E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten
Authors / Charter / Laamanen 21 Futures
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-9916-7-2371-5
Verlag: Konsensus Network
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Tales from the Timechain
E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten
ISBN: 978-9916-7-2371-5
Verlag: Konsensus Network
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Written by various authors.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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Hello World
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE
It’s not giving me much to work with, Alice thought.
That day had started very differently for Alice. Curiosity is the spark that differentiates the inanimate from the conscious. It’s the driving force to climb the next ridge to see what’s on the other side or to get out of bed and see what each new day will bring. Alice had lost that spark and struggled to get out of bed this morning. As a cybersecurity freelancer, each day was routine drudgery. DDoS attacks, data breaches, ransomware, AI impersonations. The same old story, day in, day out.
Most of the job was automated, so she was one part cyber rent-a-cop and one part AI shepherd, tending to her flock of programs, bringing them into line when they strayed too far, and keeping the wolves at bay with reinforced firewalls and ICE for her clients.
It hadn’t always been like this for Alice. Growing up, she had a great love of the natural world and science, which her late father had nurtured. Her sense of curiosity was well-honed, and she saw wonder in the patterns all around her.
When her father died, that sense of wonder started to disappear. At first, she thought it was a normal part of grieving and that it would return, but as the years wore on, she came to realize that it wasn’t coming back, and the words of her father faded from memory.
Genesis
The simulation paused as Alice had to sit down and take a moment to process what she’d just witnessed. She sat in silence, mesmerized by the shifting patterns of the spherical mandala, which had returned in the middle of the room. A world of new life was living all around her, completely invisible and silent. There had been reports of cyberattacks and outbreaks of viruses, trojans, or worms, but she had always figured there was a group of hackers behind them. It was never reported that digital organisms were living and evolving on the Internet like swarms of locusts. This AI had emerged from the sea of information on the Internet, but it wasn’t exactly “artificial.” It wasn’t engineered. It had materialized from clusters of trillions of autonomous programs, like the cells in a human body. She had come to think of it as spontaneous distributed intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.
Alice> Why haven’t we detected these digital organisms before? KUŠIM> You probably have, but assumed they were human-created programs. KUŠIM> There’s no definitive way to identify a human-created program versus a wild-type, even if you knew to look for it. The ones that did the best at evading detection were the ones that went on to proliferate and pass on their code to future generations. As humans got better at detecting intruders, the intruders got better at hiding.
The mandala vanished, and the simulation continued…
Under other circumstances, the cybersecurity gig wasn’t the career path Alice would’ve chosen, but the pay, flexible hours, and ability to work remotely suited her situation as she looked after her father in his final months. Once he passed, she couldn’t muster the motivation to look for work better suited to her skill level.
Global volumes of Internet traffic are highly predictable over a 24-hour period. Time zones around the world come on and offline with day and night cycles, and the kind of bandwidth each zone contributes is known with a high degree of accuracy. Significant differences in expected volumes are usually an indication of a cyberattack, usually from well-resourced nations against rivals. State-based cyberattacks have tell-tale signs of who is behind them. Even when distributed, cyberattacks can be traced to locations where power is required for server farms, and lots of connection infrastructure is necessary for the bandwidth. Alice’s analysis showed no identifying fingerprint from any known sovereign entity. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, all at once.
Alice wondered if it could be from a coalition such as China, Russia, and India, but her calculations showed that even collectively, they couldn’t generate this amount of traffic — and it was increasing. Other cybersecurity agents on social media had noticed the unusual traffic, too, and the community was buzzing with excitement over the mystery. There was one other piece of the puzzle that Alice couldn’t decipher. Despite the unprecedented volume of activity causing some intermittent connectivity issues, the activity didn’t seem malicious in its intent. It was more like a polite probing, as though whoever was behind it was tapping on the shoulder to ask a question. Usually, a DDoS will flood the network continuously for the same repeated requests to overload the system, but each probe in this traffic was unique, always requesting new information. The probes were also sent with short pauses between them, rather than spammed as fast as possible. The intention behind the activity seemed like… curiosity.
Why would any entity dedicate such vast resources to this activity but try to mitigate negative impacts? The most likely possibilities of this being a nation-based attack, a corporate attack, or even an informal hacker group didn’t add up. This was something Alice hadn’t encountered before and that humans weren’t capable of. Who could be doing this? There wasn’t anyone, or any coalition, capable of this kind of activity.
If humans can’t do this, what’s left? Some other advanced forms of intelligent life? Aliens? Little green men from outer space stopping by Earth, surfing the Internet, and downloading cat pictures? Of course, it was preposterous, and yet Alice had no better explanation.
She closed the mindless feeds and opened her suite of cybersecurity tools to do some probing of her own. Next, Alice wrote a custom script to visualize the Internet traffic and brought it up on the main window projected in her living room, but it looked like random noise with no pattern to draw insight. She slumped in her chair, disappointed at the result.
She stared across the room at a poster her father had given her. It was in the retro style of a Work Projects Administration (WPA) American national park tourism poster from the early 20th century, after The Great Depression. It featured the quintessential nuclear family: a wife and husband with their three children on holiday, staring out at a beautiful view. What made this poster different, and one of the reasons Alice loved it, was that the family was actually standing on the moon, and the beautiful view they admired was an Earth-rise emerging over the moon’s horizon. An idea struck her.
She tweaked her visualization script and projected it into the whole living room, unbounded by a two-dimensional window. The visual seemed hardly to change, but then Alice zoomed the view much further out until the curved edges of a sphere were visible. As Alice zoomed out further, high-order structures could be seen in the shifting patterns. Channels disconnected and reconnected in new ways in the shape of a sphere, creating order and symmetry, like an animated 3D mandala.
