105.7

Some people say triple J’s demographic leans slightly more towards the indie-hippie-roots-n-all scene than the average Aussie yoof. Those people may just have a point. For what it’s worth, Neon Bible and Dystopia would also be on my 10 ten list, near the top. The only absence I’m surprised about is PNAU, although that did release quite recently.

8 Great Things and 8 Less-Than-Great Things About Ubuntu 7.10 Though the Eyes of a Linux Noob

Great Things

1. So, so, so much faster than Windows.
2. No blue screen of death, and very infrequent crashing.
3. Compiz-fusion. Oh the purty colours…
4. Installing and uninstalling all your apps from one simple interface.
5. Using the terminal makes you feel like a real 1337 hax0r.
6. New updates come out faster than you can download them.
7. Networking the way it’s meant to be: invisible and totally automatic.
8. The forums.

Less-Than-Great Things

1. Playing an encrypted DVD (read: any DVD) takes some solid tinkerin’.
2. Your webcam gathering dust on top of the monitor.
3. Regretting having ever bought an iPod.
4. Games. Yeah, yeah, I know…I mean REAL games.
5. Occasional inexplicable changes to icons, screen resolution, and pretty much everything else you don’t expect to change.
6. “You use LINUX? Nerd!” (Guilty as charged).
7. ‘Hibernate’ is buggy at best – not fun when you read hundreds of articles a day and like to be able to restart where you left off.
8. I honestly can’t think of an eighth thing. Yes, it’s that good. Get it.

Existential Threats

Climate change is the least of humanity’s worries. Yudkowsky mentioned that social manipulation would be a good target for a fledgling superhuman AI wishing to expand its sphere of influence. An AI with high information processing capacity but few channels through which to interact with the physical world would would probably be limited to trying to influence the researchers with whom it communicates. This would be an extremely important bottleneck through which the (presumptively unFriendly) AI djinn would need to pass before it is let out of its bottle; some thoughts on exploiting it:

• We must avoid the g-factor metaphor and remember that pre-empting a socially manipulative agent more intelligent than us is by definition futile: anything we predict it will try, it will know that we have predicted, and know how to thwart us. ‘WWAID?’ should never appear on a wristband.
• Hence, the best defense may be to put as many firewalls as possible around anybody who will be in communication with the AI, and of course limit the number of such people.
• The race is then this: the AI’s ability to convince a human(s) to do its bidding, and for the human(s) to perform the physical actions necessary to expand the AI’s power, pitted against the ability for humanity-at-large to notice what is going on and either incapacitate the human(s) or the AI. Yudkowsky outlines in the article a way in which an AI could go from communication only to controlling real-world nanotech machinery within a week, so whatever safeguard we put in place would have to be very responsive.
• We should be immediately suspicious of any solution which claims to contain the problem by forbidding humans who are in contact with the AI from following instructions given by the AI:
  • Whomever is given the responsibility of policing this rule would not be immune from 2nd-order social influence; that is, influence from the humans who are in direct communication with the AI.
  • We cannot pretend to be able to know when an AI is influencing a human (see top bullet point).
• Perhaps prevention is better than cure: how can we stop an AI finding out about human psychology in the first place?

Why You Should Let Your Insurance Company Sequence Your DNA

The Economist frets about the coming revolution in health insurance. Cheap and widespread genetic screening, it claims, will result in discrimination based on predisposition to disease. This seems a very odd thing to be worried about. Knowing an individual’s disease risk doesn’t change the overall prevalence, so the total amount of insurance required is not going to rise. If anything, it will fall slightly as the margin of error in guessing one’s risk of disease is tightened. What we will see is a redistribution of the insurance burden, with the genetically fortunate buying less while the unlucky buy more. This is unfortunate for some, but as Mankiw and others have pointed out there are so many other genetic predispositions to wealth; there is no obvious reason to pick on only those traits which happen to fall within that loosely defined category of ‘disease’.

For those who think this is a little callous, take heart. More costly insurance is a powerful incentive for the market to provide sufferers with cures (or better, preventative treatments) for the most serious aliments. Indeed, a well-informed insurer has a great incentive to do everything it can to prevent a disposition becoming a disease. It seems the only people who have anything to lose from genetic screening in the long run are the insurance companies.