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"Algorithmic entities are likely to prosper first and most in criminal, terrorist, and other anti-social activities because that is where they have their greate

"Algorithmic entities are likely to prosper first and most in criminal, terrorist, and other anti-social activities because that is where they have their greatest comparative advantage (edit: or what advantages exactly that they have?) over human-controlled entities." Can anyone further elucidate what's meant by "comparative advantage"? also, i find this sentence particularly interesting. how did they come up with this notion?

darawk 9y ago
Non-human-owned corporations are insulated from criminal legal consequences, and therefore are better able to engage in activity that would otherwise engender criminal prosecution, relative to a human.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  If you took away it's money how would it exist.
  - btilly 9y ago
    It wouldn't. But for the person who created the entity, losing the company is a better outcome than going to jail.
    - guntars 9y ago
      Pretty sure we already have laws to put authors of malicious software in jail.
      - dublinben 9y ago
        What if the software wrote itself? How do you put software in jail?
        leetcrew 9y ago
        this is a fun paradox to entertain, but irl we would probably just trace the "stack" back to the human who wrote the program that started the chain of program-writing programs and hold them liable (unless we can show intent, then charge them criminally). if you can't trace back far enough to find a human then I guess you just throw up your hands and give up, which is more or less what we do anyway when we can't attribute a malicious program to a specific person. so altogether not as novel as it seems.
        pishpash 9y ago
        What if the programs were randomly generated and selected for certain traits by the crowd of non-owners at large? Who is responsible?
        fmblwntr 9y ago
        what if i set a machine to fire a gun randomly and select it for the trait of hitting people? who is responsible?
        pishpash 9y ago
        Wrong analogy. I set up a blank slate. Random people on the internet start to mould it into a gun that fires on people incrementally, each step fairly innocuous. Who is responsible?
        leetcrew 9y ago
        "who is responsible?" is a philosophical question that probably has no objective answer. "who would be held responsible?" is still pretty easy here. by default, if you own or release to the public a system that ends up hurting someone, you are liable. it doesn't matter what your intent was or whether there was any way of knowing that the bad outcome would happen. the only way you can get around this is with "safe harbor" exemptions. it's possible that your blank slate would qualify, although you would probably have to lobby for this before the fact. in that case, no one would be held responsible. otherwise, you would be paying.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    It has no fear of anything physical or social such as jail, public humiliation, police brutality, poor health. Fear itself is irrelevant, including fear of dissolution. The entity can operate as per its primary goals without concern as to the ultimate success of the goals, whether that is siphoning money to a hidden account, disrupting government services by denial of service, spawning copycat organizations to thwart law enforcement, etc.
    - louisswiss 9y ago
      Some of those attributes sound like they could be more of a hinderance than a help (in the pursuit of successful illicit activity, I mean)
    - politician 9y ago
      This all already exists in the form of large, sometimes multinational, organizations. Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely? From Equifax? We don't need AIs to achieve this level of self-directed autonomy free to engage in criminal behavior without consequences: we already have Employee Handbooks.
      - megy 9y ago
        > Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely? Is that illegal though? I mean, I can create an account for you on my web platform, and everyone else.
        danans 9y ago
        If in doing so you charge me for services I didn't request, then yes, it's fraud. And that's what WF did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_sc...
    - ars 9y ago
      And who exactly would implement the algorithm? That person has much to fear.
  - frisco 9y ago
    If you couldn't get its private keys, how would you take away its money?
    - pishpash 9y ago
      It might have money but it wouldn't be an LLC. It would just be a virus like WannaCry.
    - ateesdalejr 9y ago
      The government? Or the creator? If it were the creator I'm sure that the creator would have the common sense to pregenerate and store the private keys somewhere safe.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    What if you couldn’t? Imagine an AI running in the cloud, self replicating, totally free of human input, no physical presence anywhere, with sole access to a bitcoin wallet from which it pays expenses and to which it receives revenue. No assets that are seize-able. No goals other than to collect more and more profit. How do you stop it from operating?
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      Disconnect the servers it's running on.
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        It thought about this before you and is currently running on hundreds of thousands of zombie home computers unknowingly infected with malware.
        matte_black 9y ago
        Make it a deal it can't refuse.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Then you distribute the Antivirus patches.
    - aninhumer 9y ago
      Seize all its physical assets and make it illegal to trade with. Bitcoin is arguably impossible to control, but real world assets not so much. Property rights as they currently exist are ultimately enforced by state violence. A number in a blockchain only has meaning if those who enforce physical property rights allow it to. And if the AI manages to actually assert control of property on its own, it is no longer a market actor, it is a revolutionary army.
- q4w56 9y ago
  On the otherhand nonhumans are not protected by law, so government can kill it at will.
  - npongratz 9y ago
    But perhaps they would not kill it if it were deemed too big or important to fail. Doesn't preclude others from attempting to kill it, of course.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
It's the notion that we want to be compensated for risk in life. That's true of entrepreneurship, investing, lending out money etc. Shady industries tend to carry high risks, and therefore high risk-premiums to compensate. (e.g. see the price of illegal drugs vs the raw production costs in a legal environment) But computers can neglect some of those risks. Not all, but some. And therefore needn't be compensated for them, and have a competitive advantage over humans.
nabla9 9y ago
"comparative advantage" is probably the most important simple concept in economics that is not self evident and intuitive. It was first discovered by Ricardo 200 years ago. Comparative advantage comes from the ability to produce goods or services at a lower opportunity cost (you should also know what "opportunity cost" means to fully grasp the idea). In the original formulation it means is that can be beneficial for two entities to trade even when one entity can produce all products cheaper than the other (it has an absolute advantage in all categories) if there is differences in the relative cost they produce those products themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
eat_veggies 9y ago
Paraphrased from my econ 101 textbook: Suppose in a given day, Henry can catch up to 4 deer, or 6 antelopes. John can catch 24 deer, or 12 antelopes. John can catch way more of either animal than Henry, so we say John has an absolute advantage in both products. You might think that John can not benefit from trading with Henry, because he can produce every product better than Henry can. However, we can break it down another way: It costs Henry 3/2 antelopes to catch 1 deer, and 2/3 deer to catch one antelope (prove it to yourself: 6/4 and 4/6). It costs John 1/2 antelope to catch 1 deer, and 2 deer to catch one antelope. Thus, it costs less for Henry to specialize in catching antelopes, and for John to specialize in deer. This is comparative advantage. Then, when they trade at a rate between the two opportunity costs, they can achieve a combination of products unattainable individually: Before trade: - Henry: 6 antelopes, 0 deer - John: 0 antelopes, 24 deer After trade: - Henry: 4 antelopes, 2 deer - John: 2 antelopes, 22 deer While their totals are the same here, because an exchange rate of 1 antelope to 1 deer works out here, it helps to look at it graphically: For this, we can make a production possibilities curve (or line, to keep it simple), which is a graph of possible outputs where the axes are the amount of each product that John or Henry can produce in a day. Here's Henry's: https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png (vertical axis is antelopes, horizontal is deer) Henry can obtain any point on or inside the purple. Any point outside of that is unobtainable. However, with trade, he can obtain it! The result of trade is the green dot. Here's John's: https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png As you can see, they both obtain points outside of what's possible to produce alone, due to comparative advantage! Note: I don't claim to be an economics expert (just a high schooler taking the AP course!), and I'm sure there will be lots of better explanations in this thread!

darawk 9y ago

Non-human-owned corporations are insulated from criminal legal consequences, and therefore are better able to engage in activity that would otherwise engender criminal prosecution, relative to a human.

sharemywin 9y ago
If you took away it's money how would it exist.
- btilly 9y ago
  It wouldn't. But for the person who created the entity, losing the company is a better outcome than going to jail.
  - guntars 9y ago
    Pretty sure we already have laws to put authors of malicious software in jail.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      What if the software wrote itself? How do you put software in jail?
      - leetcrew 9y ago
        this is a fun paradox to entertain, but irl we would probably just trace the "stack" back to the human who wrote the program that started the chain of program-writing programs and hold them liable (unless we can show intent, then charge them criminally). if you can't trace back far enough to find a human then I guess you just throw up your hands and give up, which is more or less what we do anyway when we can't attribute a malicious program to a specific person. so altogether not as novel as it seems.
        pishpash 9y ago
        What if the programs were randomly generated and selected for certain traits by the crowd of non-owners at large? Who is responsible?
        fmblwntr 9y ago
        what if i set a machine to fire a gun randomly and select it for the trait of hitting people? who is responsible?
        pishpash 9y ago
        Wrong analogy. I set up a blank slate. Random people on the internet start to mould it into a gun that fires on people incrementally, each step fairly innocuous. Who is responsible?
        leetcrew 9y ago
        "who is responsible?" is a philosophical question that probably has no objective answer. "who would be held responsible?" is still pretty easy here. by default, if you own or release to the public a system that ends up hurting someone, you are liable. it doesn't matter what your intent was or whether there was any way of knowing that the bad outcome would happen. the only way you can get around this is with "safe harbor" exemptions. it's possible that your blank slate would qualify, although you would probably have to lobby for this before the fact. in that case, no one would be held responsible. otherwise, you would be paying.
- bdamm 9y ago
  It has no fear of anything physical or social such as jail, public humiliation, police brutality, poor health. Fear itself is irrelevant, including fear of dissolution. The entity can operate as per its primary goals without concern as to the ultimate success of the goals, whether that is siphoning money to a hidden account, disrupting government services by denial of service, spawning copycat organizations to thwart law enforcement, etc.
  - louisswiss 9y ago
    Some of those attributes sound like they could be more of a hinderance than a help (in the pursuit of successful illicit activity, I mean)
  - politician 9y ago
    This all already exists in the form of large, sometimes multinational, organizations. Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely? From Equifax? We don't need AIs to achieve this level of self-directed autonomy free to engage in criminal behavior without consequences: we already have Employee Handbooks.
    - megy 9y ago
      > Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely? Is that illegal though? I mean, I can create an account for you on my web platform, and everyone else.
      - danans 9y ago
        If in doing so you charge me for services I didn't request, then yes, it's fraud. And that's what WF did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_sc...
  - ars 9y ago
    And who exactly would implement the algorithm? That person has much to fear.
- frisco 9y ago
  If you couldn't get its private keys, how would you take away its money?
  - pishpash 9y ago
    It might have money but it wouldn't be an LLC. It would just be a virus like WannaCry.
  - ateesdalejr 9y ago
    The government? Or the creator? If it were the creator I'm sure that the creator would have the common sense to pregenerate and store the private keys somewhere safe.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  What if you couldn’t? Imagine an AI running in the cloud, self replicating, totally free of human input, no physical presence anywhere, with sole access to a bitcoin wallet from which it pays expenses and to which it receives revenue. No assets that are seize-able. No goals other than to collect more and more profit. How do you stop it from operating?
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    Disconnect the servers it's running on.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      It thought about this before you and is currently running on hundreds of thousands of zombie home computers unknowingly infected with malware.
      - matte_black 9y ago
        Make it a deal it can't refuse.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Then you distribute the Antivirus patches.
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    Seize all its physical assets and make it illegal to trade with. Bitcoin is arguably impossible to control, but real world assets not so much. Property rights as they currently exist are ultimately enforced by state violence. A number in a blockchain only has meaning if those who enforce physical property rights allow it to. And if the AI manages to actually assert control of property on its own, it is no longer a market actor, it is a revolutionary army.
q4w56 9y ago
On the otherhand nonhumans are not protected by law, so government can kill it at will.
- npongratz 9y ago
  But perhaps they would not kill it if it were deemed too big or important to fail. Doesn't preclude others from attempting to kill it, of course.

IkmoIkmo 9y ago

It's the notion that we want to be compensated for risk in life. That's true of entrepreneurship, investing, lending out money etc. Shady industries tend to carry high risks, and therefore high risk-premiums to compensate. (e.g. see the price of illegal drugs vs the raw production costs in a legal environment) But computers can neglect some of those risks. Not all, but some. And therefore needn't be compensated for them, and have a competitive advantage over humans.

nabla9 9y ago

"comparative advantage" is probably the most important simple concept in economics that is not self evident and intuitive. It was first discovered by Ricardo 200 years ago. Comparative advantage comes from the ability to produce goods or services at a lower opportunity cost (you should also know what "opportunity cost" means to fully grasp the idea). In the original formulation it means is that can be beneficial for two entities to trade even when one entity can produce all products cheaper than the other (it has an absolute advantage in all categories) if there is differences in the relative cost they produce those products themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

eat_veggies 9y ago

Paraphrased from my econ 101 textbook: Suppose in a given day, Henry can catch up to 4 deer, or 6 antelopes. John can catch 24 deer, or 12 antelopes. John can catch way more of either animal than Henry, so we say John has an absolute advantage in both products. You might think that John can not benefit from trading with Henry, because he can produce every product better than Henry can. However, we can break it down another way: It costs Henry 3/2 antelopes to catch 1 deer, and 2/3 deer to catch one antelope (prove it to yourself: 6/4 and 4/6). It costs John 1/2 antelope to catch 1 deer, and 2 deer to catch one antelope. Thus, it costs less for Henry to specialize in catching antelopes, and for John to specialize in deer. This is comparative advantage. Then, when they trade at a rate between the two opportunity costs, they can achieve a combination of products unattainable individually: Before trade: - Henry: 6 antelopes, 0 deer - John: 0 antelopes, 24 deer After trade: - Henry: 4 antelopes, 2 deer - John: 2 antelopes, 22 deer While their totals are the same here, because an exchange rate of 1 antelope to 1 deer works out here, it helps to look at it graphically: For this, we can make a production possibilities curve (or line, to keep it simple), which is a graph of possible outputs where the axes are the amount of each product that John or Henry can produce in a day. Here's Henry's: https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png https://i.imgur.com/k9xS7Sj.png (vertical axis is antelopes, horizontal is deer) Henry can obtain any point on or inside the purple. Any point outside of that is unobtainable. However, with trade, he can obtain it! The result of trade is the green dot. Here's John's: https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png https://i.imgur.com/V6aFZkm.png As you can see, they both obtain points outside of what's possible to produce alone, due to comparative advantage! Note: I don't claim to be an economics expert (just a high schooler taking the AP course!), and I'm sure there will be lots of better explanations in this thread!