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Personalised weapons of mass destruction: governments and strategic emerging technologies

Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler sketches in an article in The Atlantic a not-too-far future when the combination of cheap bioengineering, synthetic biology and crowdsourcing of problem solving allows not just personalised medicine, but also personalised biowarfare. They dramatize it by showing how this could be used to attack the US president, but that is mostly for effect: this kind of technology could in principle be targeted at anyone or any group as long as there existed someone who had a reason to use it and the resources to pay for it. The Secret Service looks like it is aware of the problem and does its best to swipe away traces of the President, but it is hard to imagine this to be perfect, doable for old DNA left behind years ago, or applied by all potential targets. In fact, it looks like the US government is keen on collecting not just biometric data, but DNA from foreign potentates. They might be friends right now, but who knows in ten years…

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Technology is outrunning science

It’s a common trope that our technology is outrunning our wisdom: we have great technological power, so the argument goes, but not the wisdom to use it. Forget wisdom: technology is outrunning science! We have great technological power, but not the science to know what it does. In a recent bizarre  trial in Italy, scientists… Read More »Technology is outrunning science

Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology

It is hardly a keen insight to note that there are a lot of problems in the world today, and that there are also lots of suggested solutions. Often these can be classified under three different labels:

  • “Good guy” solutions which rely on changing individual people’s attitudes and behaviours.
  • Institutional solutions which rely on designing good institutions to address the problem.
  • Technological solutions which count on technology to resolve the problem.

In this view, it is tremendously good news that scientists are getting closer to producing artificial organs. If this goal is achieved, it will be a technological solution to the problem of transplant organ shortages – and technological solutions tend to be better than institutional solutions, which are generally much better than “good guy” solutions. The “good guy” solution to organ donation was to count on people to volunteer to donate when they died. Better institutions (such as an opt-out system where you have to make a special effort not to be a donor, rather than a special effort to be a donor) have resulted in much improved donation rates. But cheap artificial organs would really be the ultimate solution.

Of course I don’t denigrate the use of getting people on your side, nor the motivations of those who sincerely want to change things. But changes to people’s attitudes only tend to stick around as long term solutions if this is translated into actual institutional or technological changes.

Take slavery, for instance. Read More »Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology

Water, food or energy: we won’t lack them

The world is full of problems. Pollution is a problem. The destruction of the coral reefs, the eradication of the rain forests, the mass extinction of animal species are problems, and tragedies. Loss of biodiversity is a problem. Global warming is a problem. Poverty and the unequal distribution of resources are major problems.

But lack of basic resources isn’t a problem. We’ll have enough food, water and energy for the whole human race for the forseable future, at reasonable costs. Take a worse-case scenario for all three areas, and let’s look at the figures.

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