Insanely Destructive Devices

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 04:19:47 -0700
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () dandin com>

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 () pobox com.


Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>

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