You know what's worse than the instant obliteration of millions of people? The slow obliteration and starving of millions of people.
Imagine Venezuela, but much much worse.
Picture a society that doesn't know how to create institutions, conduct trade and collaborate with the people around them without the aid of a computers.
Now, I don't know if disabling their computers would result in an incredibly dysfunctional society that would starve, but it's not unthinkable. If it did, the suffering could be far beyond the instant obliteration of millions of people.
Who stands to benefit by destabilizing the western world to such a degree? Clearly some big players like Russia and China, as well as some smaller players can benefit from destabilizing the western world a little bit. But if they destroy it to the point where millions of people are suffering, they'll bring suffering on themselves as well. It seems to me that they're probably motivated to level the playing field and gain dominance more than completely destroying or starving people on a large scale.
To be clear, I wasn't making the case for a motive or even suggesting this was a plausible scenario. My point was death from a nuclear weapon is not the worst form of death.
Modern history is littered with examples of millions of people starving or being slaughtered because societies collapsed economically or politically.
> Who stands to benefit by destabilizing the western world to such a degree?
Who's limiting the conversation to the western world? Let's think beyond ourselves for a second. Wouldn't it be just as tragic if cyber attacks were used to destabilize other places in the world? Imagine an African country that has become entirely dependent on some sort of mobile money transferring platform. Maybe their neighbor launches an attack on that platform to destabilize the country for whatever nefarious reasons.
> You know what's worse than the instant obliteration of millions of people? The slow obliteration and starving of millions of people
Yeah, I'm going to have to sort of disagree with you there. Once you are dead, you are dead. If you are starving, things can still change and you can still have free agency.
Well it's about statistics rather than what an individual might possibly be able to accomplish.
Sure, maybe you'll find a way to survive a famine, but on average most will die because the math just doesn't add up. Not enough food for everyone. And it ends up killing far more than bombs and bullets, even nukes. Disease and famine are far worse than WMD when the numbers are in.
Well I don't think my dead self would mind being dead with it being dead and all. So I don't really see how any kind of suffering is better than death. In a way death doesn't really hurt you, since you stop living.
You joke, but from a certain perspective and within certain parameters, there are people who would find this acceptable, and even preferred. I recall the movie Solace (which wasn't great, but I digress) where the premise is that a serial killer has psychic powers that allow him to see others' futures. When he detects a future that is particularly horrible (disease, injury, etc) with no hope of survival, he makes sure their last moments are wildly happy and kills them painlessly with no warning.
If we were to regard the life of the average poverty stricken human as being _terrible_, then killing them painlessly and suddenly becomes less abhorrent. Of course, then we need to define criteria for whose lives are of sufficiently bad quality where sudden death is a superior option.
Some nihilists might say all humans satisfy that criteria. Even if you're a wealthy and generally happy person, you will become old and die. If you were suddenly dead at this second with no warning, you would not care - the only downside would be those who remained alive, who presumably would care. Let's recurse until no one cares.
And the universe moves along just the same.
I am not advocating for this at all, but I felt your comment justified some sort of explanation. And I have been thinking about these existential questions quite a bit recently.
Actually, in a capitalist country it might be easier to survive such an attack. If there is demand for a product or service, people and businesses will find a way to meet that demand. Millions of people working independently to satisfy their local market demand. It would probably hurt centralized socialist or communist countries more since it severs their control, surveillance, and communication mechanisms.
I agree that markets tend to buffer the effects significantly.
The problem is in times of crisis, the appreciation of market dynamics and rule of law tend to wane. Even if those things are intact, the flow of goods and services can be undermined by well-intentioned but misguided politicians.
My point was simple. Despite the systems of trade, a catastrophic shock in trade or production systems could literally kill millions in a way that is more brutal and horrific than instant obliteration.
I’m intrigued - how does that play out in your head? There’s a disaster causing social collapse but a free market for food remains. Demand outstrips supply so it becomes too expensive for many to buy. What do people do before they can go back to the land and sow their own food? What about areas with a lack of suitable available land (as referenced in a sister post by the potato famine)?
I honestly didn't invest too much time playing out scenarios out in my head, rather I was mentally recalling events in modern history where we've simply allowed millions of people to starve. From a BBC article:
The scarcity, Mukherjee writes, was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing.
I guess if I was to assume a scenario that could lead to the starvation of millions, I'd imagine a poorer country making the mistake of relying too much on some sort of electronic platform to trade and save their money. Let's say this country/region also relied too much on exporting some agricultural commodity that was being affect by a change in climate.
A catastrophic attack on their banking platform could theoretically destroy the local populations confidence in the trading currency as well as scare away foreign lenders. It may create incentives where it's more advantageous to hoard food and sell it on the international markets rather than distribute it to local customers who can't pay.
Free markets tend to create the most value in the long run. In some situations, hoarding can create incentives to distribute to underserved areas. In scenarios where the underserved areas do not have a means of payment (monetary, barter, indentured servitude, etc.), free markets and hoarding can simply be horrifyingly cruel.
Should there be some catastrophic collapse in society, I would far prefer that the government requisitioned food and rationed it out. While it’s definitely open to abuse, I think it would do a better job in the short term of keeping people alive. A free market response to a national emergency sounds dreadful to me
I don't disagree. Most times, I would prefer the decisions of how people get the things they need are made by a network of people with incentives to provide and profit rather than central planning. However, if the situation is dire and the incentives create a deadlock, I think thought-out, extraordinary measures to help people are warranted.
> My point was simple. Despite the systems of trade, a catastrophic shock in trade or production systems could literally kill millions in a way that is more brutal and horrific than instant obliteration.
Systems have trade have made the market economy of the US more vulnerable to many kinds of "a catastrophic shock[s] in trade or production systems." IIRC, there are only a few days of slack in the US food supply chain. That's down from a month or two during the cold war (where I think there were mandates for reserves).
Capitalist countries still centralize their control, surveillance, and communication into few hands with little diversity. The market forces you describe only apply to the early days of capitalism. Most capitalist societies are long past that, at a stage where the strong early players have re-written the rules and formed quasi-state monopolies.
Just look at how many communications companies the US has. And the government had to step in and break that up because there used to be just one. Even now they are quietly conglomerating back together, and there are no significantly different options available. It's still very vulnerable to an attack or flaw due to lack of diversity.
Not sure how much that really buffers anything. In a lot of mature markets, the fact that the whip-hand is held by another corporation doesn't make much practical difference - what happens if someone finds an attack that bricks every Caterpillar tractor and hauler?
It doesn't matter if C&C is corporate or state, they break the same way.
In 20 years, a virtual WMD may well instantly obliterate millions of people.
I'm already unsure of what the most possible damage someone could do with over-the-air automobile firmware updates is today, just to take one example. What would it be like if someone put out a virus that at 11:32:42am on March 3rd, 2036 causes every GM, Ford, and Tesla self-driving car to lock all the doors, floor the accelerator, and let the chips fall where they may?
Consider not just the immediate impact of the crashes, but the fact that you just completely obliterated emergency services (they couldn't hope to serve but a tiny fraction of the victims), choked every major road and most of the minor roads with wreckage, wrought a catastrophe so large that while I don't predict what the effects would be, we're talking something more defining for a generation that would handily compete with both World Wars combined for psychological effect, with the Great Depression tossed in for good measure... it would be astonishing.
I'm not even sure we couldn't get close to that in 2018, to be honest. What if by some horrors the Stuxnet authors were set the task of making this happen? How close could they get?
The problem all virus authors have is escaping detection. 2036 is too far out for them to count on not being detected, and on cars being the same. Release it today, and even if you infect all cars and are undetected, GM and Ford's normal update cycle is likely to change things such that by accident your virus cannot spread. You can expect to get a handful of cars to accelerate out of control - and odds are the door locks don't work on them so you failed to lock the door.
Infecting a cars is hard for other reasons. Radios tend to be easy to updated (they can sell you new features - maps if nothing else). All other controllers tend to be more locked down such that it is likely that a virus couldn't actually spread to anything that can take control.
Maybe, who knows who GM will change over the next 20 years. GM only has guesses.
"2036 is too far out for them to count on not being detected, and on cars being the same."
Sorry, I conflated two things here. I meant someone in 2036 setting a logic bomb for something like a month in advance in their time, and as a separate question, how close one could get to such a virus today. As we keep wiring up our cars to networks (not necessarily "the Internet", but networks), it's only going to get easier.
One of the problems I think will happen with cars, only accelerated by self driving cars and the high probability that people will largely lease them rather than own them, is that the governments of the world are going to see a big pot of real-time surveillance data and real-time person control mechanisms and won't be able keep their hands off, mandating that cars start getting very connected and that cars have backdoors for authorities to take over and redirect them, etc. My scenario in 2036 may not even be a brilliant virus designer, but just one person with Python scripting skills and a bit too much access to the government control system.
It's not even that hard to imagine such a disaster happening accidentally. I'm sure, no sarcasm, that protections will be put into place, but there always has to be a developer back door mechanism of some sort, and there may be enough controls added, or they may not be added competently enough.
(And in terms of the protections of the cars themselves, remember that Stuxnet included the use of not one, but two code signing certificates that the Stuxnet authors clearly did not have true authority to use. If there's a way from the Internet to the control mechanism, even if it requires signed code, there's no guarantee a particularly capable and motivated enemy won't penetrate the protections.)
My scenario in 2036 may not even be a brilliant virus designer, but just one person with Python scripting skills and a bit too much access to the government control system.
I think you would need to think in the line of a global economy/technology/infrastructure collapse (no power production/utilities, (global) transport, financial crisis), millions of first world being thrown into third world conditions (no access to water, food, medicine) due to the large cities depending on technology.
Also see: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01
Virtual weapons are worse when it comes to proliferation. And they are worse when it comes to identifying attackers. Both of these could make them more likely to be used.
Software which say opened the throttle and disabled the brakes on millions of vehicles simultaneously would be in the ballpark for total destruction in a short time. With self-driving cars, the total destruction can be optimized, hunting down pedestrians and hitting vulnerable infrastructure.
Blackouts. Do what Stuxnet did to the control rooms of a large number of power plants, spinning up the machines to hard, coordinate this attack so it triggers in a large number of places.
If you can pull this off for a continental scale, you're looking at potentially months to restore power to everywhere.
Actually for power plants it isn't quite so simple. Because turbines and turbogenerators at nominal speed are quite close to the limit of what the material can support, they have multiple independent fail-safes. For example, if you tried to spin a turbine above safe speed, quick acting valves redirect the steam elsewhere in a fraction of a second.
However, there are absolutely things you could do in a power plant that greatly accelerate wear. It might be possible to accelerate wear enough to achieve failure of some parts before the next maintenance happens.
"Just shutting a plant off" on the other hand is not too difficult; for most plants and upstream systems "off" is the safe state, so all systems are designed to fail into that state, if they really have to.
Anything that doesn't require refrigeration would still work though, trucks run on diesel after all.
Which makes me concerned about the future; if the transport network becomes electric, a power outage will cripple things even more. Unless we build self-contained, internet-disconnected charging stations maybe, but that's not going to be done at any kind of significant scale.
You can maybe drive a truck, but there is a lot more to a logistics pipeline then actually driving the truck. Without power the whole scheduling automation etc. has to be done manually, and it's by now simply impossible to do every automated job manually again.
Your logistics pipelines could maybe run at a few percent efficiency if every step is manual, but by then your trucks will be raided on the streets.
They are still pumps: a physical system. Give me a couple hours and I can get gasoline out of any gas station without needing electricity. Of course I will destroy large parts of the machine in the process. I'll get my gas, and so will anyone else while that turns the crank. The pump will need to be replaced to use normally afterwards.
The bigger worry is gasoline in tanks is good for at most a month. The refinery is much harder to start/operate without power. They have their own backup power on site (I assume) so this might or might not be a real worry. If it is I'll just brew some ethanol.
Maybe you would, would people everywhere? Also, the tanks are underground, encased in concrete, with a submersible pump, and there are no power tools.
Might be possible to get to them. But that's solving one problem. If we're talking continent scale blackout it's also unclear what that gets you.
Typical backup power is measured in hours or days. Black start time scale for a blackout that scale is potentially significantly longer than that.
Long before petrol in refineries runs out our logistics system that distributes food to people has failed. The water system probably has failed. Now if you're in the countryside with a full pantry and a stream next to you that might not matter too much. You'll sit this one out. But if you're in the middle of New York?
My first thought when this happens is society will get itself going again in a few weeks. I wouldn't want to be the looter who robbed a gas station in the trouble. By time it was obvious that society isn't getting back together the gas in their tanks is bad so I wouldn't want it. I'd be more interested in robbing the hardware store to get shovels, and other supplies for gardening so that I can live long term. Hopefully my neighbors are helping as well, division of labor is helpful.
This assumes I survive. Anyone who is this interested in destroying society is probably going to use other means as well to kill people at the same time.
It highlights the shipping "chokepoints" where disruption causes potential food crisis for where the ship had intended to deliver its payload. If the infrastructure which manages these pathways is attacked, the security of these regions is in jeopardy.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a virtual WMD that is worse than the instant obliteration of millions of people.
Incidentally, my impression has always been that, at least with the comparatively low-yield atomic weapons that have actually been used, it's not the instant obliteration that's the biggest problem, but rather the lingering effects of fallout and radiation sickness.
If you can shut down enough utilities (electricity, mobile telecommunications, television & radio station, water treatment plants, access to water...) at the same time on a wide enough area, it would be devastating.
If you took out a dam in Montana the following chain of dam failures would cut the United States in half all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and destroy US agricultural output. The US produces 40-50% of the world Soybean and Corn supply. Long term you're probably talking billions of deaths due to food shortages.
Dams are dangerous beasts. The KMT breached some dikes in the 1930s for the purpose of environmental warfare, and in the process killed half a million peasants and displaced millions more.
I'm not sure it would be. I don't think we've considered all that can happen with a sophisticated worm.
The problem with leveraging nukes is MAD. With worms, you can do a lot of damage without even knowing who did it. Think the Anthrax attacks in 2001 x 1000.
With worms, you can do a bunch of damage over a long period of time without getting discovered. What's the US going to do, start a nuclear war over it? No, see MAD above.
I mean if a worm could figure out how to stop shipping (say simultaneously disable control / start systems of vehicles or gas pumps), people will start to starve after a few days, then probably total chaos will happen leading to a bunch of deaths. That's just a single scenario.
How about if a worm took control of all the air traffic towers simultaneously and change the information so that controllers would start crashing planes everywhere.
I know nuclear war has been played out on tv and in movies for the last 70 years or so, but I don't see an all out nuclear war between two states lobbing hundreds of warheads at each other ever happening. At least not intentionally. Any type of nuclear detonation would either be accidental, or very isolated.
Mosul dam in Iraq was in serious trouble and some argued that it might collapse after the second Iraq war. If it's ever breached the disaster could kill as many as 1.5 million people living in the city below and displace a further 5 million. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that a Stuxnet aimed at the dam's control systems could kill more people than at attack with nuclear or chemical weapons.
