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The only thing better than a free lunch, IMHO, is a free book. In the last six months I’ve made my way through dozens of great ebooks and audiobooks that I got for free, completely legally, because their authors chose to release them under Creative Commons licences. Cory Doctorow claims that he releases his books for free because it drives up sales of his print editions, and I have no doubt that, for him, this is true. As attractive as this sounds, it is not a long term strategy. Releasing high-quality works under CC drives up print sales because it is still a rare enough event that potential readers who would otherwise not have heard of the work become aware of it. Doctorow acknowledges this when he paraphrases Tim O’Reilly: the problem artists face is not piracy, but obscurity. If all artists were to release their media under CC, overall they would get poorer: their works will still be just as obscure, and those handful who are interested in it can just take it for free.

I’m addicted to the Economist’s audiobook edition. At first I tried to obtain it legitimately, but soon discovered that the legit route was an incredibly painful one. Their distributor’s website refused to accept my registration for days, crashed constantly, and generally spread misery. After a few weeks of this, I gave up and started getting the download from bittorrent, painlessly, freely, and illegally. This is file-sharing, and it’s not going away. As long as media can be digitised, they will be shared. Why waste money and effort on something that can be obtained freely and easily?

So giving media away for free won’t work, and people are not going to stop pirating and sharing the non-free stuff. A world in which the only cultural products around are labours of love, or government backed, or donation-supported, would be a world in which the pool of cultural products would be tepid and a good lot smaller. None of the commonly predicted equilibria – musicians living off live concert profits, authors living off donations and hard copy sales – are remotely plausible except for the top percentile of cultural products. Markets are supposed to find the equilibrium that nobody could ever have guessed, but this isn’t a typical public goods problem: how does a market function when there are no realistically enforceable property rights?

Rather than backing bold and implausible schemes, I think the better part of wisdom is to sit back and see what happens, while supporting the partial solution that has worked for many a non-excludable good in the past: advertising. Please, keep writing your books and audiobooks, and please keep releasing them under CC. But make sure you’re still making money for yourselves. I’d rather hear or read a few ads then have you shut down production entirely. And Economist, I have no idea if your audiobook is breaking even in the face of file-sharing. It’s in my best interest for you to remember though: nobody is ever going to stop pirating your audiobook. However, the world would be a worse place if you stopped producing 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?