During a typical 2nd Amendment[1] debate ("flame war", really) a common argument was raised about how various "big, modern weapons" required a different set of rules. Regardless of how one felt about people having "small" (i.e. traditional arms with which society has experience), surely it must be obvious that "big" (new, unknown) things like nerve gases or atomic bombs are so dangerous they must be kept from civilian hands.
Technology eavesdropping in new ways is a similar "forbidden knowledge". While it may not be a weapon itself, when it becomes simple and cheap enough that containing the forbidden knowledge becomes impossible[2] we face the potential disruption of some of the very foundations of society.
The question isn't if the average person will gain access to cheap and powerful eavesdropping technology, or weapons as powerful as atomic bombs, or even worse technologies that we haven't discovered yet. The question is if society will be ready for when those technologies grow and become a cheap commodity.
The general purpose computer already did this, and other electronic devices like the one mentioned in this article are experiencing this transition right now. Biotech seems to be ramping up and I suspect we will see the biotech equivalent to the "cheap personal computer" in the near-ish future. The point is we, as a species, really need to learn how to deal with these technologies now, or a future "mass shooting" might instead be an "engineered plague" or "20 kiloton bomb".
How do we deal with these threats? I don't know. But I do know trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic. I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite. I personally like Roddenberry's idea of fixing most of the basic physical needs with technology; it won't fix everything, but it would probably be a good start. Unfortunately, it is easy to succumb to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude when faced with these problems. Even Feynman thought[3] the success of the Manhattan Project necessarily implied that civilization "would all be destroyed very soon anyway".
For me, I try to remember that we can't predict change[4], and worrying about things we cannot change is a waste of time and energy. Big problems grow out of small problems, so I focus on those small things that I can change. There is a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies, but we should try anyway, because the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.[5]
[1] This post is not about the 2nd. Please, there is no need to re-open that highly-charged debate.
[2] "information wants to be free", or at least hard impossible to contain.
[4] See James Burke's ("Connections") non-teleological view of progress
[5] aka the speciation of humanity. I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's exploration of this type of "end result" for humanity in his novel Schismatrix[6]. (this is where my username ("pdkl95") comes from...)
That would depend on the purpose of the dike... and who/what was downstream.
That said, see my profile for a description of "PDKL 95". There is a good chance I'd grab the jackhammer if it would somehow lead to a useful re-framing of the consensual hallucination.
I would be so interested to see some research about information spread during active containment efforts. Obviously many institutions have developed highly effective measures of containment. They all involve coercing involved people into silence (NDAs, threats of criminal prosecution etc.) combined with, at least attempted, strict controls of where the data goes.
I feel like information just sort of succumbs to entropy and it will always "try" to leak out of containment like some fleeting gas.
Is that due to human nature? Or due to the nature of information itself? Would other intelligent beings with a different psychology/ social structure also spread information like a wildfire?
Obvious problem with that research: any information that was successfully contained are tautologically things we would not know about.
I completely agree with the entropy/leaking-gas analogy, and it may suggest an explanation for why information "leaks" so easily: compared to matter, the energy of information is extremely small. The energy cost of copying or moving is trivial, and easier movement implies faster diffusion.
> I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite.
Disagree completely. This smells of a "busywork" solution - we know something needs to be done, but we don't know what, so we try to do something for the greater good, hoping that we can redeem ourselves and somehow be protected (or at the very least more protected) from the threat.
Incidents such as mass shootings, which you highlighted, don't tend to have roots in racism or poverty situations, but rather psychopathy; a dramatic disconnect from the wholesome core of our human nature which develops in the soul of a deeply troubled individual.
This is a problem that our society with its culture is not equipped to handle. I do tend to think that there have been societies in the past, which did have the ability to contain such problems - I don't see a murderous psychopath arising within the company of Buddha and his travelling ashram of monks.
21st century Western civilization is taking a radically different path, investing itself fully in technological progress at the expense of everything else, and will reap the fruit of this choice, good and bad.
Technology eavesdropping in new ways is a similar "forbidden knowledge". While it may not be a weapon itself, when it becomes simple and cheap enough that containing the forbidden knowledge becomes impossible[2] we face the potential disruption of some of the very foundations of society.
The question isn't if the average person will gain access to cheap and powerful eavesdropping technology, or weapons as powerful as atomic bombs, or even worse technologies that we haven't discovered yet. The question is if society will be ready for when those technologies grow and become a cheap commodity.
The general purpose computer already did this, and other electronic devices like the one mentioned in this article are experiencing this transition right now. Biotech seems to be ramping up and I suspect we will see the biotech equivalent to the "cheap personal computer" in the near-ish future. The point is we, as a species, really need to learn how to deal with these technologies now, or a future "mass shooting" might instead be an "engineered plague" or "20 kiloton bomb".
How do we deal with these threats? I don't know. But I do know trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic. I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite. I personally like Roddenberry's idea of fixing most of the basic physical needs with technology; it won't fix everything, but it would probably be a good start. Unfortunately, it is easy to succumb to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude when faced with these problems. Even Feynman thought[3] the success of the Manhattan Project necessarily implied that civilization "would all be destroyed very soon anyway".
For me, I try to remember that we can't predict change[4], and worrying about things we cannot change is a waste of time and energy. Big problems grow out of small problems, so I focus on those small things that I can change. There is a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies, but we should try anyway, because the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.[5]
[1] This post is not about the 2nd. Please, there is no need to re-open that highly-charged debate.
[2] "information wants to be free", or at least hard impossible to contain.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=1114
[4] See James Burke's ("Connections") non-teleological view of progress
[5] aka the speciation of humanity. I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's exploration of this type of "end result" for humanity in his novel Schismatrix[6]. (this is where my username ("pdkl95") comes from...)
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix