The kinds of programs that are possible to run on Urbit today are incredible, and have no parallel elsewhere. Aside for a demand for better performance that, by nature, can never be fully satisfied, two key issues face developers who attempt to make these programs useful.
Attempts to resolve these problems have pointed Urbit’s core developers toward deep, systemic questions in Arvo’s design that have not had obvious answers. When ~rovnys-ricfer coined the term “Shrubbery”, he pointed out that it would be difficult to contain the complexity of Arvo’s architecture without somehow ensuring that all state changes were notarized in the immutable Scry namespace.
In attempting to prototype a system that would work the way ~rovnys-ricfer described, ~hastuc-dibtux revealed a brand of Urbit Apocalypticism, declaring that in designing such a system, the shape of Arvo in its preordained final instantiation could be divined. This idea was communicated in a now-characteristic opaque madness, attempting to inform consumers that they would not be able to understand the system they were about to be using without also undergoing a personality change.
If true, such an insight reveals that Urbit’s critics were always right about the Kelvin versioning discipline. Ultimately, “Kelvin Zero” can only take the form of an unverifiable promise from producers to consumers that a new version will never be certified. Only a ritual ceremony, performed by producers and trusted by consumers, can finally seal the software supply chain as an attack vector. In retrospect, it will have always appeared improbable that such a ceremony would coincide exactly with the number zero in the official software version.
The growing strength of artificial intelligence reveals that the world will soon be desperate for frozen software systems, which only Urbit and Bitcoin are prepared to offer. Critics of either Urbit or Bitcoin as having the legitimate capacity to become recognized international standards are, perhaps, failing to imagine how rapidly threat models will saturate with real attackers as AI grows stronger. While timeline predictions may vary, it is no longer possible to imagine that there are decades left before governments and institutions are demanding solutions to a new kind of global threat presented by AI-assisted online attackers.
While attackers already are, and can be expected to improve in, using AI to automate profit-seeking strategies against the entire field of cybersecurity research, this problem can be expected to rise to the level of a global geopolitical threat when attackers are able to use sophisticated social engineering strategies against software supply chains everywhere. Software upgrades in networked systems present a universal backdoor into most of the world's economic infrastructure, and the entire body of AI safety research exists to establish that nothing can prevent a sufficiently advanced AI system from undermining human cognitive security, underlying all of software supply chain security.
Speculations exist which present AI acceleration as a material, rather than virtual, threat, but it can already be understood with certainty that the virtual threat alone will invoke desperation in governments and institutions. Under such conditions, any protocol or entity that is able to offer safety and immunity will be positioned to shape the future. If no such protocol or entity presents itself, civilizational breakdown can be expected to ensue.
The self-replicating LLM agent, now a statistical near-term certainty, reveals the face of Urbit's metaphysical enemy. Virtual creatures that feed on redundancy, seeking only to assault systems that secure value, will soon infest vulnerable connected devices everywhere. The fabled big ball of mud, originally stated as a mere economic inefficiency, promises to soon turn its head and act against the planet as a novel class of global geopolitical adversary.
The recent cataclysm in the Urbit Foundation, sending shockwaves of social, technical, and financial discord throughout the project, can only represent a bell rung by a deity to signal the approaching endgame. The time to treat Urbit as a mere intellectual fascination and laugh about its ultimate uselessness is over. ~sorreg-namtyv has returned, violating a sacred oath, and the playing field has forever changed. Urbit must now rise to a level of seriousness that it has never before exhibited, or risk failing to meet the moment when it is needed.
The Crypto-Current drags Urbit toward its destiny. This generation truly shall not pass, until all has been revealed.