Language, Security, and the IoT
As far as we know, the alphabet was invented only once* — in Phoenicia (covering modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel). It spread and persisted because with it, you can render any word in any language. This is what the physicist David Deutsch called “the beginning of infinity” in his book of the same name. It is the point at which domain-specific (parochial) modes are traded for universality. The evolution of DNA is another example, as is the CPU, a generic computational machine theoretically capable of mimicking any other.
In real terms, this strength is also a weakness. Once an organism’s genetic code is no longer species-dependent, for example, it can be hijacked by any number of invaders. At the smallest (and simplest) level is the virus, which has no machinery of its own. A virus is an “inert” strand of genetic material wrapped in a protein syringe, and it’s dependent on its host’s cells to reproduce and spread.
With a universal system, then, security becomes paramount. And indeed, the immune systems of large, multicellular organisms are typically quite complex. In fact, I would argue they are rivaled in complexity only by the brain — so much so that we are still making radical discoveries, most recently that intestinal flora can affect mood. And that illustrates the next point, that despite their complexity, immune system often fail (as does the brain). This is because a universal system has a theoretically infinite number of potential configurations, most — but not all — of which are going to be failure modes. Some are going to be advantageous, but since there’s no way to know which is which in advance, and no way to encode an infinite number of states into the system even if you did, distinguishing friend from foe, or signal from noise, becomes quite complicated.
Those infinite potential configurations also create a second problem, beyond porosity: error checking. A dedicated device with a finite number of correct configurations is relatively easy to fix. At the highest level, you know that anything other than one of those correct configurations is an error. One can look at a hammer — ANY hammer — and know immediately whether or not it is broken. Figuring out what’s wrong with my novel, another device made from a universal system, is not only complex but vague and imprecise. And I don’t just mean spelling and grammar, which are relatively easy (but still difficult). I mean what’s wrong with the novel itself, which is something more than the sum of its components. With biological systems, a failure of error checking is often fatal in the form of cancer.
I like knowing why the world is the way is it and not some other way. I like big-picture answers, which in my experience most people tend to overlook. To illustrate the different types of answers, I often use the question, Why did the 8 ball go into the corner pocket? The reductive, scientific answer, popular with engineers and accountants, who like wrestling with the devils in the detail, will involve trigonometry and the angular momentum of the cue ball and all that kind of stuff. The statistical answer will involve the observation that four of the six pockets are corner ones. The answer from the humanities and social sciences is that the player’s wife went shopping, leaving him the afternoon for leisure, making it very likely that balls would be falling into holes.
I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the latter category of answers and because they are explanatory, whereas the others are merely descriptive. And that’s why I love this short talk by Thomas Dullien — first shared by computer security maven Bruce Schneier, whose blog I follow. It helps explain our moment in history by explaining why the internet is sick: it suffers from both maladies mentioned above. On the one hand, it’s growing cancerously. On the other, systems are porous and riddled with invaders.
Of course, in an open universal system, some degree of that is unavoidable. In the case of DNA, for example, if you want to reap the benefits of evolution, you need to allow some minimum amount of mutation, which leaves the door open both to cancer and to an arms race with pathogens, who are themselves evolving — internal errors, external invaders.
Dullien observes: >The “anomaly of cheap complexity.”
>For most of human history, a more complex device was more expensive to build than a simpler device
>This is not the case in modern computing. It is often more cost-effective to take a very complicated device, and make it simulate simplicity, than to make a simpler device.
He says that as if it’s a somewhat unexpected result, and for engineers, it probably is. There’s also the culture of computers, which is eschatalogical and so sees little value in what has come before. As I’ve written before, thought leaders in the world of AI are just now waking to flaw in their research programme first raised by philosophers in the 1980s and subsequently ignored. Indeed, Dullien’s observation was made succinctly by Blaise Pascal in 1657 when he said: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.”
I am not, by the way, suggesting that computers (or the internet) are analogous to the human body, or even to life itself. I am saying that both systems suffer the endemic drawbacks of universality.
Security, Moore’s law, and the anomaly of cheap complexity
*The term “alphabet” is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish “true” alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets. (Wikipedia)
