"cheap, effective sensor nodes lead to a government with the capacity for ubiquitous surveillance, which leads to a police state, which leads to societal collapse or worse."
It feels helpful to reframe "can it be trusted?" as "who knows more about its emergent runtime behavior?" This makes it more obvious that there are answers that can't be found by staring at the source code. Vinge was likely aware of the unanticipated behavior of the Morris worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm) when he wrote Deepness. In the years since this book, we've seen more examples (stuxnet[1], ethereum[2]) of software with behavior unanticipated by -- and even weaponized against -- its creators.
(I'm very interested in this subject, and research ways to prevent unanticipated runtime behavior. My approach can be summarized as, "keep software small and simple to stay out of dark forests[3].")
[1] "accidentally spreading beyond its intended target" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event
[3] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Does anyone else have recommendations for sci fi or otherwise with such complex intrigue?
In that book, giant ships are being powered by computer systems that are so complex, nobody fully master them and you need computer archeologists who spend their entire life studying how those system works to maintain and improve them. The hero of the book is actually one of those archeologists. If I remember correctly, he's the only one to know the meaning of the "unix epoch".
Edit: got my wires crossed. Indeed the book I am refering is actually the one mentionned in the article.
The heat death of programming
I'm vaguely disappointed I can't go down to Costco and buy a 100-pack of localizers to sprinkle around my own property.
I choose to be very glad that my neighbors can't wait for an opportune gust of wind to spread a 100-pack of localizers to my property.
But maybe not such a good thing for civil liberties.
I love how Vinge explores these issues in his books. He's really underrated. When The Expanse was announced, I was excited ... but a bit disappointed that that series made it to the screen as the first hard sci-fi book across the line, before Vinge's work.
Rotoscope could be used for Spiders.
So instead of complex vision systems to find, say, a part in a bin in a warehouse, a locator attached to the item would inform the network that it was "Two items down and three across in bin #243. Oh, and I am upside down", allowing a robot to quickly retrieve the item. It's an interesting approach to what Robert Forward called "artificial stupidity".
Each particle of dust is a tiny computer with simple sensors, near field laser beam directed stealth communication node, FOF identification sensor, and maybe more. Soldiers could plug into this network (all properly encrypted, yadayada) en see and listen to the enemy. Dust covered vehicles could be tracked as long as they stay in a well-dusted area.
The idea is not that the enemy cannot see that you've 'dusted' their country/battlefield, but that you've dropped so much of this self-organizing sensor dust that they cannot block it all.
I'm assuming that the dust could be radiation hardened against EMP or other area of effect 'cleanup' measures, and that they are powerful enough to run proper cryptographic code, to ensure proper functioning of FOF and the communications.
I also suspect that at least some insects have been utilised for similar intent. The trouble is in figuring out which ones... .
The way I imagined this while reading the book was that the sensors are ubiquitous, so it's not about making them move so much as selecting the sensors in a specific area to view imagery from or enable grit attraction on.
Anyway, great timing to see this posted over the Christmas break. I wanted to reread The Witcher, but this has revived my desire to read more of Vernor Vinge. Recommendations welcome.
