Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?
> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.
You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.
There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with.
And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”
Why do they even bother with India ? Easy manpower and one of the world's largest English speaking nations.
I was with you until then - hasn't it been documented over and over again that at least in some of these places people are basically slaves, they have their passports taken away, kept in a walled compound and not allowed to leave?
Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
There's a joke about certain princes here but I just feel bad for the people getting scammed since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem
Happened to a person close to me a few months ago and, indeed, it has become uncannily realistic. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the attention of the relevant authorities, because harmless people are now being scammed of their live savings (or worse, in the case of the person close to me she had actually borrowed the sum she was scammed of) and no-one seems to be doing anything. It's also highly regressive, as in it seems to affect the people that would most need that money (in a way it's similar to how gambling affects the lower classes a lot more compared to the wealthy).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Edit: Recalled -> Recall
If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]
[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.
"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."
and
"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."
Bollocks!
AI definitely makes the scams more believable, a Nigerian Prince can now easily forge documents.
But at the same time AI is a double edged sword, it can be used for both offence and defense.
> "Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc."
https://xcancel.com/SemioticRivalry/status/20815246004504824...
Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable. If you let this sort of opportunistic environment exist there will be people to work in it
Dire economic conditions increase crime, that much seems true, but as long as it is profitable, there will be crime, under all economic conditions. It is, as you say, opportunism.
What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.
And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.
It is true that we see correlation between richer countries and lower level of crimes - across all layers of society.
Privacy focused solutions prevent the leaks which enable many scammers, and yet governments respond by demanding more identifiers be added everywhere, which perpetuates the leaks. I've not gotten a single spam message on Signal with their phone number privacy settings and username usage. You can change your username whenever you want.
Google should add email aliasing and encourage it. They could detect and alert users if an email that comes to an alias is from a different sender than the first email to that alias.
I'm thankful for Cloudflare and I don't think I would have had the resources to deal with it any other way.
They said "Am I speaking to <my full name>?". I did not answer that and instead asked what company they were calling from, then they immediately hung up.
I guess people who ask that initial question are disqualified for their scam, they're looking for more gullible folks.
I also asked my parents and inlaws to adopt the same approach. Never pick up, never read any texts from unknown numbers. Those are all untrusted bytes.
But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.
As if people weren't scamming before AI, with the billions of dollars seized from the Chinese scam dungeons in Cambodia [0] where they had kidnapped people and tied them to computers (including a few deaths, and another wave of arrests just recently)
Scammers gonna scam. At least if they can use AI for it then maybe they'll kidnap fewer people
Chinese models are going to keep getting stronger. Maybe the Free World™ should increase their people's access to and education about AI too.
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
Phone? The network could spot sources exhibiting robocall patterns. AI could analyze live conversations and warn the recipient on certain patterns.
Instant messaging? There's spam and abuse screening built into most IMs already. AI could [locally/privately] analyze conversations.
Email? Ditto; analyze conversations, a bit deeper than basic junk mail filters already do.
I don't think you can even dispute this. AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
In retrospect, I think the world would be a much better place if we'd just turned it off in 1998.
It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?
What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.
The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?
Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.
Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.
I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.
Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.
Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?
As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.
Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.
And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?
I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.
I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.
Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns.
My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him and she pointed out:
"Really, he needs someone he can call to send a check somewhere or send a digital payment and he just calls them and they make it happen."
Ideally, there would be a more generic service that would do this for the elderly. It would be the financial version of those "senior phones" that have big buttons and a "help" button that connects you to a person.
My parents are not yet a concern for this stuff, but I imagine eventually they might be.
So I would get a notification on my phone to approve the transaction/withdrawal.
Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.
All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.
I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.
"Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."
This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer.
Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind
The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.
All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.
I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.
You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.
You could stand in real life in front of your parents or grandparents while they're talking on the phone to a scammer pretending to be you, and they would rather believe the scammer than believe you.
The current generation of elderly have great disdain and distrust for their children and grandchildren, and the highest respect and deference towards any perceived authority, and especially if they are contacting them through mail or phone. It's just the hyena mindset: Kiss ass of those you perceive to be higher in rank than you, kick down on those you perceive to be lower in rank than you.
You could be the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and your elderly relatives would rather believe a scammer calling and pretending to be their banker than believe you.
----
This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights
----
I didn't even realize how serious I was being, back in late 2022, when I was telling my Boomer friends (twice my age, but still closer than most "family") "make sure if you're grand-daugther calls 'begging for her life,' you need to ask the kidnappers something only she would know – and then *you can never ask that same question again (for verification, at least; ask whatever you want).
We are here.
I cracked. Had never seen that used before, yet so obvious now in retrospect. Pure poetry.
You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.
Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"
Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)
That’s a really extreme take that lacks any nuance.
Might as well blame the OS as well for allowing any custom code to be executed.
But those are completely unrelated topics. You don't need a hint of JavaScript to do online banking.
And you don't need online banking to send someone your credit card details or banking information. Any kind of communication can turn into a scam. You can steal money over the phone or by mail.
Tim invented the web: HTML, HTTP, URLs.
Vint did a lot of things, but most of it had to do with lower-level internet infrastructure, not the web per se.
But the US have a Gini coefficient of 0.418, so a high income equality
Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..
""" The global spread of the syndicates’ operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia.
A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries being freed.
But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs’ immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly.
‘It spreads like a cancer,’ UNODC’s Hoffman said.
‘Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate.’ """
These criminals may even belong to the same groups that were targeted by law enforcement in Southeast Asia. they do not actually need to recruit local people. They only need to use advertisements for high-paying “overseas jobs” to attract people with the necessary technical skills and capabilities.
Unless you ban mentioning other IM platform or communication channel, they will always try to get you on something less monitored
Ah with a decade or two time horizon it shouldn’t matter how hard it crashes if Zitron & Doctorow are proven right… rightttt!
I think they are about the same.
Both work about as well as autocorrect
So I stand by my terms.
Here is a story which describes one such letter from 1913: https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.
Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.
"If you scam us, we'll scam, you back" ?
I too am unconvinced.
It does, otherwise what are you arguing for, that financial crises are bad?
>You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
Right, which is why I posed it as a question.
To create a false dichotomy like this tells exactly why we have this problem.
I am arguing against the unnecessary over-spending on data centers that has gone into AI, in favor of making efficient models that take less energy, such that less data centers are needed.
The blockchains in many cryptocurrencies have found a way to scale and take significantly far less energy, thanks to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus over Proof-of-Work (PoW).
We have seen little to almost none of this with the current frontier AI models which is why they currently need orders of magnitude of energy to operate at scale, which is why the over-spending and debt accumulation on data centers exists.
But if investors hadn't been taking profits on the incline, then I have little sympathy for them skiing down the decline.
(This is a harsh opinion, but people getting into investing should be doing it actively, not passively, ie. do some research, make a plan. Also, for those who are invested passively, long term, via ETFs, then they're still up 55% as @Nition says, so they're all good)
That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist.
There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case.
We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help.
This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope.
For example a romance scam where the scammer pretends to be your girlfriend who loves you for 6 months and then asks for money to cover an emergency.
Or a stock market scam that might even pay out small profits before convincing you to go all in.
If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.
Last week I finally had an onslaught of spam voicemails, several in an hour, that caused me to disable voicemail notifications altogether. I'll just check them when I'm expecting something now, similar to mail. My phone app was successfully filtering the calls so I wouldn't see them, but it still got routed to voicemail which then created a notification.
Voice stuff is just narcissists trying to get their way.
The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
That said, OpenAI isn't public, so you can't directly short it easily. I guess you could short Microsoft but I don't know if that gives you enough exposure to truly be worth it, even if you do genuinely believe what OOP claims.
Not guaranteed, but the norm.
I've never tried to buy PUTs on a big IPO but I wouldn't be surprised that there's a premium on them, if options trading is even available.
That tends to settle down ~60 days after trading, with seasonsed order flow, a realized volatility pattern, Observed volumes, open interest, liquidity in the stock (eg hedging becomes cheaper) and naturally - competition between market makers.
Wide spreads are profitable for options dealers (and you need that profit to absorb losses where risk is misjudged or the stock is unpredictable) - but if two dealers are making excess profits offering wide markets in an option, a 3rd will join and undercut them.
Source - I was a quant at a large investment bank, with ~5 years facing the Equity markets / 13 years across many desks and teams.
Here's a chart of the last 20 IPOs with their Relative Spread (Bid + Offer / Midpoint) on each successive day of trading to show the tightening of spreads over time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnG...
(Even spam could be encoded into those two tokens via binary or whatever, it still wouldn't because it's predicting a classification, and not the next sybmol; i.e. not simply the next bit in a after a string prefix, but a 0 or 1 value indicating whether the bit string is spam, which comes from an asserted external judgment.)
It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Meanwhile in a pig butchering scam you have emotionally desperate people (who often would go for figurative scraps) being fed fake romance before being slaughtered (having a lot of money extracted from them, which usually ends in the end of the fake relationship as results don't materialize for the victim, e.g. the lover not showing up)
It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical.
How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never.
Asking for money is common over voice or whatsapp in some countries for things like medical care, funerals, weddings, police "fines", school fees etc.
"You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede."
There is a massive qualitative and quantitative gap between the two. Even if you had a real token predictor for the word spam, you would need a thousand of these to touch LLM capability. But it's not a real predictor. It's not locational. It's something vastly weaker.
> It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Now you made it even worse. If not for the word 'trained' this would be every program. If two programs fall under the umbrella of machine learning in any way, that kind of logic treats them the same. What would you consider a "different kind of AI"? Your definition there fits basically the entire field.
One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable".
Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
Do you even read what you write? If you institutionalize corruption to reduce competition between different corrupt factions, you end up with a not endemically corrupt society?
Here's what it actually means: if you institutionalize corruption, you end up with an endemically corrupt society that is incapable of even recognizing corruption for what it is.
> ...at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
No, the corruption is just more sophisticated so that we can pretend it isn't corruption. Just look at campaign finance. In many ways, it's even more insidious than companies handing over paper bags full of bribe money to politicians and government officials.
The amounts are bigger, the number of people who get a piece of the action is great and it's all "legal" so the corruption is more durable. And, again, everyone gets to pretend that it's not corruption.
In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income, in poorer countries at least one side has its main income from illegal activities.
In relative terms?
So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?
- tamper with index fund rules so that the 401k's of the masses are bearing the risk of your risky investment
- bribe a border agent to let you through to see a friend
It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found.
Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then.
Do you realize how much dirty money moves through and is laundered and stashed in the US? And how many billions of dollars a year in "legal" income financial institutions and other "legitimate" business entities, not to mention the US Treasury, collect from facilitating this?
Both options are endemically corrupt but removing most kinds of corruption is an improvement.
It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.