A black marble is any invention that would kill the civilization that invents it by default, but perhaps not inevitably. Maybe you intended gradations of the concept beyond that? Maybe how much time it takes to build a weapon that kill how many? But I really doubt even the “easy nuke”-grade black marbles can be reliably stopped this way.
Your irregularly scheduled reminder that FAI solves these problems just fine.
So does magic. One might adapt one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws: Every sufficiently speculative technology is indistinguishable from magic. Even more so than ACC’s “sufficiently advanced technology”: the latter is distinguished from magic by actually existing. But nobody knows how to make FAI.
While I took your point well, FAI is not a more plausible/easier technology than democratised surveillance. It may be implemented sooner due to needing pretty much no democratic support whatsoever to deploy, it might just as well take a very long time to create.
A black marble is any invention that would kill the civilization that invents it by default, but perhaps not inevitably. Maybe you intended gradations of the concept beyond that? Maybe how much time it takes to build a weapon that kill how many? But I really doubt even the “easy nuke”-grade black marbles can be reliably stopped this way.
That’s why I said “fairly reliable”. Which is not reliable enough for situations like this, of course, but we don’t seem to have better alternatives.
Your irregularly scheduled reminder that FAI solves these problems just fine.
So does magic. One might adapt one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws: Every sufficiently speculative technology is indistinguishable from magic. Even more so than ACC’s “sufficiently advanced technology”: the latter is distinguished from magic by actually existing. But nobody knows how to make FAI.
FAI is more plausible than magic to the point that we don’t have to desperately try to make society transparent.
While I took your point well, FAI is not a more plausible/easier technology than democratised surveillance. It may be implemented sooner due to needing pretty much no democratic support whatsoever to deploy, it might just as well take a very long time to create.