Tech's Dark Potential

The headline says:

Tech's dark potential troubles terror expert

And the article, in the San Jose Mercury News, reports:

Five years from now, a wave of cyber attacks cripples the Internet infrastructure and global finance. One terrorist assault targets a supercomputer hub at Moffett Field near Mountain View.

At the same time, accelerated advances in computer science and biotechnology raise the prospect of genetic enhancement that could lead to 'super kids', and computer hookups to the brain that could alter the nature of humanity.

In Richard Clarke's new thriller Breakpoint, an unusual blend of science fiction, politics and tech talk, the world is a more dangerous place. China is a prime suspect in the attacks, along with Russian mobsters, a shadowy group of hackers and some right-wing anti-technology militants.

But Clarke, who made headlines as terrorism czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations, has set out to write something much more than a fast-paced airport read.

With a plot sure to create a buzz in the tech community, he wants to generate a debate from Silicon Valley to Washington on difficult ethical and practical questions he thinks will demand attention in the next 10 years. . .

Clarke concedes it's difficult to predict when emerging technologies in genetic engineering, for example, could be widely available.

And even if U.S. regulations are adopted, rapid research will happen outside the country, he adds, just as restrictions on embryonic stem cell research prompted research elsewhere.

"We need to be aware of what's coming, because sometimes new technologies burst on the scene before we decide if we want them and what the consequences are," Clarke said during an interview. . .

James Hughes, a bioethicist and sociologist, said, "The scenarios Clarke describes are quite plausible," though genetic enhancements will require years of clinical trials with animals and face serious liability problems.

The U.S. military has conducted research in brain-computer linkages, exoskeleton body suits to enhance strength and endurance and pharmaceuticals to improve stamina. Clarke includes a five-page author's note that describes the status of technologies he refers to in the book.

Some of these developments "scare the hell out of some people," said Hughes, director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He favors the use of new technologies to improve human capability, with some controls. . .

Read the rest.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Phillip Huggan]

5 years as an estimate for serious in-vitro genetic selection *inventions* is complete crap.
University students and physicians and surgeons would have to be training with the new tools and techniques (all of which don't exist but are surely engineerable *if* desired) today, for the 5 year timeline to hold.

It is easy to dismiss the very real cyber terror attack threat against Traffic systems, sewer systems, water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil-drilling infrastructures, environmental/military/navigation/weather satellite systems sabotage, widespread trade secrets theft and nation security intel being hacked; these real economic and geopolitical threats are losing meme resources to the threat of mutant children in 5 years?!

The threat of mutant children makes my Extinction Essay list, but in the second lowest tier (above proven infinitesimal threats like naturally caused gamma ray bursters). The threat of AI (all software not just the Terminator type) failure makes my 2nd highest tier of extinction threats in terms of likelyhood. The more just-in-time our social systems get, the more likely our multiple reduncies to any essential infrastructure (2007 electircal grids are weakest but will organically grow more redundant soon) will simultaneously be terrorized.

Even a very powerful mutant person like Wolverine only has the war-making ability of a regional militia (like the Sri Lankan separistist terrorists) or a city's police force (say, Boston PD). Flesh is weak. A small flame thrower will kill Wolverine, when human parents are given the opportunity to make him in, say, 50 years or so (even after diamond MNT I think)

[Phillip Huggan]

Rereading my post it sounds vitrolic. It's not meant to be. I realize he is one of the good guys, but it would make more sense to talk to some medical researchers before making these very public predictions, before making them as if he has been in contact with medical researchers.

I agree cyber attacks are likely. I wouldn't clssify them as an essential system just yet (pimple-faced hackers don't have the finance expertise to bring down our derivatives-based world economies; certainly bond trading may be halted for days in some major markets). Maybe in 10-15 years, the point of inflection may come where the developed world's electrical grids become safer than the (now much more vital) world's 2022 Internet III.

[Greg]

I found the following quote at the end of the article to be very revealing:

``I had a hacker I know read parts of the draft and make some suggestions, but it came back incomprehensible,'' Clarke said. ``I could have written this for a few thousand people, but I'm hoping for more than that.''

Now the most charitable interpretation (for Clarke) of this would be that, having asked for suggestions, the hacker in question came back with stuff like a 5 page disquisition on the minutiae of how to do a buffer overrun exploit. Even this interpretation gives me pause to wonder. Neal Stephenson managed to do a very good job with a scene in his book "Cryptonomicon" where one of the protagonists logs remotely logs into his computer system right before his computer is about to be seized in a police raid and attempts to cover his tracks. The job of a good author is to render what might at first seem incomprehensible in such a fashion that ordinary reader can follow what is going on without undue effort. A far less charitable possibility is that having read the draft, the hacker came up with a list of "things which couldn't happen this way", explaining why this was the case (and perhaps even offering alternatives). Clarke then decided that fixing these things would be too much trouble and decided to leave things as they were (hence the dismissive comment about a few thousand people). If true, this would be yet another example of one of the classic mistakes made by mainstream authors who try to write a Science Fiction story: underestimating the importance of verisimilitude and how easy it is to lose the feel of verisimilitude. The problem with such works is that the interesting questions that they may raise are often inextricably linked with the utterly implausible way that they treat the topic as a whole. Given the fact that Phillip is dead on with his analysis here:

>>5 years as an estimate for serious in-vitro genetic selection *inventions* is complete crap.
University students and physicians and surgeons would have to be training with the new tools and techniques (all of which don't exist but are surely engineerable *if* desired) today, for the 5 year timeline to hold.<<

I rather suspect that the situation is closer to the second of the interpretations that I described than the first.