Vitalik's Sci-Fi Novel "Snow Moon" Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Meldan, Viridia · 3724 Frost 7

Gladias heard a knock on the door of his government hotel room. Before he could react, he heard a buzzing sound, and the door opened.

Sera pushed the door open and entered.

"I'm sorry, Sera," Gladias said almost immediately, a sorrowful expression on his face. "I don't think this plan is going to work."

"I've failed our entire family. We know where Febric and Hreda are, and now we know where Lily is, but there's no way to save any of them—unless the Northerners completely conquer us."

Sera walked up to Gladias and hugged him.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then she stepped back, a smile appearing on her face.

"So I have a new idea."

Gladias's eyes lit up.

"What is it?"

"So what we learned yesterday is that the judges are unwilling to do things they consider very undemocratic. So I have a solution. We make it democratic."

"What, like we hold an election tomorrow?"

"In a sense, yes."

"While you were in Zego, Moff and I started using Silver Language to reach the upper levels, talking to people there. At first we weren't very successful in getting their attention. Vildo joining about ten days ago helped a lot, but even then, they didn't take us very seriously. But on the day we rescued Tafindel at Kungope, I took a risk: I told them a long-tick in advance that something interesting would happen militarily. And then of course it did. So now they're willing to listen to me, and I have a plan to ask them something."

"Silver Language has a polling feature. You can burn Zip coins—technically, pay Zip coins to the company—and it lets you automatically ask questions to a large group of people on the platform. The more Zip coins you pay, the more people it surveys. So what we're going to do is ask a lot of people a series of questions about their views on various Viridian and other government institutions and other hypothetical scenarios."

"We'll include 'Do you think the Council represents the people?' and 'How would you feel if Viridia's military were run by the Zegoans who rescued the Red Shire President's son?' But we'll include these alongside hundreds of other decoy questions. That way, the Northerners won't know what's going on."

"To make the responses genuine and well-considered, you need a high priority, which I imagine requires paying a large amount of Zip coins. To make it a social signal with strong legitimacy, common knowledge must be established—everyone in Viridia must not only know that the poll was conducted and what the results are, but also know that everyone else knows the poll was conducted and what the results are, and everyone knows that everyone else knows, and so on. This will require a substantial portion of the total population. So we'll have to pay a lot of Zip coins to make the poll visible."

"My estimate is nine hundred thousand Zip coins."

"Do we have that much?"

"No, all our savings combined, plus Moff's, only add up to half."

"But here's the trick. We don't need to pay. We convince Silver Language founder Everlow to do it through the company. Then they can set the breadth and priority as high as they want—they get one hundred percent of the fees back."

"Wait, can't they just do it manually at zero cost?"

"Their platform works by publishing proofs to the encrypted network every time the readable message set is updated. So they actually have no way to violate the rules—if they try, the proof won't verify, and the audience's clients will automatically reject the messages as invalid. The only thing they could do is publish a new algorithm hash, but that would introduce a twenty-day delay."

"Can they get one hundred percent back? No sales tax?"

"With the latest rule changes, given how Silver Language has performed on algorithm transparency—the exact proof mechanism won't let them just backdoor and violate their own rules—as well as interoperability, respecting user privacy, and collaborating with researchers, their tax has already dropped to zero."

"Then let's see what Everlow thinks!"

Gladias, Sera, and Zey walked together along their usual route, through Kalima, lush with trees on both sides and surrounded by stone houses. For safety, they rode in a black car most of the way, but the car could only go as far as the border of the car-free zone. So they had to walk the last few hundred meters. Hopefully the privacy robes will be enough, Gladias thought.

A cold wind blew from behind. The cold gave them motivation, the wind pushed them forward, and they began to walk faster.

"Turn right here," Sera whispered through her neckband. By now, she was almost as accustomed as Gladias to conducting all conversations through the neckband.

They turned right onto a smaller path. The path stretched straight for about a hundred meters. At first, there were stone houses on both sides. After about fifty meters, the houses disappeared into what appeared to be dense forest. After a hundred meters, they could see something like a small hill ahead.

The path sloped downward, leading to what appeared to be a gate inside the hill. Another building that barely pays land tax, Gladias thought. By now, Viridians had nearly perfected the art of living and working while placing complex structures into forests, such that the same forest looked untouched from a hundred meters away.

Zey marveled, his mind immediately leaping to compare it with Zego's pyramids. In Zego, he thought, they shaped natural mountains into pyramids, making nature look like human craftsmanship. In Viridia—or at least in Meldan's Kalima district—they made what were likely entirely artificial mountains look like nature. Zego could learn from Viridia's style, he thought. For preservation, it might be better.

Sera tapped the green circle beside the door with her handheld device, and the door opened.

She led the three of them along a path: left turn, then right turn, up a slope, then another right turn, then up stairs. Finally, she opened another door and led them up the stairs into the middle of a circular area, from which they could see the open sky. Gladias and Zey realized they had reached the top of the hill.

They turned around. Another man in a privacy robe, without a head covering or face mask, was already there.

"I'm Everlow," he said. "Nice to meet you."

"I'm Gladias. Nice to meet you too."

"I'm Zey."

Everlow pressed a button, and the roof above them began to close. After about ten ticks, the roof was fully closed.

"Just for privacy," Everlow said. "Feel free to take off your robes. Also, would you like water or tea?"

"I'll have tea," Gladias replied.

"I'll have a cup of tea too." Zey added.

Sera looked around. "Then I suppose I'll have a cup of tea as well."

"Sounds good, four cups of tea. The robot will be up shortly."

Everlow sat on a bench against the safety railing behind the stairway exit. He pointed to the circular benches around the room. "Please, sit."

They removed their hoods and masks from their privacy robes, then sat down.

"So, Sera, you mentioned to me that you have an idea for something Silver Language could do to make the entire Viridian government less foolish," he said in a blunt, honest tone.

"Yes, that's right."

"Basically, I want to run a poll. I had Jade come up with about a thousand questions, and I reviewed them. Some are about how you feel about the present, some about possible futures. A small subset of the questions concerns what we actually care about—replacing the military even if the Council is unwilling—and the rest are decoys."

Zey frowned slightly. He thought Sera was too quick to volunteer the contents of her master plan. Kungope would never operate that way. But perhaps Viridian culture is simply more trusting—or perhaps Everlow had already proven himself to Sera, or even to all Viridians, as someone trustworthy.

"Our goal is to let the public know that the poll happened and what the results are. If it goes well, then we'll have a stronger argument to present to the judges that this is what people really want, and they won't riot against it."

Sera showed Everlow her handheld device. Everlow briefly skimmed the questions, then began reading aloud.

"Who do you want to run Viridia's military? A: Current leadership. B: New leadership chosen by the Council. C: Silver Language leadership. D: The Northerners. E: Kungope (the Zegoan group that recently rescued the Red Shire President's son). F: Arturia military advisors."

"How much are you willing to spend on this?"

"Three million Zip coins. I'm hoping Silver Language the company can do it itself, since you'd get one hundred percent back anyway."

"Interesting! I'd say three million is too much—that's more than any previous Silver Language poll or advertisement. It would make the Northerners suspicious that something unusual is happening. I'd spend one million. In terms of expenditure, still in the top three, but not unprecedented."

"I'm fine with that."

"But there's another problem," Everlow continued. "If we do this, we can help the judges see that making a major change would be popular, and that people don't consider the Council that legitimate. Or of course we'll discover that our judgment about what Viridians think is very wrong. But this won't convince them that such drastic action would actually work."

"Do you have any ideas?"

"Actually, yes. Recently we added a feature, Silver Language Predict, that lets people—or bots—place bets on future events. So far, bots are the most effective—"

"I see," Gladias interjected. "Prediction markets are cool. But there are two weaknesses. First, if the Northerners see the market, they can manipulate it. In theory, any manipulation would create more incentive for arbitrageurs to profit by pushing the price back to where it should be, but how this works in practice is still untested."

"The known result is that unless arbitrageurs are completely risk-neutral or have unlimited capital, a manipulator can always force at least some price movement. If the underlying variable is so unprecedented and unknown—like whether we can achieve the world's second victory against the Northerners in the past century—then it would be very hard for any arbitrageur to want to step in."

"The second problem is private information. We're confident about Kungope because we know them well, we trust them, and we know their capabilities very well. But if we publicly reveal this, we'd be revealing it to the Northerners."

"Yes, both good points. Hopefully we can work on improving the first over time, but... prediction markets are new right now. The second is harder to solve."

"Well, I have a different idea. We don't use the market directly. Instead, we take the top five performing bots on the leaderboard and use verifiable two-party computation to query them. We create a kind of temporary virtual private sandbox, we input private information into the sandbox, they input the bots into the sandbox, and the sandbox only outputs the bots' answers."

Zey saw an opportunity to speak. "Yes, this is just an extension of garbled circuits—you'd probably want verifiable garbled circuits. The overhead is quite annoying—"

"There are optimizations for AI computation. Remember, almost everything in large language models is linear. The non-linear parts are necessary for language intelligence, but they only account for one-thousandth of the total computation."

Zey realized he had been outmatched on this particular specialized topic. It seemed that in his nine months of studying cryptography, he hadn't become smarter than everyone at everything.

"I see..."

Their conversation paused briefly as they heard mechanical noise growing louder from below. A few seconds later, they could see the top of the robot slowly climbing the stairs, performing a lifting motion with each step, followed by a sliding motion, with a tray carrying four cups of tea. When it reached the top of the stairs, it walked toward Gladias and served him tea first.

"Gladias," Everlow asked. "You look smart. I have a different question I'd like to ask you."

"What is it?"

"Do you remember the debate between Ephelion and Silka?"

"Yes."

"Ephelion said that most 'soft' features of society seem to cycle: good breeds the seeds of evil, and evil breeds the seeds of good; disaster breeds heroism, which brings prosperity, complacency, and then back to disaster; technocracy leads to democracy, democracy leads to chaos, chaos breeds strongmen, and back to technocracy. And so on. The only thing that doesn't cycle this way is economic output—growth compounds itself continuously. Therefore, we should stop trying to accelerate the things that cycle and instead focus on increasing economic output. I don't like this argument, and what it implies makes me uneasy, but I still can't quite articulate what's wrong with it. What do you think?"

"I don't think economic output compounds by itself—I think many good things compound with each other. Health makes people more productive. Productivity gives people the resources to continue progressing. Education supports both, and health supports education."

"So in other words, the feature vector Ephelion talked about doesn't just contain one dimension—which is actually what most feature vectors look like."

"You obviously know more about feature vectors than I do!"

"Silver Language is a social media site. Feature vectors are like... on the first page of the original whitepaper."

Gladias laughed.

"But on the other hand," Everlow continued, "the Northerners do care about health. It's not the compassionate, loving, caring aesthetic health that Silka wants—it's hard metal longevity clinics—but it's still health."

"Silka would say that what matters isn't longevity, but living healthily."

"Yes, but the medieval legend of people who drank the elixir of immortality and then were doomed to lie on the ground forever with all their bones broken—that's not the actual principle of any longevity science. By default, longevity is a healthier life. The easiest place to prevent harm is at the moment the harm begins."

"I think you'd say the Northerners also care about education. They barely understand music and poetry, but they teach children science well, and that's part of education anyway, involving the largest feature vector."

"Correct."

Gladias could see Sera frowning with discomfort. His mind raced, trying to come up with other arguments against Ephelion's way of thinking.

"But the Northerners aren't actually maximizing economic output. They want to start a war—war can destroy economies for decades. They try to eliminate anyone in Zego who goes too far in technological progress, and that's not maximizing economic output either—quite the opposite. They're not trying to maximize economic output. They're trying to maximize economic output under their control, and destroy everything else."

At this point, Zey spoke up.

"Ephelion implied a potential model in which there's a vector shooting outward toward infinity, and the faster it approaches infinity, the faster everyone becomes happy. But that's not how I see the world at all."

"The world I see now is a fragile world. It hasn't been this fragile before. In the past, communication was limited, and power transfer was limited. Any empire that unified long enough would eventually collapse. The world was reversible. But today, with our modern robots and modern surveillance, if someone successfully takes over and consolidates control over the entire world, they can lock in their power. Irreversible. Forever."

"If the Northerners win, a certain entropy—the spatial dimension of humanity's possible futures—will be permanently constrained. From then on, the only possible future world will be the Northern world."

"That's not even the worst case. If the Northerners or anyone else makes a mistake with one of their superweapons, and no one else has a way to resist it, they could completely destroy the living world."

"Eventually, the world will become reversible again. We'll be able to travel between stars, and our civilization will become too large to fully control or fully destroy. But until then, we're in a fragile place, and if within the next decade everything is multiplied by zero forever, the Northerners will be the reason it happened."

"I have a simpler answer," Sera added. "All these arguments about the distant future are very hard to predict. If you already know which path you want to take, it's easy to convince yourself that one path is correct and come up with really clever math to justify it. But there's one thing that's easy to predict: if the Northerners conquer Viridia, the war could kill hundreds of thousands or millions of our people, and the Northerners will destroy the beautiful world we know and cherish. For me, that alone is already enough for us to resist. The beauty of our world, our nation, and our friendships is already worth fighting for."

"All good answers," Everlow replied. He took a sip of tea, sat back in his chair, and fell into thought.

3724 Frost 8

Gladias, Sera, Zey, Bai, Vildo, Den, and Mu all