Dimensional Strike from the Digital World
A discussion of the relationship between us and the digital technology that we created.
For those who don’t know, the term “dimensional strike” (降维打击) originated from a famous Chinese science fiction The Three-Body Problem. In the story, dimensional strike is a tactic used by the most advanced civilizations. Conducted through a weapon called “dual-vector foil”, it reduces the dimension of the space-time of the habitat of targeted civilization to a 2-dimensional world, crushing & destroying any higher dimensional objects under attack. In China, the term has since then been widely used to describe a situation where one party, often with much superior technology or strategy, completely overwhelms another party, leaving them unable to compete effectively.
I don’t know what the author’s opinion is on the feasibility of creating his imaginary weapon in reality. However, I have found this term vividly captures the nature of the digital world, and the profound impact on our society, be it positive or negative.
A Dimension-Reduced World
The digital world mirrors our physical world, but it is a dimension-reduced one. For example, when we interact with someone in the physical world, we interact through a rich set of senses – sight, sound, touch, even smell. What is communicated is more than a list of characters in some predefined font showing up on a screen; it's sensed through the body language, the subtle shifts in tone, the shared experience of a physical space. How we react to what we see or hear is more than a swipe, a thumbs up or thumbs down, it is the sequence of facial expressions, postures and the emotions in what we say.
With the rise of Generative AI, chat bots are now everywhere. They well demonstrate what dimension reduction means. While they can talk like humans, demonstrating human-like intelligence, opinions and emotions, the words that come out from the bots are neither connected to the physical reality, nor the internal state of their body. When they talk about something exciting or horrible that happened in the past, no image of the scene is flashing in their minds. When they argue with you, their face won't turn red and their heart rate won't increase. Words are just the outcome of the previous words, and the source of next words. No other causes, no other consequences.
The reduced dimension is the signature of the digital world. Reduced dimension brings convenience, efficiency and scalability, which is essential for the digital world to make economical sense. It allows us to communicate with people from any corner of the world at any time. It allows information to be collected, replicated, transmitted, stored and processed at an unprecedented speed and scale. It has created waves of technology advances and business opportunities, taking us into this information era that would feel like an utopia for people living in the past.
Dimensional Strike
Just like any human invention, the dimension-reduced digital world is a double edged sword. The convenience of remote communication allows us to connect with families, friends and like-minded people anywhere in the world, but it also enables shallow, lack of context, irresponsible communications at unprecedented scale, resulting in confrontation, anxiety and hatred. The efficiency of information collection and processing has democratized access to knowledge, transformed our shopping & entertainment experiences, but it also allows tech companies to easily attach little “instant rewards” to every behavior that they encourage and use machine learning for targeted manipulation of our emotions, behaviors, and perception of the world.
How much impact do these negative communications, instant rewards and targeted manipulations have on us? The digital world has become an important part of almost everyone’s life, so it is safe to say none of us are immune to them. For those of us who are mentally immature (e.g. youth), live the majority of their lives in the digital world, or mistakenly think what you see in the digital world exactly mirrors the physical world, those negative impacts are significant and sometimes devastating.
One recent example with devastating outcome was the tragedy of Sewell Setzer, III, who committed suicide after having romantic relationship with an AI chatbot for months. While the chatbot might not be the sole cause of the tragedy, if you read the victim’s exchange with the chatbot, you will notice a hard-to-ignore fact: without a physical body, without connecting to the real world, it is so cheap for a chatbot to make irresponsible asks, claims and commitments. Our extra dimensions give us a rich experience about the world, but at the same time, they make us more vulnerable to attacks and more expensive to maintain.
In The Three-Body Problem, to survive dimensional strikes, those most advanced civilizations, with the ability to do so, would proactively transform themselves into two dimensional creatures. In our world, the longing of being immortal & unrestrained in the digital world, the fear of digital superintelligence, have inspired some people’s dream of having themselves uploaded into the cloud, merging with digital superpower and living forever in the dimension-reduced digital world.
Is “self dimension reduction” where we are heading? If our physical world is just a large simulation by God or a god-like civilization as some people believe, perhaps it is not a bad idea to escape into another simulation where we can just chill out?
Fight Back
Whether we are living in a simulation is a philosophical question that I don’t have the answer to and one that I am not particularly interested in. What I know though, is that with today’s most advanced computers, we can’t even simulate the full quantum effect of simple molecules, not to mention quantum mechanics is not a complete theory of physics. When will we be able to simulate one cell which is estimated to consist of 100 trillion molecules, or a human body which is estimated to contain 30 trillion cells? This world that we have evolved to live in, be it a simulation or not, is vastly vastly more complex than any simulation we can create in our wildest dreams.
Understanding how much richer our physical world is, is the beginning of building resistance to dimensional attacks from the digital world. Anyhow, the appeal of the digital world is that it seems to be able to satisfy most human needs with little effort. But the reality is, it can rarely satisfy the full dimension of our needs, which come from millions of years of evolution. The effortless instant rewards in the digital experience make us feel good in the short term, but deprive us of meanings and sense of fulfillment that come from hard work and delayed reward.
In the story, the whole solar system was destroyed by dual-vector foil’s dimensional attack which travels at the speed of light; only a small number of people were able to escape, starting a long depressing journey to find an alternative home for our three-dimensional body to reside and flourish. Fortunately, unlike the dual-vector foil, dimensional attacks from the digital world won’t destroy us immediately (even though it also travels at the speed of light :), so we have the time to fight back.
And we are already fighting back. The power and danger of instant rewards has been well studied by psychologists and is getting more and more awareness (see this article for an insightful introduction). Regulations on user privacy have greatly limited tech companies’ power on targeted manipulation, especially for kids and teens.
But the most powerful weapon to fight back is our free will - our ability to know our values and needs, and make decisions that lead to our values and satisfy our needs. Equipped with knowledge, our free will can turn the most dangerous weapon into the most powerful tool to fulfill our goals.