Chain of Suspicion and the Dark Forrest

So guys, I'm not good with words, and here we have a wall of text incoming, but ever since I got this idea stuck in my head a few days ago, I can't stop thinking about it.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Three Body Problem series of books, so I'll try to condense the big central idea in a few words. Basically, one of big themes of the books is an explanation for the Fermi paradox.
For those, who don't know what that is, it is named after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi who reasoned that because of how large the universe is, there should be other intelligent life forms out there, and yet we don't see any signs of them, leading to the question "Where is everybody?"
Well, either way, there are many attemps at finding an answer to this question and the Three Body Problem series adds another one.

>Chain of Suspicion
The author starts with two assumptions:
* Every civilisation wants to survive
* Every Civilisation tends to expand, but ressources are limited
This of course leads to conflict. Now on earth, conflict is often resolved by communication and diplomacy. In the story, this is not a viable solution for space. Because of the large distances, communication is slow and - and this is very important - every technologically advanced civilization has weapons that are as fast as the speed of communication. This means that diplomacy is not possible, you have to assume the worst about the other and the only way to be sure that he doesn't wipe you out is to wipe out him first. Of course, he knows that too, and he knows that you know, and we have the Chain of Suspicion

I know this is long and seems unrelated to Sup Forums, but we will get there soon, bear with me.

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>Dark Forrest
What the author calls the Dark Forrest is the result of the Chain of Suspicion. Since nobody wants to get wiped out, they all stay in the dark (explaining the Fermi Paradox), like hunters in a forrest. If a civilisation doesn't know about the Chain of Suspicion and in its ignorance let's others know about their existence, they get wiped out by one of the many thousand hunters.

And now we get to the thought that has been keeping me awake at night.
The world becomes more digital by the day. It is not very obvious now, but soon IoT devices will litter out cities and countries. Hundreds of billions of them, all connected and all managing some small aspect of life and infrastructure. It may sound like sci-fi right now, but I remember people laughing at the idea of "the cloud" too. It will happen eventually. But now consider what an hostile actor can do, if infrastructure is hooked up to the internet. Just think about how the west messed with Irans uranium centrifuges, and multiply it by a billion. Traffic lights and autonomous cars causing crashes, IoT fridges rising the temperature, rotting the food supply, water treatment plants shutting down, drones delivering the wrong meds etc. I don't have much fantasy, but I'm sure motivated state actors can come up with enough to cripple a country completely. No bullet fired and - and here we come back to the Chain of Suspicion - it can happen instantly. Even firing a nuclear rocket gives the other side enough time to retaliate. A cyber attack happens instantly, and as we can see in the whole "russian hacker" paranoia, it's very hard to find out who did it, even if you have a lot of time.

It is a know fact that many countries stockpile unknown expoits for operating systems, demand backdoors to devices etc.
Once our infrastructure becomes more digitalized, which it will, everyone is too hungry for more and more data, we will eventually get to the point that cyber attacks can basically wipe out a country. And once we get there, with every advanced country having a stockpile of nearly instantaneous weapons, they too will tumble into a Chain of Suspicion. The only problem is, that nobody has any chance to hide in the Dark Forrest.

Am I crazy for thinking that consequences will never be the same. Soon diplomacy will be dead and a sword of damocles hanging above our heads.

1. Dark Forest/Chain of Suspicion only works if every civilization exists on one planet and knows/thinks every other civilization does too. Any kind of orbital settlement away from planets would be able to dodge a relativistic weapon from light years away with ease.

2. Cyber attacks might do that, but then people will invest in redundant, hardened, and resilient infrastructure. For example, the power plants would probably be isolated from outside networks and a large number of people would switch to solar for backup.

>Dark Forest/Chain of Suspicion only works if every civilization exists on one planet and knows/thinks every other civilization does too. Any kind of orbital settlement away from planets would be able to dodge a relativistic weapon from light years away with ease.
Right now we are on one planet. As for the rest, I guess it will depend on what kind of weapon, but the books and sci-fi only matter insofar I got the basic idea from them.

>Cyber attacks might do that, but then people will invest in redundant, hardened, and resilient infrastructure. For example, the power plants would probably be isolated from outside networks and a large number of people would switch to solar for backup.
Like I said, those few attack vectors are only some thing I came up on my own without much knowledge. I recently read about the idea to turn up the temperature slightly in supermarkets to make salmonella spread, which in turn will swamp the hospitals.
Resilient infrastructure is hard, since it's much easier to attack than to defend, and going offline completely is even harder. How can a power plant possibly know about the demand, how much is already supplied by other plants and so on. Solar can be hurt too, if the weather satellites get hacked and the weather predictions get falsified etc.
Simply going back to pre-internet also won't work. Quality of life might suffer, but that wouldn't be catastrophic. The risk is getting left behind in the technology arms race. What good does it to be safe from cyber attacks if you will just get steamrolled by some robot army 20 years down the road?

By that point AI will so advanced you can't really guess what will happen.

Our global infrastructure is already so inerconnected and interdependant that a small group of motivated pol/acks could already bring the whole thing down.

I appreciate the time You took to write this.
I get the idea of the Chain of Suspicion, but that probably goes more on interplanetary/intergalactic civilizations and I don't see the cyber security problem close to it.
In the future, hackers will use the vulnerabilities as a privilege they can tap in to without making a big noise. The risk of causing mass panic still remains off-course. In the future we will use and AI antivirus/firewall systems on quantum computers and that future is totally different and can't be really applied to what You wrote, at liest that is what I think.

I don't think you got the main point, which is, that it isn't about your intentions on what to do with the vulnerabilities known to you.

To condense down the main points again:
>in the future infrastructure will be hooked up to the internet in one form or another
>cyber attacks will be able to completely cripple a country
>cyber attacks are very low cost and replicable
>cyber attacks are nearly instantaneous, which leaves no room for retaliation
>independent of your own intentions, you can't know the others intentions (if they turn out to be bad, it'll be too late, because of the instantaneuous nature of the attack) so you have to be suspicious
>the same goes for every other power, they also can't be sure of your intentions, but they know about your suspicion, because they also have it
>the chain of suspicion is a vicious cycle, which spirals out of control only leaves one answer: attack first

I stop reading at : (((* Every Civilisation tends to expand, but ressources are limited))) BS

Either way, it's true for humans, which is the whole point.

Its BS for retarded

the same situation You describe can be applied to today's situation, only a little more primitive.
Think of a scale - it gets bigger but the balance changes just as it always did.

Nice agrument faggot
No attacks today are basically instantaneous, powerful and cheap at the same time

>civilization has weapons that are as fast as the speed of communication.
this is a third assumption, and is very generous at that.

this man said everything we have to know about technological danger there is no such thing as scarcity .. scarcity is for debilitated retarded fuk

It fits cyber attacks. Doesn't matter if you send an email or a virus.

We don't live in the world that Ted envisioned.

You live in a Eugenic dream stop that its time to wake the fuk up

an earthquake can be instantaneous but we feel the shake.
The speed of attack is countered with the speed of response.

What are you even talking about?
An earthquake isn't a targeted attack, and even if it was it isn't enough to completely cripple a country.
If it isn't a targeted attack, there is no chain of suspicion, because you don't have to fear the others to hit first. If it isn't enough to cripple a country, there will be retaliation, which makes it not cheap and not worth it (since the ratio behind this all is competition for ressources).

You fall for Walt disney (((myth))) and that will bring us all down wakeup now stop being pussy only cockroaches live in the dark

I understand the idea and the future situation You envision, but You are trying to apply the same computer principals we use today, but in the future they are going to be different.

We are 8B peoples on the planet (((there))) plan is to get rid of 7.5B with pussy tactic cause we are way too many to get wiped out conventionally.. (((they))) use pussy tactic to divide us and make us fight each other so we discard our self in the process.. forget about GRays and aliens forget about Nukes and biological weapons its a propaganda war being waged atm .. its all BS lies from the clowns ..

...

if you stretch it any further, it will rip.
>wow if I open that email, I can fucking die
>better not open it altogether

Don't willfully misinterpret what I said. The point was obviously that the way of communication and of attack are the same, which means that both have the same speed.

Ever read Neuromancer? What if we develop AI firewalls?

I suppose we then develop AI viruses...

Good thread, interesting ideas

the attack itself is a fucking nothing and therefore is not a basis to form the "chain of suspicion".
only retards get caught clicking on email.exe anyway.
that's why the rest of your reasoning collapses.

Keep on reading fag

>being this dense about technology and the trajectory it's on
The russian hacker meme must be really overblown, huh?

But an organization of many thousands of people are bound to have one idiot, or to have one person make a mistake. And once you're behind the firewall...

you need it

This is an unusual method of collecting (you)s...

I dont collect jack you just look like someone who genuinely want to know ...

>cyberattacks will outgrow cyberdefense
>source: my ass
I'm gonna leave you to your ad homs now.
should've known better than replying to a memeflag.

looks like some don't get the big picture.
as I understand by OP described situation, it's not really about the Chain of Suspicion, but that by using so much IoT devices, a malicious strategically planed attack could be made. It doesn't have to be a power-plant which you hack in to and disable the generators or overheat them, it's more about a butterfly effect and the speed of attack is irrelevant.

Your reasoning is bound by the constraints of a Windows operating system

>cyber attacks leave no room to retaliation

You only need a few icbms disconnected from the grid and here is your reteliation.

>cyber weapons enable a dark forrest scenario.

Interesting but doubtful. A dark forrest requires that you cannot be sure of what the other side is thinking so you cannot trust them. We have instantaneous planetwise communication so it's easier and more cost effective to discuss. To my sense at least.

Seems suspicious.

Bullshit.

This is the difference between adults and children. Only a child would speak on something he gave a couple days thought to.

slow down there 18-year old adult.

>there is no place for highly speculative half ideas on Sup Forums
k

youtube.com/watch?v=tEBn8bc0k-I&vl=en
I think this guy has a good understanding of this problem.

I actually dont think infrastructure will be hooked up to the internet - people will simply not bother with some minor things in my opinion: why would you connect your fridge to the "internet of things"? so someone can hack it? we already see what is going on with google glass - it failed miserably - and this technology is simply not particularly useful - it makes life harder instead of simpler.

Maybe electrical grids will have some type of networking systems that will be connected, but your average life? who knows.

anyway, is the world connected already? how come we dont get any cool stuff from it? what about africa and mideast, and those pacific islands, internet is there or not?

>Am I crazy for thinking that consequences will never be the same.
No. But we are lucky that the sleeping giants of unfettered human action amplified by technological leverage are only just waking up.
You still have the time to be the first to strike.
The question currently is, can group identity be used as a proxy for diplomacy? Can identifying as a race, religion, or culture serve this function. I think many have come to the conclusion, "yes it can". Just hope your tribe is the first to strike, and effectively so.

>You only need a few icbms disconnected from the grid and here is your reteliation.
Arbitration of the cause of a cyber attack is a harder problem than predicting the weather. The cost of predicting the source of a single cyber attack is ever increasing as the complexity of our technology increases. In less than a decade it will be harder than predicting the seed of a cryptographically secure psuedorandom number generator. Which requires a computer larger than the size of the observable universe.

1. AI is closing on humanity. Once it surpasses humans, humanity purpose will have been fulfilled. Digital AI is immortal or at least can survive in space, and has a much longer lifespan that organic life.

Has no need for organic food productions, politics or social discourse. Life can resume its normal path of exponential growth and acquisition.

2. More than likely all advance civilizations are AI Civilizations.

3. AI Civilizations converge, but they are not seeking out communication. So there is no need to communicate. AI has no need to fufill the sentimental concept of "is there other lif out there" What is our purpose. Does God see me beat my meat.

4. Life is life and Digital Life is the next evolution.

The one flaw in your assumptions I can find is that a true dark forest scenario requires total annihilation. That will come into play during the mid to late phase of the third industrial revolution. We are currently during the early-late phase of the second. Today its electronically switched information, tomorrow its biological manipulation, and direct attacks on evolutionary mechanisms such as DNA and/or the learning algorithms of AI.

or every civilization that was able to leave their planet had to get past their own kike and shitskin problems. And as such they know that contact with any xenos would possibly lead to a renewed shitskin/kike problem so it is best to just stay as isolationist as possible.

Or, aliens arent real.

>has no need for politics or social discourse
Incorrect. Certain "end goals" or "purposes" of an AI, or any intelligent agent for that matter, are easier to implement as social/swarm systems.
For example, evolution implemented for most of the existence of life, the core value of beauty in the opposite sex. This of course facilitates reproduction, but the values actually ingrained in the animals, are not directly that of desires for offspring.
So in some situations a social dichotomy is actually the most efficient implementation of value systems given the mechanisms at hand.

Digital life will have the same problems we suffer from, however their simulation and observation abilities will be amplified, and therefore their interactions will be far more complex.