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The Nightmare Scenario
Back in 2000, I wrote a novel, Permanence, in which among other things I speculated about the future of smart tagging and augmented reality systems (I called it 'inscape' because augmented reality wasn't really a current term at the time). Sometimes I'm optimistic about such technologies; in this case I went dystopian. The question was, what happens when physical objects are given a virtual "soul" or digital counterpart, which is irrevocably attached to it? One of the possible results is written up in this short scene from the novel.
--------------
He remembered one day running up the street to his house's door and his father shouting. That was the beginning and end of his personal experience of the Reconquista, when the FTL ships from the Rights Economy took the government of Kimpurusha.
When he thought about the Reconquista, he always did so through the lens of another, singular memory:
There was a chair in his home. It was unique in the household--made of rosewood, large and with an embroidered seat and splat, where the other chairs were more utilitarian and factory-made. The legs were carved with intricate floral designs. Michael's toys scaled it and it was the biggest mountain in the world; his dolls sat along its front edge and they were steering it, a cycler, through the deepest spaces between the suns. He built constructions of blocks around the crosspiece between its legs and it was a generating station. For the youngest son of the Bequith household, this chair could become anything, with a simple flip of the imagination.
One day, not long after the running and shouting, a strange man came to the house. He was tall and pale and seemed nervous as he paced through the rooms. In each one he took a canister and aimed it at the furniture and fixtures. A fine smoke puffed out and fell slowly to vanish as it touched things.
“What's that?” he had asked his father.
“Nanotags,” said father, as if it were a curse.
The man entered the hall and puffed smoke on the rosewood chair.
Other men came and Michael had to go with them. They took him to a hospital and made him sleep. When he awoke he could feel the distant roar of inscape in his head, like an unsettled crowd. He felt grown up, because he knew you weren't allowed to get inscape implants until adulthood and he was only ten years old. The men took him home and his mother cried and it was at that point that he realized something was wrong.
He didn't know what for a while, but the inscape laid its own version of things over his sight and hearing. He would learn to tune it out, he was told; but for the moment, he couldn't.
Now, when he looked at the rosewood chair, all he could see was the matrix of numbers superimposed on it, that told the monetary value of its parts and whole. And so with the drapes, the walls, windows and the rice as he picked it up with his chopsticks.
He imagined--and he knew it couldn't be so--that the people of the free halo worlds still saw things like the boy before they had put nanotags in every object and inscape in his head. As if a chair could be a mountain or a starship and not just a collection of values and registrations.
To think this way was to miss something he hadn't even known was his when he had it.
---------------
Ideas like these have led me to believe that identity is something that you must be able to turn off. Identity *must* be contestable to avoid hellish scenarios like this one. As I said in one of the other discussions, we don't have identities anyway, only process of identification, which must be provisional and contestable. Likewise, the systems that coordinate actions in the real world have to be malleable and contestable.
Thoughts? What, for you, would turn the block chain, or Ethereum, from a dream technology into a nightmare?
--------------
He remembered one day running up the street to his house's door and his father shouting. That was the beginning and end of his personal experience of the Reconquista, when the FTL ships from the Rights Economy took the government of Kimpurusha.
When he thought about the Reconquista, he always did so through the lens of another, singular memory:
There was a chair in his home. It was unique in the household--made of rosewood, large and with an embroidered seat and splat, where the other chairs were more utilitarian and factory-made. The legs were carved with intricate floral designs. Michael's toys scaled it and it was the biggest mountain in the world; his dolls sat along its front edge and they were steering it, a cycler, through the deepest spaces between the suns. He built constructions of blocks around the crosspiece between its legs and it was a generating station. For the youngest son of the Bequith household, this chair could become anything, with a simple flip of the imagination.
One day, not long after the running and shouting, a strange man came to the house. He was tall and pale and seemed nervous as he paced through the rooms. In each one he took a canister and aimed it at the furniture and fixtures. A fine smoke puffed out and fell slowly to vanish as it touched things.
“What's that?” he had asked his father.
“Nanotags,” said father, as if it were a curse.
The man entered the hall and puffed smoke on the rosewood chair.
Other men came and Michael had to go with them. They took him to a hospital and made him sleep. When he awoke he could feel the distant roar of inscape in his head, like an unsettled crowd. He felt grown up, because he knew you weren't allowed to get inscape implants until adulthood and he was only ten years old. The men took him home and his mother cried and it was at that point that he realized something was wrong.
He didn't know what for a while, but the inscape laid its own version of things over his sight and hearing. He would learn to tune it out, he was told; but for the moment, he couldn't.
Now, when he looked at the rosewood chair, all he could see was the matrix of numbers superimposed on it, that told the monetary value of its parts and whole. And so with the drapes, the walls, windows and the rice as he picked it up with his chopsticks.
He imagined--and he knew it couldn't be so--that the people of the free halo worlds still saw things like the boy before they had put nanotags in every object and inscape in his head. As if a chair could be a mountain or a starship and not just a collection of values and registrations.
To think this way was to miss something he hadn't even known was his when he had it.
---------------
Ideas like these have led me to believe that identity is something that you must be able to turn off. Identity *must* be contestable to avoid hellish scenarios like this one. As I said in one of the other discussions, we don't have identities anyway, only process of identification, which must be provisional and contestable. Likewise, the systems that coordinate actions in the real world have to be malleable and contestable.
Thoughts? What, for you, would turn the block chain, or Ethereum, from a dream technology into a nightmare?
Comments
No, the real nightmare scenario is that Ethereum becomes co-opted by the current legal, political and economic system before it can gain traction as a liberating tool for the general population. I.e, that it gets relegated to a 'faster, more efficient way' to do what already exists. Case in point: Bitcoin, if adopted as a global, 'one world currency' by governments would be far worse than cash from a societal point of view. On that note, I thank Matthew Slater for his insightful article on http://matslats.net/ethereum-fate-bitcoin.
I'm currently thinking of ways to make it difficult to co-opt out of the gate, I reckon optional total anonymity via a ZeroCash implementation as a smart contract is something worth researching very early on.
This idea was influenced by a Philip K. Dick story where the main character has to put a coin in his door in order to get *out* of his apartment.
The result being anarchy, or some sort. Not at all sure if that immediately leads to death and destruction to be honest, in particular if money problems are not very prevalent. Any military defenses may be very negatively affected if the society was particularly poorly prepared.
Seems a tad unlikely, i mean i suppose such a society would bother supporting quite a few public key algorithms, and a lot of wallets may use proxy contracts that limit how quickly you can extract from them. Maybe some longer public keys can be supported by having them be announced to the blockchain with a proxy-contract like structure. Presumably that can be implemented with contracts now, but if you're dependent on the regular pubkey to provide gas and payment for the transaction, you may be stuck not being able to communicate with it. (because your ethers to create gas can be stolen if someone broke the pubkey structure)
And breaking of the block system might cause a rewind with a new one.
But i think KarlSchroeder's is about bad results from a working blockchain. Me and Stephan_Tual are both talking about essentially some kind of failure of the blockchain. (not asking rethorically)How can a functioning blockchain be a bad thing? I tend to agree with Stephan_Tual that the blockchain cant support intelligent enough computing. I cant exclude the possibilty of strong AI using it, and poverty would be bad, but those things are both things that could occur, regardless of the presence of a blockchain.
• A P2P drone delivery system is built in ethereum. Anyone can buy their own drones, config them and add them to the network, and the system will pay for them. These drones will be used to deliver packets from anyone in a city to anyone else, very fast. It disrupts all delivery companies.
• The service is extremely useful, it grows and anyone can add charging stations, smart cars, or services to the network. Soon, there are whole companies dedicated to building and providing them with all kinds of vehicles.
• As the service connects to other distributed services, it's also used as drug delivery mechanism. Libertarians cherish, and governments decide not to outlaw the system because it's seen as useful and instead investigate the deliveries. Slowly, most local drug lords are outcompeted.
• The system develops a variable fee, it can predict how much high risk some deliveries are, soon it can also charge more for high value items high risk, so in essence, much of the drug money previously siphoned to crime is transferred to the mesh network. It's seen as a positive step for many.
• The system is lucrative, but drones don't buy mansions or spend it in prostitutes, all money is going back to buying more robots and expanding the service.
• Vehicles are created for international packet shipping: submarine, torpedoes, long range airplanes. The system is able to reach a container ship in international waters, and grab a packet directly from board. No law is being broken by a human so this is a very hard system to fight against.
• Governments start requiring automated drones to provide identification. Unregistred drones can be shot at will. This doesn't prevent them thou, as slow drones are shot, it only raises the profitability of faster and stronger drones. An arm race starts.
• Legal and illegal factories in china are dedicated exclusively for providing robots for the system. But soon, the factories themselves become DAO's as it's cheaper than CEO's. Maybe humans are still working there, but in bad conditions (just like they are now)
• A prediction market is created to siphon a bit of the money gained in causes that are believed to be good for the system as a whole. If your firm starts lobbying and campaigning for the system, you'll see the system starts just "giving" you money. They lobby for less government intervention, international cooperation, and for worse working conditions.
• The same prediction market evolves into an assassination market: if some person is identified as someone who is a powerful enemy of the system, it siphons money to anyone who can neutralize them.
• Asian factories are 100% automated and can be built anywhere. Reports appear that they are building weaponized drones. No country has ordered them, but someone is paying for them. Why?
But if you wait long enough you might be able to see this on CNN instead of the cinema.. ;-)