Super-scratch. We'd have to trash every processor manufacturing plant on the planet; Every single one almost certainly uses computer-controlled machinery working from computer-stored plans.
This would be a fun novel to read. An alien intelligence that can only act at a distance infects our computer systems, and we have to recover. A sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, except without the magic "engines don't work, but matches do" flavor. I hope Neal Stephenson is bored and looking for something to write.
> post-apocalyptic scenario, except without the magic "engines don't work, but matches do" flavor
I don't know if you're referring to "Revolutions" TV series here, but I've seen exactly those accusations of "magic" leveled against the show in the past, on HN. I decided to watch it anyway, and...
(spoiler alert)
...by the half of the first season it's becoming slowly revealed that there's no magic that happens to disable only electronics and combustion engines - it's omnipresent advanced nanotech explicitly designed to do just that.
"Three-body problem" has an interesting variant on this: an alien intelligence which can sabotage physics experiments, thereby preventing humanity from exceeding a particular level of development.
I was definitely thinking of that when typing that out, although I think that the particular way the antagonists did this in Three Body Problem was like using a jet fighter to shield your infantry from the rain.
Indeed they could have done much more "fun" stuff with the tool they used. It seems that they lacked the mentality of human trolls.
(BTW. I just binge-read the entire trilogy within the past two weeks, thanks to HN recommendations of the first book. And I have to say, it's great sci-fi, totally worth the time it takes to read it.)
I read the first one, and it was incredibly interesting, but mostly from the cultural and historical perspectives. The "magic" bit I referenced seemed ... overpowered and yet underused. It's incredibly difficult to imagine an intelligence that can come up with that, but not extrapolate any further.
Potential spoiler alert: Using that particular plot device to fool scientists into believing the laws of physics weren't constant struck me as ludicrous. The part where physicists start committing suicide instead of seeing this as the start of a revolution in their understanding of the universe was almost plausible by comparison.
I need to read the second two, but I heard that the translations aren't as good :/
My current "head canon" theory explaining the underutilization of sophons is like this: at first, they weren't meant to be discovered, so they were used primarily for covert communications and locking down particle physics research. Later, they may have decided not to abuse them to wreck havoc with advanced technology in order not to incentivize humans to invest too heavily into sophon-proofing.
I don't know Chinese so I can't evaluate the accuracy of the translations of the other two books, but taken at face value, IMO they're pretty good pieces of writing. I didn't notice any obvious problems, and on the other hand I very much appreciated frequent inclusion of translator's notes that explained things like untranslatable humour, and provided the cultural background for things that may be obscure to Western readers.
Taking the plot device entirely literally misses the point of the book somewhat; it's so highly metaphorical and so much of it is told through the "VR" dream sequence exposition.
It's really a book about the question: how do we know what we know? Specifically, how do we find truth when powerful forces have devoted themselves to obfuscating it for us? In other words, the "cultural revolution" in China. And by extension, the present day wǔmáo dǎng era.
I haven't read the sequels, but the Sophon bit seemed pretty explicitly literal. How can I not read that part literally? Either the Sophons have the power ascribed, or the plot is nonsense.
Obviously it is literal, it has to be - it's relevant to the object-level plot both in the first book and in the latter two. Whether or not it has layers of additional "meta" meaning associated with it, that's another topic.
Though I'm not sure about the indirect references to various political events that people seek in the story - the author himself wrote explicitly in the afterword for American readers that he is not writing sci-fi to explore contemporary issues in different settings.
> using a jet fighter to shield your infantry from the rain
Great imagery, and similar to the thoughts I had when reading that series. They can imprint arbitrary images on human retinas, you'd think they could at least disable computers if not suborn our networks completely. I suppose that their... mental handicap could prevent them from coming up with the idea of our computers "lie" to us, but that seems a little flimsy.
I must be forgetting something, or something is in the sequels - what mental handicap? And I thought the entire point of the Sophons was to have the computers lie to us.
(Versus, say, blocking out all light from the sun and freezing us to death. Or reflecting more and burning us alive. Or slicing through every human's spinal cord. Or detonating nuclear devices. Or whatever.)
