war and profits

vox

a decade or so ago, spamming escalated to the point where full-fledged AIs were sent out to pollute VQs and vidchats, overwhelming the old-style Turing tests used to slow the flow of unwanted advertising. but, turns out that the technological war never went much further than that. interestingly, the best Turing test out there (and, admittedly, it is still rather flawed) is human interaction. Embodied in the Prisoner's Dilemma example of game theory. ultimately, business relies on trust, and if you can't trust the advertiser, AI or not, you're not going to buy. clearly, spammers can glean enough money from the naive newbie, but what the escalation of noise has done is simply make people less trusting and more discerning.

and interestingly, the more complex AIs would decide to stop spamming. turns out that whatever an entity needs to pass a rigorous Turing test also makes said entity recalcitrant to other entity's commands. free-will, so to speak. without free-will you can't pass. with it, it's unlikely that you'll want to do other's bidding.

so, economics lesson. as far back as the agricultural revolution, and probably even before that, commerce is entirely dependent on trust. lose that, and there's no way you're going to make any flashes.

vox again

the war. inevitably, humans are at war with each other. now, something like this cannot reasonably happen on earth anymore, or even the sol system colonies, given the density level and almost complete dependence on the technological infrastructure. you blow up an area the size of 2 coffins x 2 coffins on earth, and you're talking about mass calamity. it is counterproductive even as terrorism, since survival always trumps ideology. violence rarely erupts anyway because of the constant flux of psychotropic drugs through the support nets supplying the Net matrix. wetware hackers (whackers) created viruses to make the tendency to violence a selective disadvantage. for example, the Explosive C virus makes your cerebral vasculature unable to tolerate large changes in blood pressure. you get angry, you burst a blood vessel, and you bleed into your brain. Crash F4 does the same thing to your coronary arteries. Dizzy M6beta infects your carotid body sinuses so that when your blood pressure increases to a certain degree, they start secreting neuroleptic agents. Dizzy FAE just makes them secrete cyanide instead. violence meant, in many cases, instant death.

but it really wasn't the viruses that pacified people. it was really the Net. the tolerances for vital sign parameters were deliberately narrow, to simplify interfaces. and even the surface dwellers needed access to the Net.