What risks scare or terrify us?

Since I am also a believer that natural is not necessarily better, this article was nothing new. However, the point about how different people rate different risks made me wonder, what do I regard as risky?

The first was obvious, the highest perceived risk for Nuclear Power by most people, has very low risk for me. I would be happy to live next to a nuclear power plant as I expect that the quality of life around it will not deteriorate. The likelihood of an accident is negligible. Furthermore, and this is just a hope, that should there be an accident, it would be fast and furious :)

Then there is the risk of driving or even walking down the road. I do both but always wishing for a safer option. I would love to see auto-driven vehicles take over. I would love to see only electric carts within towns and no private vehicles. This is a hope that it will happen one day, though not likely in my lifetime.

Now the risk which terrifies me. Manipulating the human brain using technology. The only personal experiences of the damage people can do to each other are related to property disputes between brothers and sisters. The passion, viciousness and self-destructiveness defies logic. Hence, it makes it easy to extrapolate to events like riots and even genocide.

I can easily imagine bots learning to create and spreading ever more effective messages which will be spread using messengers like Whatsapp. The utility of messengers is so great that they will be around like cars and roads. I don't see how the messages can be stopped except, of course, by an even worse solution like 1984.

Postscript: Saw this about the spectacle of Chidambarm's arrest just after writing about my fears

We don't need enemies. An anonymous blogger will do.

I am reminded of a cartoon in my professor's office ages ago on reading this news about violence in Pune. The cartoon was of a scientist stabbing himself in the back and the caption read, "No one else can do a better job".

The sadness of such mob behaviour does not  even need the justification that a peaceful society needs tolerance of free speech as a safety valve.

Anyone with even minimal skills can write anything on the web by creating pseudonyms or anonymous posts. The person may be a resident of Timbuktu or may even be a bot designed for flaming.

What does bewilder me is that how does the mob come across such posts? May be the mob leader has set a google alert for them?

For anyone with any doubt about what a bot can do, Turing test passed!

"The Turing Test is a vital tool for combatting that threat. It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true... when in fact it is not." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10884839/Computer-passes-Turing-Test-for-the-first-time-after-convincing-users-it-is-human.html)

Exiting Social Networks

There was a statement that religion, politics and other emotive posts are a major reason why people 'unfriend'. I found myself getting needlessly irritated by posts on a forum of ex-colleagues. Instead of tech or general topics, a number of ex-colleagues often hi-jack the list for their personal, strongly held beliefs.

I was going to remove myself from the list. Unfortunately, my wife found these discussions at times amusing. So, the messages from the list are filtered and forwarded to her and trashed in my mailbox.

Devaluation of words

I think we need to find a new word for 'friend'. After facebook and similar sites, I wonder what it means any more.