"Modern Hex"


Today, when we talk of the Internet of Things (IoT), we can imagine the washing machine telling Alexa to order detergent. Or of the wind turbine that tells the company that it may stop working soon unless its components are replaced soon. But generally, we don’t think of what will happen next when some of those “Things” in the Internet of Things are the robots of the future.

Maybe we should, I felt when I was reading sci-fi author, Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest. At one point, one of the main characters finds himself being targeted by multiple automated entities of the future. So what was going on?
“It’s a murder virus. First it establishes the identity of the target by a variety of methods… When it locates the target, the Killer virus manipulates every possible piece of external hardware to carry out the murder.”

You’d think that such viruses would get found as they killed more and more people. But what if the virus was written for one particular individual only, not as a generic kill-anyone-you-pick mercenary virus? In that case, it won’t act until it finds its (one and only) victim. Which means the virus would lie undetected… until it is too late. And yes, it would never give up either.

All of which is why the colloquial name of this murder virus in the book felt so apt: a “modern hex”.

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