About this site

Story/text/characters of The Case of the Killer Robot

© 1989, 1994 Richard G. Epstein

Permission is granted to copy this material for use in classroom instruction at a college or university. This material may not be copied for any other purpose without express written permission of the author.

Disclaimer:

The persons and institutions involved in this scenario are entirely fictitious (except for the references to Carnegie-Mellon and Purdue Universities and to the venerable computer scientists: Ben Shneiderman and Jim Foley). Silicon Valley was chosen as the location for the accident because Silicon Valley is an icon of high technology. All of the persons and institutions named in Silicon Valley are purely fictitious.

HTML/CSS/graphics/Jekyll

The Case of the Killer Robot text used here was taken from North Carolina State University’s site.

This presentation of the material was created for use by the Computer Science department at RHUL as a Jekyll site. See the copyright notice above which concerns the Killer Robot scenario. The repo containing this site is available under an MIT License: you’re free to fork it and host it locally, or as a GitHub pages site.

Metal texture image via pxfuel.

About the headshots (or: who are these people?)

The characters in the documents are fictional; so the photographs are too. Specifically, the headshots were taken from thispersondoesnotexist.com. They were imagined by a Generative Adversarial Network (specifically, StyleGAN2 (Dec 2019) — Karras et al. and Nvidia).

If you’re interested in how that works see this YouTube video on StyleGANv2

Thanks to Phil Wang for making thispersondoesnotexist available, and credit to Nvidia for StyleGAN2!

See also: thiscatdoesnotexist.com:

a cat that does not exist