Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

How should we think about these nightmares? Sometimes they are intended to get people to take security vulnerabilities more seriously, under the theory (which we will encounter again in this chapter) that the most effective way to mobilize people into adopting responsible policies is to scare the living daylights out of them. Whether or not that theory is true, no one would argue that we should be complacent about cybercrime or disease outbreaks, which are already afflictions of the modern world (I’ll turn to the nuclear threat in the next section). Specialists in computer security and epidemiology constantly try to stay one step ahead of these threats, and countries should clearly invest in both. Military, financial, energy, and Internet infrastructure should be made more secure and resilient.³⁶ Treaties and safeguards against biological weapons can be strengthened.³⁷ Transnational public health networks that can identify and contain outbreaks before they become pandemics should be expanded. Together with better vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, and rapid diagnostic tests, they will be as useful in combatting human-made pathogens as natural ones.³⁸ Countries will also need to maintain antiterrorist and crime-prevention measures such as surveillance and interception.³⁹

In each of these arms races, the defense will never, of course, be invincible. There may be episodes of cyberterrorism and bioterrorism, and the probability of a catastrophe will never be zero. The question I’ll consider is whether the grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed. Is it inevitable that the black hats will someday outsmart the white hats and bring civilization to its knees? Has technological progress ironically left the world newly fragile?

No one can know with certainty, but when we replace worst-case dread with calmer consideration, the gloom starts to lift. Let’s start with the historical sweep: whether mass destruction by an individual is the natural outcome of the process set in motion by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. According to this narrative, technology allows people to accomplish more and more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do anything—and given human nature, that means destroy everything.

But Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants, argues that this is in fact not the way technology progresses.⁴⁰ Kelly was the co-organizer (with Stewart Brand) of the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, and since that time he has repeatedly been told that any day now technology will outrun humans’ ability to domesticate it. Yet despite the massive expansion of technology in those decades (including the invention of the Internet), that has not happened. Kelly suggests that there is a reason: “The more powerful technologies become, the more socially embedded they become.” Cutting-edge technology requires a network of cooperators who are connected to still wider social networks, many of them committed to keeping people safe from technology and from each other. (As we saw in chapter 12, technologies get safer over time.) This undermines the Hollywood cliché of the solitary evil genius who commands a high-tech lair in which the technology miraculously works by itself. Kelly suggests that because of the social embeddedness of technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time:

The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a team of scientists whose job it was to develop a species-extinguishing bio weapon, or to take down the internet to zero, you probably still couldn’t do it. That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort have gone into preventing this from happening, in the case of the internet, and millions of years of evolutionary effort to prevent species death, in the case of biology. It is extremely hard to do, and the smaller the rogue team, the harder. The larger the team, the more societal influences.⁴¹