Angry Monolith

In honor of Angry Monolith’s home base being recently overrun by Trojans and rootkits, this week’s Death by Tech will cover a somewhat more esoteric, but extremely deadly, future death scenario: A Basilisk attack.

Viewing this image won't kill you. This time.

What is it?

A ‘Basilisk’ or ‘Medusa’ attack is an idea generally attributed to science fiction author David Langford (Check out comp.basilisk for more information). The general idea is that an image is generated that will ‘crash’ a human mind in the same way that a virus can crash a computer. Here’s a technobabble explanation for people smarter than me:

“…the human mind as a formal, deterministic computational system — a system that, as predicted by a variant of Gödel’s Theorem in mathematics, can be crashed by thoughts which the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The Logical Imaging Technique presents such a thought in purely visual form as a basilisk image which our optic nerves can’t help but accept. The result is disastrous, like a software stealth-virus smuggled into the brain.” (wiki)

Though Langford is responsible for the most sophisticated iteration of this idea, it is not unique to his writing. William Gibson, in Neuromancer envisioned an advanced firewall called Black ICE, which would attack the minds of invading hackers, killing them if they weren’t properly prepared. Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash revolves around the use of a similar mind-hacking device. This kind of attack also receives brief mention in Charles Stross’ Accelerando.

Likelihood?

Right now, pretty small. There’s no very good reason to pour resources or brainpower into developing such a weapon as long as we’re still wearing our fleshbodies and can be killed by simple things like blunt trauma and time. But as we draw nearer to such things as mind uploads and direct neural uplinks, the threat will likely grow. When humans have transcended their physical forms, it will become necessary to create new weapons of war if we want to keep killing each other (as is our general modus operandi). A basilisk is designed to attack, destroy or erase the very mental hardware of a human being - an attack on your very self.

Pain Factor?

Unclear, but it will probably not be small. The images associated with Basilisk attacks are supposed to trigger some inconsistency in the very clockworks of your brain  - you probably won’t know why,  but I imagine it will hurt quite a bit. And then, of course, you’ll die.