arrives, I try to tap it's shell to see if it was boiled, it poofed before I could get my spoon out of the cupboards.

Oh the egg didn't buy the plot btw, 't was a bit pricey.

You should move to a world that doesn't allow users to script if you're that opposed to automation.

The Bot runner should have rights.

Not the bot.

If you can't see the difference between a fire and forget bot and a script, we have nothing else to talk about.

A washing machine doesn't have any rights.

But I still have to load it and turn the stupid thing on to do my laundry.

And it washes the clothes without me once I set it up.

For now I have the right to own a washing machine.

If my washing machine goes online and starts hacking into Bank Accounts though, Ill lose my right to have that kind of washing machine pretty darn quick.

Now that I think about it , my washing machine doesn't masquerade as a human either.

The only difference is in scale and sophistication.

And maleficence.

Oh, I'm quite clear on the differences... I've written bots entirely from scratch in the past, networking code, protocol, natural language parsing and all.

So scripts run entirely inside secondlife? What does that matter? They can still connect to external resources and do things *MANY* of the exact same things that any bot-driven avatar can. Heck, they can even animate avatars and make them look as if they were active when the real human is long since AFK.

Yes, I'm aware that bots can make full use of the client/server protocol as deployed by LL in ways that the SL-Viewer does present to us humans (yet).

Many of those will be directly available to us anyway as a variety of clients comes out for 'power users' that don't want bots but want more sophisticated features than the current viewer grants.

See this is all fine.

However the BOT itself is not a human account holder.

I wish there was a bot account reserved for bots but no one is interested in such.

We should not be expected to treat a computer program like a person, just its owner.

You can run as many bots as you want on your land. But when your programs start to affect other people, they need to be stopped, the Sheepbot from ESC and the landbots.

So, what we need to do on land purchases is add a verification on the buyers end, a simple what letters are in the box will do.

As for ESC, it should be against both the TOS and CS to scan another resident's items then list the items unless that resident has requested the service, opt in not a convoluted opt out.

Although I agree, its never gonna happen.

I can sum up LL's general attitude towards bots in one word:

"KEWL!"

Well, of course you're not expected to treat a computer program like a person. However, that doesn't make it okay to grief an avatar just because you think it might be controlled by a bot!



Chris-

I've been strongly in favor of 'internal content' remaining internal... however LL's direction is one that is breaking down the membrane that encapsulates our world, (SL is like the Web2.0! Rah Rah!). ESC's search bot is an inevitable consequence of this direction.

I doubt we'll ever have CAPTCHA for land sales... it's too likely to interfere with LL's largest land holders who have probably already made their position painfully clear to LL on the matter. Besides, those annoying landbots keep land prices inflated, which helps LL pull in more revenue when they release new sims than they would otherwise.

Gee, I dunno. If they do, either they or their owners are making mistakes, right? Otherwise, they should be buying for only the amount a human buyer would pay, only faster. Maybe the euphoria of having virtual minions at their beck and call makes the barons all giddy with flippy-frenzy or something.

It has the potential for inflating market prices, without more proliferation. But as has been shown, it has scared out quite a few of the smaller-time flippers, who also played a part in jacking up the land price. I'm on the fence about them now.

There is a few estate owner functions that scan the entire sim giving you certain information on each scripted object, to ban the scanning on object would require a reworking of the estate land functions,
Scans can be used for many useful purposes in information gathering, for instance I have scanners on my sims telling me how much land resiednts own on my sim, this is piped to my website which works up my billing and the reidents account history, without scanners it would have to be done manually, and that is an impossibility

But those residents by renting your land give you permission to scan their items. Sheepbot got permission from no one. You had to jump through hoops to not have your stuff listed.