Grassland: Solving Decentralised Autonomous Warfare
Once the number of users for any product passes a certain threshold, the likelihood of abuse by bad actors starts to become an issue.
Software products all have one particular problem that they have to solve, cybersecurity threats caused by exploits. Grassland has that too but it also has another problem all its own.
Solving Problems That Are ‘Below The Horizon’
It’s hard to solve a problem that most people can’t see yet. It’s even harder to explain it to them.
It was clear from the beginning that Grassland was going to need a defence system for the 21st century. However, every concern expressed by early users revolved around traditional human based threats like stalkers, etc. But humans are among the slowest and “blindest” intelligences in Grassland. Any Grassland connected ordnance could predict, engage and neutralize one or any number of human threats with remarkable precision and timing, and all before those people could even register what had happened. So malicious humans alone were never really a concern.
A New Paradigm
For millennia, national security was dependent on the strength of city walls. Then in 1453, Mehmed II broke the walls of Constantinople using an early version of the cannon and completely changed the rules of the game.
The defence system we are talking about is one that can handle threats in both cyberwarfare (digital) from software and kinetic (physical) warfare from autonomous weapons. But this system is defined by a much more advanced, antifragile version of these threats. One that’s unique to the type of “playing field” that Grassland technology creates. Something we call “Decentralised Autonomous Warfare” or DAW for short.
After the fall of Constantinople, national security could no longer rely on being able to hide behind city walls. Today, it can no longer rely on being able to hide at all.
DAW is the problem backdrop against which Grassland’s entire mathematical system (see Explain Grassland Geometry Like I’m Five) was made. It’s just an abstract tool for finding/calculating and executing winning strategies in DAW. And it was found to be very useful for solving problems and explaining phenomena in other domains.
But nothing about DAW was mentioned in the ELI5. Those who’d been given the first drafts of the full paper advised against it since most people aren’t mature enough or rational enough to be able to reason about the subject matter without coming to the wrong conclusions. But you can go back and look at everything that’s been done on this project since day one with it in mind and you’ll see that it was the deciding factor in every decision that‘s been made. And that should explain why, at the time, many design decisions might have seemed unnecessarily martial.
“Load-Bearing Walls”
This is why if someone asks a Grassland developer if they can add or change some feature of the core, P2P client and they’re told that it can’t be done, it’s often for a very good reason.
All software features at the network level serve at least one very important purpose; most serve several. When execution speed goes hand in hand with security, everything has to be streamlined; every line of code matters. They’re all “load-bearing walls”, so to speak. Removing or modifying the core features without careful consideration would threaten the integrity of the entire structure.
Addressing the Problem
So we can’t just ignore this issue by treating all users like they’re five years old forever. The world’s military and police forces are still extremely perplexed as to how to even approach the issue of regular autonomous warfare let alone a decentralised one.
Unusual Antifragility and Infinite Games
It’s not just the fact that human soldiers and police officers can’t match the speed of machines. And it’s not just because the processing bandwidth of the human visual cortex maxes out at just two eyes making it impossible for a “human in the loop” to contend with the distributed, artificial “visual cortexes” that characterize DAW. Or even that DAW has no “centre”; there’s no geographically bounded component or individual that once toppled would mark the end of the conflict, even if you could launch an attack that couldn’t be foreseen.
What really makes DAW systems so different is their antifragility. A system that is designed in such a way actually benefits from being attacked. To the point that they will, in turn, can emulate the attack strategies that have been used against them.
And whereas for human beings, war is typically what strategists would call a finite game. Which are games that are guaranteed to end after a finite number of moves. Human mortality and sheer exhaustion being the limiting factor that causes both sides to want, if not require, a decisive end. But DAW systems like Grassland aren’t “alive”. At least, not in the same way. So they don’t really share those concerns.
Which is why we have to tell these types of users to forget almost everything they know about armed conflict. They need to reason from first principles.
So in 2022, we’ll be taking practical steps with all our clients and partners around the world to make sure that their governments have the right technology to deal with this problem and to solve it before it even starts, because we want them to win.
Minimal Disruption to Infrastructure, Commerce and Civilian Life
The complete situational awareness that Grassland technology provides to both lethal and non-lethal autonomous weapons makes it possible for warfare to be so efficient and discreet that there would be almost no disruption to normal life. A problem which can be especially acute when it takes place within in a dense urban environment. But Grassland’s precision means commerce and trade can continue as usual, infrastructure can remain intact and operational, and most people lives can be largely unaffected. Conflicts would be over long before civilians even know they had begun.
