The Lawfare blog recently celebrated the publication of their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones——Confronting A New Age of Threat. I haven’t read it; what caught my eye was almost an afterthought in the post:
But as President Barack Obama recently lamented about cybersecurity, “one of the great paradoxes of our time” is that “the very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm.”
This strikes me as an intellectual error in that attempting to assign moral values to technologies, to mere artifacts (or even intellectual constructs, such as mathematics), is to mistake what makes up morality: our actions in the context of our relationships. It’s quite easy to think of moral and immoral actions that might be taken with drones, viral research, computers, telephones, cars, dynamite, arrows, armor, spears … see, these are all easy. Some have more potential, some less; I’ll leave it to the foolhardy to decide if the potentials for evil and good are in balance for each artifact.
It’s not a paradox, it’s been with us from the start. I recall, many years ago, arguing with an older gentleman as to whether technological progress was good or bad. For all that he held a degree in physics and worked for a defense contractor, he was fairly dubious about the worth of progress; he seemed to prefer his pre-Vatican II milieu. I was puzzled then, but contemplating the great good – and great evil – that can be done with many of today’s advances does leave me a little more connected with my friend of decades ago.
I also wonder how society will handle this: society can only bear a certain level of instability before people begin to panic, to constrain choices and whatever is causing the instability. While the United States hardly ever puts legal restrictions on such research (usually it has to do with munitions advances, in which the inventor gets a patent and $1, and the government takes the exclusive license), socially sometimes limits are sought, such as the Precautionary Principle currently being pushed or implemented by certain organizations. The problem with limits is that not everyone obeys limits, and there’s rarely a way to enforce it; see the attempts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, for example. If someone knows something can be accomplished, they’ll take a shot at it.
