Risto_Saarelma comments on Computer security story - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Perplexed 17 February 2011 12:26AM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 17 February 2011 02:26:48PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: lsparrish 17 February 2011 07:35:18PM 0 points [-]

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.