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sixes_and_sevens comments on Computer security story - Less Wrong
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If you think that's terrifying, you should see how easy it is to steal, rape and murder.
It's not that hard to kill most people, but it's usually pretty hard to kill someone without getting caught.
Killing most people would be tough! I suspect I'd be stopped well before reaching .0001% of people, myself.
Have you ever actually tried?
Don't get me wrong, I've not actually tried to kill anyone either, but I've thought about the pragmatics of it, and I don't think premeditated murder is actually prohibitively difficult to get away with. I'm pretty sure it's more of a psychological barrier than anything else.
Really? One of three murders in the U.S. go unsolved.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_25.html
jdinkum:
That's not a good number to base your calculations on. Getting away with any crime nowadays is extremely difficult if the police and prosecutors are willing to invest significant resources in investigating and prosecuting it. How much they'll be willing to invest heavily depends on all sorts of circumstances, even when it comes to the most serious crimes.
In particular, murders and other violent crimes are investigated far more vigorously if committed in a respectable environment, in a way makes high-status people feel unsafe.
It's still hard enough that we can't build autonomous machines for doing it, the way we have been able to for decades for computer intrusion.
My point was one about social transgression rather than orders of scale.
Mine was that humans are sensitive to social bounds, even when breaking them, while machines are utterly oblivious to them. Society stays together since most people don't steal and murder, despite theft and murder being rather easy to do for anyone determined to, but if someone could build swarms of self-replicating murder-bots, we might want to rethink the physical security thing a bit.
Computer users who don't care about security using the logic of them being uninteresting targets and there being few crooks often end up having their machines automatically infected to serve a botnet.
Also of note is that, for some individuals at least, anonymity fosters deindividuation, which removes social inhibitions that would prevent such social transgressions. Deindividuation actually does have benefits (in some circumstances it can lead to more altruistic morals), but the dangers thereof are important to bear in mind as well.