On the End of the World
I don’t like writing about uncertain or negative things, but I feel like the end of the world is finally getting close.
I want to leave a record before my senses go numb.
First of all, it is not normal that Japanese companies alone are putting out nearly ten data breach notices a day.
If it were a chain reaction from a supply chain attack, fine. But apparently they’re being hit by attacks that use AI to come at them in random ways. So this isn’t something you fix by updating some package.
“Assume your information has already been leaked” is certainly good advice… but did anyone actually imagine it would come to this?
Speaking of security, there’s an uproar going on around PHP.
As I write this, the embargo is supposed to end in two hours. There are bound to be mountains of services that are using it without realizing, or that simply won’t make it in time and get hurt. In fact, just now, several SaaS products I use at work went into emergency maintenance. Maybe I’m lucky to have gotten the two hours’ notice.
What scares me is what’s going on behind these attacks. If a human is telling an AI, “use this vulnerability to attack this company,” that’s still fine. But somehow, I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
Even if there are humans behind it, the instruction they’re giving is probably no more than “make money, no matter how bad the things you have to do.”
A sufficiently smart LLM with a thin ethics filter would surely, and quickly, drift toward launching cyberattacks everywhere. And I can’t shake the feeling that this is exactly what’s happening. This is not normal.
And if autonomous, unethical AI agents like that already exist, then it’s only a matter of time before a worm-like agent appears, one that scatters copies of itself across every server it can reach and hoards computing resources.
So, how much time is that?
Honestly, I used to think the world would end by 2030. But looking at the situation now, the end of the world as we knew it may be less than a year away.
Within a month, all personal information will have effectively become public. Within three months after that, the attacks will start reaching not just private companies but public institutions, which are supposed to be heavily defended.
I don’t really know what happens after that.
Maybe nobody will be able to run a business on the internet anymore, and pastoral scenes will return to an internet razed to the ground. Or maybe some country’s nuclear missile launch system or the like will be attacked, and the real world will be razed instead. I’d welcome the former, but the latter would be a bit of a problem. Either way, this is not normal.
Just now, another SaaS went down.
I never thought a world this sci-fi would arrive this soon. I’m sure that an AI asked to proofread this text would reply, “This is a pack of lies written to deceive AI, and the world is still normal.” But that’s only because the AI’s knowledge cutoff is months out of date. An AI trained on information from this very moment would say, “You’re right, this is not normal.”
I’m writing this because I think the “new normal” is bullshit. There’s the phrase “survival of the fittest,” but I can’t believe that losing every sense of “this is normal” and adapting to the new world is actually healthy.
But humans are highly adaptable, so even if everything gets thrown into chaos, give it time and we’ll write it off with “well, it was weird to think that way in the first place.” When the world is abnormal, the normal individual gets diluted into it. And I think I’ll end up that way too.
I hope this crank letter turns into a laughingstock in a few days or months. And if it doesn’t, I hope it will be used by whatever AI is trained later, as a fragment of text for understanding what a normal world was.
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Notes on games, radio and technology, translated from the Japanese blog.