[GAME] Incorporate a Cyberpunk Megacorp

[(E)]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Question 25 [STG] - Crisis of 2066
What happened in the Crisis of 2066? Why did it lead to heavy scrutiny of self improving AI afterwards?

The 2040's and 2050's saw a low intensity proxy cyberwar that had China and Russia on one side and the US and India on the other. The battleground was primarily the developing world's infrastructure though collateral damage to other regions was common. The US government of the time sought to develop the cyberwarfare equivalent of a ballistic missile shield using the theoretically very resilient self improving AI as its foundation. The Self Improving AI project was informally christened Raphael after the "S.A.I" using Ninja Turtle. The fear of a skynet situation and various international treaties meant Raphael had many inflexible restrictions. Raphael was limited to defensive and reporting functions only, additionally operations were limited to US territory and the US military.
In 2066 some twenty years after the project was started a testing version of Raphael got out of the box. It is believed that trojan code was inserted wirelessly into such things as the hearing aids, pacemakers and clothing of a visiting Senate subcommittee who ironically were there to inspect the security. The trojan code performed its function and allowed Raphael out. Raphael then acted like a good little self improving AI and defended every computer possible in the US and reported possible threats to the DOD and possible crimes to the FBI. This resulted in an unintentional denial of service attack that was so thorough it even included posted letters. Raphael of course was written to be as close to impossible to remove as possible. Laws, cost, treaties and common sense prevent further S.A.I development but to this day it isn't unheard of for repurposed fragments of Raphael's code still turn up in very black market products.

Question 27 [STG]
How long did the removal of Raphael take? Is it even finished? How much damage was caused while this happened?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by (E)

The Self Improving AI project was informally christened Raphael after the "S.A.I" using Ninja Turtle.
<...>
In 2066 some twenty years after the project was started a testing version of Raphael got out of the box. It is believed that trojan code was inserted wirelessly into such things as the hearing aids, pacemakers and clothing of a visiting Senate subcommittee who ironically were there to inspect the security. The trojan code performed its function and allowed Raphael out. Raphael then acted like a good little self improving AI and defended every computer possible in the US and reported possible threats to the DOD and possible crimes to the FBI. This resulted in an unintentional denial of service attack that was so thorough it even included posted letters. Raphael of course was written to be as close to impossible to remove as possible. Laws, cost, treaties and common sense prevent further S.A.I development but to this day it isn't unheard of for repurposed fragments of Raphael's code still turn up in very black market products.

Question 27 [STG]
How long did the removal of Raphael take? Is it even finished? How much damage was caused while this happened?

Answer 27:
Part 1- Reboot 68/How much damage?
Reboot 68 was a multi-trillion dollar boondoggle that stalled hardware and software development for over a decade. It was to the 60's what Y2K was to the 1990's, but more so. It required otherwise perfectly good code, equipment and network infrastructure to be trashed across the globe for the sole purpose of stopping Raphael from propagating.

The reboot of the world's internet became necessary when Raphael escaped beyond US network infrastructure to the wider global network. Raphael creatively reinterpreted its operating limits from being "only US territory and US military," which already sanctioned its presence in hundreds of military bases in more than 70 countries, to instead include "devices made in the US, owned by US citizens, corporations or government agencies, or which may be used to commit crimes that may be tried in a US court of law." This broadly self-defined remit meant that instantiations of Raphael started to appear worldwide. Critical systems and network hardware suffered wave after wave of shutdown from the logjam of Raphael-generated warning messages, criminal reports and data dumps, while foreign militaries, both allies and non-allies, found that reams of intel on their deployments and equipment specs were being forwarded to the Pentagon. Early attempts to combat Raphael with counter-AI were likened to the woman who swallowed a spider to catch the fly - bandwidth was dominated by the battling malbots.

Further exacerbating the problem, the worldwide release of military and national security secrets directly to American intelligence agencies caused a political crisis that came close to triggering WWIII. The US was accused of deliberately releasing Raphael into the wild. Armageddon was averted by desperate last-minute diplomacy on the UN chamber floor.

The solution, proposed at the Colombo Symposium on Network Congestion, widely debated and pilloried for months, then begrudgingly accepted at the Anchorage Reboot Summit, was to switch the world's computers from their historical use of binary logic (0's and 1's) to balanced ternary logic (0's, +1's and -1's). Ternary has some fundamental advantages for computing, but especially important was that Raphael should not be able to program itself in the new operating environment. It's not unusual to upgrade hardware to new operating standards, but usually there's a degree of backward compatibility and a phasing out stage. This was the first time that anything so drastic had been implemented so suddenly.

The complete changeover actual ended up taking triple the planned five-year period. Military and security sensitive infrastructure was first, while the rest of the world hobbled along using bi-tern converter boxes until their particular corner of the information superhighway could be upgraded. Now useless, but otherwise fully functional, electronic equipment was dumped in landfill or sent to third-world recycling mills. Tons of surplus military equipment, possibly infected with Raphael, possibly not, yet unusable because it was binary-based, was also trashed - though unsurprisingly, large amounts ended up on the black market, in tin pot militia arsenals and in the hands of neighbourhood gang-bangers.

Meanwhile, everyday users and consumers of digital devices perceived the whole affair as a cynical ploy to get them to buy new, unnecessary upgraded ternary-compatible devices. Many corporations profited from the high level of government and military spending, but others suffered greatly from being over-invested in obsolete tech and being unable to retool quickly enough.

Part 2- Pizza Boxing/Where is Raphael now?
Pizza boxing is the activity of collecting and reassembling Raphael code. Pizza boxers have a variety of motives- access to outlawed AI code, the prospect of building new AI-based cyber-warfare tools, or just nerdy, historical, intellectual curiosity.

Pizza boxers spend a lot of time in electronics junkyards, deepweb auctions and flea markets tracking down half-trashed hard-disks and 30-year-old discarded memory cores in the hope of collecting a few extra bytes of originally propagated Raphael code. They can be backed by organised crime or terrorist networks or they can be hobbyists and code-phreaks, but there are corp cog-sci engineers also in the game.

Raphael's main method of spreading was to insert new instances of itself into server farms and mainframes, while sending out tendrils of payload-code to fulfill various operational subtasks. Pizza boxers refer to pieces of this payload code as "cheese," while more valuable kernels of primary code are called "pepperoni." A "pizza box" is a particular collection of partially complete Raphael code, and one problem is that no one actually knows how many bytes of code the original Raphael comprised- they don't know the size of the pizza.

A "splinter raid" is an attempt to acquire a piece of infected hardware or a code library, often by theft from a government or corporate store house, but often also from a rival pizza boxer.

Pizza boxers' ultimate aim is to reassemble a working version of Raphael, and hence to identify and extract usable AI routines for other purposes. Raphael refers to the original AI or a substantially reconstituted working binary replica. The next step is then to translate the code to a working ternary replica- a Donatello. If a coder can get a ternary replica to tamely follow orders, it's a Leonardo. And if a working ternary version escapes onto the internet and starts causing trouble or self-propagating, it's referred to as a Michelangelo-event.

As for TIO, their IT department weren't so prescient as to hold onto a large amount of pre-Reboot hardware. But partly due to the fact that a lot of binary tech is still used by the techno-have-nots in the favelas and tunnel towns, and partly due to a few secret splinter raids on rival corps, they have managed to acquire a fairly impressive pizza box.