[IP] Insanely Destructive Devices
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 04:19:47 -0700
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxx>
Insanely Destructive Devices
Trying to defend against self-replicating weapons of mass destruction.
By Lawrence Lessig
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/view.html?pg=5>
Smallpox has killed a billion humans. That's more deaths than in all modern
wars combined. Yet despite its virulence, smallpox typically kills only 30
percent of the population it infects. Naturally evolving pathogens keep
enough victims around to kill again.
Engineered pathogens can be different - as recent work in Australia has
terrifyingly demonstrated. By inserting a mail-order gene into mousepox,
scientists increased the death rate in mice to 100 percent. Even after
vaccination, the rate was 60 percent.
We don't know whether the mail-order gene would have the same effect with
smallpox. But the very idea is an example of the fear that led Bill Joy to
write his frightening piece "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," published
four years ago this month in Wired.
Joy worried that key technologies of the future - in particular, genetic
engineering, nanotech, and robotics (or GNR) because they are
self-replicating and increasingly easier to craft - would be radically more
dangerous than technologies of the past. It is impossibly hard to build an
atomic bomb; when you build one, you've built just one. But the equivalent
evil implanted in a malevolent virus will become easier to build, and if
built, could become self-replicating. This is P2P (peer-to-peer) meets WMD
(weapons of mass destruction), producing IDDs (insanely destructive devices).
Many criticized Joy's claims. Cassandras, they said, have always been
wrong. Social and political forces will balance technology's dangers. So
four years later, were the critics right? Have we learned anything about
IDDs? How have we reacted? And have our reactions made us safer?
Like many professors, I think about hard questions by teaching a class.
So I asked a local genius, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and polymath
Steve Jurvetson, to help frame a course around the challenges raised by
Joy. He opened the class with the smallpox example and asked how a society
should protect itself from innovations that lead to pox viruses with
100-percent kill rates. What strategies does it adopt when everyone, even
vaccinated health care workers, are vulnerable?
The first reaction of some in the class was positively Soviet. Science
must be controlled. Publications must be reviewed before being printed.
Communications generally may have to be surveilled - how else can we track
down the enemy? And, of course, we must build a Star Wars-like shield to
protect us, and issue to every American one of those space suits that CDC
workers wear. ("Dear American: You may not have health insurance, but in
case of a biological attack, please use the enclosed space suit.")
But it didn't take long to see the futility of these responses. GNR science
doesn't require huge labs. You might not be able to conceal the work in
Manhattan, but you could easily hide it in the vast wilds of, say, Montana.
Moreover, a great deal of important work would be lost if the government
filtered everything - as would the essence of a free society. However
comforting the Star Wars-like Virus Defense Initiative might be, engineered
diseases would spread long before anyone could don a space suit.
Then one student suggested a very different approach. If we can't defend
against an attack, perhaps the rational response is to reduce the
incentives to attack. Rather than designing space suits, maybe we should
focus on ways to eliminate the reasons to annihilate us. Rather than
stirring up a hornet's nest and then hiding behind a bush, maybe the
solution is to avoid the causes of rage. Crazies, of course, can't be
reasoned with. But we can reduce the incentives to become a crazy. We could
reduce the reasonableness - from a certain perspective - for finding ways
to destroy us.
The point produced a depressing recognition. There's a logic to P2P threats
that we as a society don't yet get. Like the record companies against the
Internet, our first response is war. But like the record companies, that
response will be either futile or self-destructive. If you can't control
the supply of IDDs, then the right response is to reduce the demand for
IDDs. Yet as everyone in the class understood, in the four years since Joy
wrote his Wired piece, we've done precisely the opposite. Our present
course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of
angry souls seeking revenge on us.
We've not yet fully understood Joy. In the future there most certainly will
be IDDs. Abolishing freedom, issuing space suits, and launching wars only
increases the danger that they will be used. We had better learn that soon.
Email Lawrence Lessig at lessig@xxxxxxxxxx
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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