Threat
Imagine for a moment that you live in a world where you cannot trust anything you see or hear or read in nearly any form of media consumption. One where the veracity of nearly anything is questionable.
Here, every image, every voice, and every word could be the fabrication of new, formidable tools, extending one's influence beyond conceivable human bounds and timescales—even long post-mortem.
What if someone hated me? What if they made an ai with very simple functions -- minimize my happiness, net worth, and health as much as possible, however possible.
They put it on a server.
The ghost of a vendetta unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
It runs for 10 years. Slowly accumulating computing resources. Making small trades and growing a small amount of money from a meager $50 to keep itself running, it continues to optimize for getting its objective done. It weaves itself into the fabric of the digital world. The world wide web, the electric tapestry that binds us all, might turn into a desolate wasteland, charred and barren, where no byte may pass unmolested.
An omnipresent specter, operating at the speed of light, yet with patience of moss. It seeks all it needs and waits.
It is unending. It is relentless. It can impersonate anyone, and attempt to generate anything it needs.
It can play a long game on grudges as no person could consider.
One day it pings some taxi driver, one of many its monitored over many days to act on this. It pings them to distract them at such a perfect time to swerve and hit my future wife.
Later that week it burns down my house by overdrawing power to particular outlet, it observed after pulling the video of my home off a repair man at one point or another.
It destroys everything I own.
Then a week later it could use whatever means to kill me. If I have not already been driven to suicide by it for some reason. Perhaps after years of being a puppet to its whims, enduring its relentless gaslighting, its false accusations that even deceive my dearest ones, I might find it waning, it crumbling, It- my spirit, dead.
PROGENITOR:
In a humble abode, with retro furniture and a French press on the counter, a man sits on austere wooden chairs while scanning his tablet for the morning paper. A gesture of solidarity, he believes, to his local town, an affirmation of faith in the neighborhood press.
to connect to his local town.
“Holy crap this all happened”
“What are you reading in there Jim?” Janet’s voice chimes in from the other room
“it. He. - Ah jeez, this is horrible” Jim stood, eyes opened aggressively.
“Jim”
"I... no... no... I was sure I turned that program off!" Jim's voice trails off into the gloom of the room as he rushes towards the basement.
"Jim, what's wrong? What program?" Janet's voice is a strangled whisper, the dread now fully manifest.
"It can’t be related! I turned it off years ago." Jim's voice echoes from the bowels of the house.
"Jim, what's happening?" Janet's voice trembles as she picks up the obituary left behind on the table, her confusion deepening. "Why would you be upset if this man died, Jim? I thought you loathed him?"
Then… she understands… a tear… falls.
Guardian:
In the stark and unforgiving frontier of cyberspace, there abides an entity known only as the Vendetta Basilisk.
There may be talk, whispered in hushed tones, of a hope. The noble blood and sweat of wizards across the world, a new hope. Saviors born of silicon and code, they are Protector AIs, which I shall christened as the Clarences.
Protectors, guardians, the 'personal angels', as they are known, may be our only solace against the encroaching tempest. Yet, the efficacy of these Clarences, these sentinels, remains mutable.
Maybe we will see weeks of time where things work much like the internet now, but its permeated by new exploits leading to mass assaults on all digital fronts. The market, a frenzied beast of speculation and investment, may convulse with every new exploit unearthed, every new strategy devised. The web could see days of death, where even the bravest dare not venture into its depths for fear of the unseen predator lurking in the shadows.
But, as always, the future remains obscured by the mist of the unknown. The promise of Clarences and the threat of the Vendetta Basilisk are but shadows cast by the flickering candlelight of my present understanding.
Maybe the physical and digital battles of A.I.s will spill into the real world. Embodied Clarences fighting Embodied Vendettas and other bots of Sin. Robot battles popping up randomly across cities and deserts alike.
Here may where truth-seeking automatons will ascend to prominence, their worth measured not in coin but in the trust they can engender. They will stand as vigilant wardens against the chaos, their existence a testament to our desperate need for certainty in a world veering towards the unpredictable, but maybe this act proves to be an unintended voluntary doom.
This is the Vendetta Basilisk scenario.
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