6 ms·

I read this paper (it's only a few pages, completely non-technical). The entire paper assumes we get a certain type of communication and in the course of decod

I read this paper (it's only a few pages, completely non-technical). The entire paper assumes we get a certain type of communication and in the course of decoding it, destroy humanity. It would make an interesting screen play, but the paper presents no proof whatsoever that "message decontamination is impossible." At best, the paper presents 1 case and outlines 1 possible ending which is the end of humanity. Kinda interesting but not nearly as universal as the title claims.

k__ 9y ago
Wasn't Arrival about this?
- knowaveragejoe 9y ago
  I read both the short story and saw the film, and I didn't get that from it.
- spartanatreyu 9y ago
  Nope. <spoilers>It's about two things. First, an alien race that give's humanity a "weapon" which is their language. Anyone who learns the language starts to perceive time in a non-linear (probably deterministic) fashion, ie. flashbacks and flashfowards. They did this so that humanity would save them sometime in the future from something unknown to modern day humans. And second, it's about how a translator lives through the life and death of her child while understanding said language. She makes the choice of conceiving her child even though she knew the child was going to die in the future because it was worth it to her because of how much she loved her daughter.</spoliers>
  - e40 9y ago
    That is a very good summary of the movie. I've watched it 3 times and love it more each time.
    - Simon_says 9y ago
      Did you read the short story? IMO, it's better.
      - colatkinson 9y ago
        Link to the story, for GP: http://discours.philol.msu.ru/attachments/article/264/Chiang_Story%20of%20Your%20Life.pdf http://discours.philol.msu.ru/attachments/article/264/Chiang...
  - k__ 9y ago
    Yes, that is what happens, but the whole language was like virus that turned people into p-zombies.
- riffraff 9y ago
  Snow Crash was closer, if anything.
- MattRix 9y ago
  Not exactly, Arrival is more about how learning a new language can change the way you think. If you want a fiction novel that IS very similar to this, I recommend reading The Three-Body Problem.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    That is good. Earlier, as EvanAnderson notes, there was the Blight in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Also the malware attack on the Ceres colony in The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
wingspar 9y ago
Sounds like Monty Pythons killer joke... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yo9WHrTvks https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yo9WHrTvks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_Wor...
- api 9y ago
  Monty python solved the Fermi paradox!
shkkmo 9y ago
> The entire paper assumes we get a certain type of communication and in the course of decoding it destroy humanity. "Assume" is a bit of an odd way of putting it. The paper is a discussion of the risks of receiving a certain type of message. > but the paper presents no proof whatsoever that "message decontamination is impossible." That's a bit harsh. The paper provides several arguments which I find quite solid. Which of them did you find unconvincing? The existence of message that can't be parsed by hand? The risk of manipulative AI running on an air-gapped computer? The difficulty of containing a message given that we can't turn off the source? The difficulty of containing knowledge/information over longer time scales? I didn't think there was much particularly new in that article. It's mostly a re-hashing of other people's arguments. The most interesting point the article made is this conclusion: "As we realize that some message types are potentially dangerous, we can adapt our own peaceful transmissions accordingly. We should certainly not transmit any code. Instead, a plain text encyclopedia (Heidmann 1993), images, music etc. in a simple format are adequate. No advanced computer should be required to decrypt our message."
- wyattpeak 9y ago
  Personally, I find the idea that "humans could be bargained into a poor position" to be fairly weak. It's certainly possible, but negotiations with hidden agendas have been part and parcel of humanity for all time, and are a major basis for all foreign (and most internal) affairs. The paper presents no predicament that China couldn't put the US in tomorrow with a suitably (apparently) one-sided deal, and yet countries don't as a rule isolate themselves to avoid hearing potentially deadly trade offers.
  - pdonis 9y ago
    > I find the idea that "humans could be bargained into a poor position" to be fairly weak That's because you're assuming that whatever ETI or AI we are bargaining with has roughly our intelligence. That is what has made it possible for humans to negotiate with each other instead of isolating themselves to avoid hearing potentially deadly offers. But any ETI or AI capable of sending us a complex message will probably be much more intelligent than we are. In that case, we would basically be in the same position as, say, a dog trying to negotiate with humans; we simply would not even be able to comprehend what the other side was doing or thinking.
chicob 9y ago
ETI message? Kill it with fire. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsTheOnlyWayToBeSure http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsTheOnlyWayToBe...
- gmueckl 9y ago
  In the paper, they would nuke the hypothetical moon base, although sadly not from orbit.
Retra 9y ago
I came up with an idea as a fantasy world-building exercise which included a confusing book of spells, which if someone where clever enough to decode the central theme of the book, they would have performed the mental gymnastics necessary to cast a spell which would erase every possible future in which they did not become a supreme evil. But here the basic premise is that merely thinking the right thoughts can physically change reality. Which is 'sort-of' true for real brains, but there's an important layer of indirection that makes it not work the way I spelled out above.
AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
That was my immediate reaction as well, "decontamination is impossible" um, why? I deal with 'unusual' payloads all the time and I've never seen anything that has this potential, I don't see how anything could be built to be so, without obviously being so. EG: the progression would go from something being some form of plain text, to it being encoded in some way which is very very likely. On the extreme ends say something is sent as machine code. Firstly, this is very odd and suspicious for a lot of reasons but even still you can run untrusted machine code in a very safe way. Assume its resistant to existing types of disassembly for whatever reason. Let's say you want to take an absurd level of paranoia (which, really, is justified if an alien civilization sends us machine code), rut it on an entirely physically disconnected (battery powered) machine inside a Faraday cage. If the code still won't work (ERR: must be connected to the internet to proceed) you can basically assume its malicious. And, after all that, there are far easier ways to kill us all. Send the plans to a massive superweapon but only send it to the USA (or just to Russia, or just to China) but send the other side a message telling them what you did. The snubbed nation may feel the need to make a preemptive attack before the other nation can develop the technology. Send plans for an ultimate bioweapon to the right/wrong people.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  >rut it on an entirely physically disconnected (battery powered) machine inside a Faraday cage What if decompression produced an alien message hundreds of gigabytes in length? Is that file completely safe to transmit to un-airgapped computers? Would you bet all of human civilization that it's safe? No way any part of it would produce any negative effect on a human reading it? >Send the plans to a massive superweapon but only send it to the USA Laser beams sent over interstellar distances will be hundreds of thousands of kilometres wide at the destination. The threat model for a hostile probe inside our solar system would be rather different, of course.
  - 13of40 9y ago
    "This is a national security issue that must be treated with the utmost care. Can you analyze and decode this message we received from Alpha Centauri 4?" [Time passes] "By Jove, I think we've cracked it, Sir. It's essentially Huffman encoded and contains a mechanism for repeating redundant strings. Let me see if I can decode the entire message." [Time passes] "Shit, my computer crashed."
rspeer 9y ago
It's important to keep in mind that the barrier to entry to publishing on arXiv is that you can produce a well-formed LaTeX document with coherent paragraphs. There's no reason to believe a claim _just_ because it's on arXiV.
- qubex 9y ago
  Note how they wrote of a ‘proof’ of the famously unproven Riemann Zeta hypothesis and proceeded to merely state it (in a form that might even be compatible with the proven Euler Zeta hypothesis, the ungeneralised case where s is a real number and not a complex number).

k__ 9y ago

Wasn't Arrival about this?

knowaveragejoe 9y ago
I read both the short story and saw the film, and I didn't get that from it.
spartanatreyu 9y ago
Nope. <spoilers>It's about two things. First, an alien race that give's humanity a "weapon" which is their language. Anyone who learns the language starts to perceive time in a non-linear (probably deterministic) fashion, ie. flashbacks and flashfowards. They did this so that humanity would save them sometime in the future from something unknown to modern day humans. And second, it's about how a translator lives through the life and death of her child while understanding said language. She makes the choice of conceiving her child even though she knew the child was going to die in the future because it was worth it to her because of how much she loved her daughter.</spoliers>
- e40 9y ago
  That is a very good summary of the movie. I've watched it 3 times and love it more each time.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    Did you read the short story? IMO, it's better.
    - colatkinson 9y ago
      Link to the story, for GP: http://discours.philol.msu.ru/attachments/article/264/Chiang_Story%20of%20Your%20Life.pdf http://discours.philol.msu.ru/attachments/article/264/Chiang...
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes, that is what happens, but the whole language was like virus that turned people into p-zombies.
riffraff 9y ago
Snow Crash was closer, if anything.
MattRix 9y ago
Not exactly, Arrival is more about how learning a new language can change the way you think. If you want a fiction novel that IS very similar to this, I recommend reading The Three-Body Problem.
- mirimir 9y ago
  That is good. Earlier, as EvanAnderson notes, there was the Blight in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Also the malware attack on the Ceres colony in The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.

wingspar 9y ago

Sounds like Monty Pythons killer joke... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yo9WHrTvks https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yo9WHrTvks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_Wor...

api 9y ago
Monty python solved the Fermi paradox!

shkkmo 9y ago

> The entire paper assumes we get a certain type of communication and in the course of decoding it destroy humanity. "Assume" is a bit of an odd way of putting it. The paper is a discussion of the risks of receiving a certain type of message. > but the paper presents no proof whatsoever that "message decontamination is impossible." That's a bit harsh. The paper provides several arguments which I find quite solid. Which of them did you find unconvincing? The existence of message that can't be parsed by hand? The risk of manipulative AI running on an air-gapped computer? The difficulty of containing a message given that we can't turn off the source? The difficulty of containing knowledge/information over longer time scales? I didn't think there was much particularly new in that article. It's mostly a re-hashing of other people's arguments. The most interesting point the article made is this conclusion: "As we realize that some message types are potentially dangerous, we can adapt our own peaceful transmissions accordingly. We should certainly not transmit any code. Instead, a plain text encyclopedia (Heidmann 1993), images, music etc. in a simple format are adequate. No advanced computer should be required to decrypt our message."

wyattpeak 9y ago
Personally, I find the idea that "humans could be bargained into a poor position" to be fairly weak. It's certainly possible, but negotiations with hidden agendas have been part and parcel of humanity for all time, and are a major basis for all foreign (and most internal) affairs. The paper presents no predicament that China couldn't put the US in tomorrow with a suitably (apparently) one-sided deal, and yet countries don't as a rule isolate themselves to avoid hearing potentially deadly trade offers.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > I find the idea that "humans could be bargained into a poor position" to be fairly weak That's because you're assuming that whatever ETI or AI we are bargaining with has roughly our intelligence. That is what has made it possible for humans to negotiate with each other instead of isolating themselves to avoid hearing potentially deadly offers. But any ETI or AI capable of sending us a complex message will probably be much more intelligent than we are. In that case, we would basically be in the same position as, say, a dog trying to negotiate with humans; we simply would not even be able to comprehend what the other side was doing or thinking.

chicob 9y ago

ETI message? Kill it with fire. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsTheOnlyWayToBeSure http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsTheOnlyWayToBe...

gmueckl 9y ago
In the paper, they would nuke the hypothetical moon base, although sadly not from orbit.

Retra 9y ago

I came up with an idea as a fantasy world-building exercise which included a confusing book of spells, which if someone where clever enough to decode the central theme of the book, they would have performed the mental gymnastics necessary to cast a spell which would erase every possible future in which they did not become a supreme evil. But here the basic premise is that merely thinking the right thoughts can physically change reality. Which is 'sort-of' true for real brains, but there's an important layer of indirection that makes it not work the way I spelled out above.

AdamJacobMuller 9y ago

That was my immediate reaction as well, "decontamination is impossible" um, why? I deal with 'unusual' payloads all the time and I've never seen anything that has this potential, I don't see how anything could be built to be so, without obviously being so. EG: the progression would go from something being some form of plain text, to it being encoded in some way which is very very likely. On the extreme ends say something is sent as machine code. Firstly, this is very odd and suspicious for a lot of reasons but even still you can run untrusted machine code in a very safe way. Assume its resistant to existing types of disassembly for whatever reason. Let's say you want to take an absurd level of paranoia (which, really, is justified if an alien civilization sends us machine code), rut it on an entirely physically disconnected (battery powered) machine inside a Faraday cage. If the code still won't work (ERR: must be connected to the internet to proceed) you can basically assume its malicious. And, after all that, there are far easier ways to kill us all. Send the plans to a massive superweapon but only send it to the USA (or just to Russia, or just to China) but send the other side a message telling them what you did. The snubbed nation may feel the need to make a preemptive attack before the other nation can develop the technology. Send plans for an ultimate bioweapon to the right/wrong people.

sbierwagen 9y ago
>rut it on an entirely physically disconnected (battery powered) machine inside a Faraday cage What if decompression produced an alien message hundreds of gigabytes in length? Is that file completely safe to transmit to un-airgapped computers? Would you bet all of human civilization that it's safe? No way any part of it would produce any negative effect on a human reading it? >Send the plans to a massive superweapon but only send it to the USA Laser beams sent over interstellar distances will be hundreds of thousands of kilometres wide at the destination. The threat model for a hostile probe inside our solar system would be rather different, of course.
- 13of40 9y ago
  "This is a national security issue that must be treated with the utmost care. Can you analyze and decode this message we received from Alpha Centauri 4?" [Time passes] "By Jove, I think we've cracked it, Sir. It's essentially Huffman encoded and contains a mechanism for repeating redundant strings. Let me see if I can decode the entire message." [Time passes] "Shit, my computer crashed."

rspeer 9y ago

It's important to keep in mind that the barrier to entry to publishing on arXiv is that you can produce a well-formed LaTeX document with coherent paragraphs. There's no reason to believe a claim _just_ because it's on arXiV.

qubex 9y ago
Note how they wrote of a ‘proof’ of the famously unproven Riemann Zeta hypothesis and proceeded to merely state it (in a form that might even be compatible with the proven Euler Zeta hypothesis, the ungeneralised case where s is a real number and not a complex number).