Lessig on IDDs

This month's Wired carries a great Larry Lessig column on IDDs -- "Insanely Destructive Devices". What he describes is the possibility of dangerous pathogens (be they biological or nantechnological) that can replicate themselves. The result, a totally fuxxored planet and very little of a thread of civilization left... if any.

Larry goes on to talk about a class he taught on the various doomsday scenarios and what kind of policies would be appropriate to avoid these outcomes. The initial reaction of his students was "positively soviet" with recommendations of locking down scientific thought. Then he describes "one student" who recommended looking at it in a very different manner: we need to eliminate the incentives to create such malevolent pathogens. That is, we need to delete the urge to kill large amounts of people:

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 hush, 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 wil 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 tat soon.

I've been trying to articulate this for a while now. We don't need wars... we need to initiate the very much harder task of figuring out what part of our culture that we export is destroying us. We need to undercut the demand for terror.

However, as I said, I've been thinking about this for a while. One thing about all this has been bugging me from the beginning. The war on drugs. That is, the war on drugs is a case-study in how war doesn't solve a (perceived) ill. However, what about reducing the demand for drugs? We've tried that (anti-drug campaigns) and it has worked reasonably well. However, terror is different. It seems that most of the muslim terrorists are upset that our liberal values will infect their culture... how do we control this? Do we stop trying to preach civil liberties and equal rights (race, gender, sex pref., etc.) to other countries? What does this kind of foreign policy look like? It looks very different than what we've got now...

Posted by joebeone at Marzo 31, 2004 09:14 AM | TrackBack