[ExI] Who is covering corruption in AI?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Right
> now identity theft and stealing from credit cards still require some
> hands-on work, and this limits their effectiveness and speed. Suppose
> someone found a way of automating the process of extracting the money?

E-commerce.  Granted, a merchant account has to be involved at
some point, and the credit card companies crack down hard
trying to prevent these accounts from being shells to grab money
before fraudulent purchases can be discovered - but the process
is imperfect, especially if the thief closes their account in time and
leaves no traces.  (There are many automated money laundering
schemes about, where the trace only goes to some dope that's
been recruited to withdraw and send untraceable cash.)  The key
is to abandon any one setup before law enforcement catches on
and begins the trace; most human crooks (that are caught) get
lazy or arrogant and try to overexploit one account.

> An irrational
> thief would milk for a lot more, likely getting caught but also doing a lot
> more damage to the credibility of our credit system - and that would be
> rather bad overall.

Or worse, a hacktivist thief whose entire goal was to ruin the
world's trust in its financial systems.  (Comments about bank
CEOs aside: however well they are achieving this end, it is not
actually their objective.)

> And if the exploit exists and a script-like form and you
> are a thief, you will want to use it as early as possible before either the
> exploit is closed or another, less rational thief uses it. So you get a race
> to drain as many accounts as you can.

Which may well be said hacktivist's preferred modus operandi.