Is ever-more-powerful technology incompatible with civil freedom?

Great Debates
1

A thought experiment:

You get on a passenger jet and take your seat. In this thought experiment, there are no terrorists, just ordinary everyday people who buy a ticket and get on the plane and listen as the flight attendants go through their safety lecture. You listen to the little speech about where the exits are located, how to use the oxygen masks, and which part of the belt buckle goes into the other part.

Then, at the end, they direct your attention to the armrest, where every seat is equipped with a red button under a plastic cover.

“The cover is currently locked, and will be unlocked as soon as we’re in the air,” says the flight attendant on the microphone. "When that happens, under no circumstances are you to lift the cover and press the button. For if you do, the plane will be instantly destroyed and everyone aboard will be killed.

“Have a nice flight.”

The question: How many planes will reach their destination without some curious person pressing the button and killing everybody? Like I said, I’m not referring to terrorists or people with ill intent; what are the odds that on any given plane an average curious individual will think, “Really?” and give it a try. Even with the reports of other planes falling out of the sky in fiery balls of death, will people be able to stop themselves from pushing their own buttons?

Obviously, no passenger jet would be so equipped; it’s just a hypothetical scenario. But the larger question follows closely: If we give people the capacity to destroy themselves and others, can they resist the urge?

Right now, we’re seeing the social effects of “weapons of mass destruction” (as loose a catchall descriptor as that is) starting to become available at a wide scale. We learn about anthrax and sarin and ricin and how simple it is to manufacture something dangerous, though it takes a bit of effort to make something hugely lethal. The plans for constructing a nuclear weapon are easily available on the web; only the availability of plutonium is the obstacle. And this knowledge scares the shit out of us, collectively speaking, and so far we have been willing to tolerate an erosion of certain civil liberties as the price we pay for ensuring our physical safety. When it comes to putting up with increasingly invasive searches and enhanced police powers vs. the risk of having our lungs melt in a poisonous cloud, we may grumble, but nevertheless we obediently queue up at the security station.

What does this mean in the long term? As science and technology marches on, as we begin to untangle the fundamental forces of the universe, doesn’t it become possible that even more powerful destructive techniques will start to appear? Now, I’m not a loon, and I’m not suggesting that this power is totally limitless; simple physics is enough to reassure me that Steve in Schenectady isn’t going to be able to knock the Earth off its orbit by hooking a balaclava to a nine-volt battery and soaking the thing in soy milk. There’s a limit of plausibility here.

Even so, in our remarkable age, we take our household lasers and magnetrons totally for granted, because they’ve been integrated with our everyday lives. (Amusing digression: If you suggested to a science-fiction writer that said technology would be used to play with cats and heat up leftover chili, instead of exploring the universe, you’d probably have gotten a chuckle.) The internet makes it possible for absolutely anybody to find out about almost anything almost instantly. Private investors are building space planes and forming tentative long-term plans to build on the moon and Mars. Data encryption permits private citizens to lock their personal information away from all but the most powerful codebreaking systems, and even those systems are struggling to keep up in the ongoing arms race. Communication technology lets far-flung individuals coordinate themselves across the globe with ease.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: I’m not buying into the sky-is-falling Luddite philosophy that views all of our magical toys with distrust and advocates a return to nontechnological living. I’m not saying it’s a mistake to pepper in God’s lo mein. I’m a big fan of what our thinkers and engineers have been able to give us, and I think in virtually every measurable way, the human experience is better now than it has been at any point in recorded history. All the same, you have to admit, there is potential for tremendous harm looming in the future. It’s vague and ill-defined, and we can’t predict future breakthroughs that could radically change the balance of the social equation, or even if there will be any. It could be decades or centuries before catastrophically destructive but easy-to-build devices are developed, at which time, hopefully, humanity will be spread across multiple worlds and thus enjoy some insulation from total annihilation. Or, while it’s unlikely in the extreme, it could happen next month. We just don’t know.

My question, and the subject for debate, is this: What happens as the inexorable march of discovery brings more and more power into the hands of average people? Will we continue to tolerate the encroachment of government power into our daily lives, on an incremental basis, in order to maintain the perception of safety? Or will we resist change even while it is being thrust upon us, until the social paradigm undergoes a violent shift to accommodate the new reality? Basically, is human psychology such that we can be happy to live quietly and without interference in our own homes even with the awareness that our neighbor, a stranger, has the capacity to, say, vaporize ten city blocks without any warning?

Nice easy question. We should have this knocked off by dinner. :wink:

2

Left out some words:

Please insert the phrase “fifty years ago” in the obvious place in the sentence above where it makes the thought interesting instead of stupid.

3

That’s silly. Who would press this button? This shiny Red button . . . The beautiful, candy-like button! THIS CONFOUNDED BUTTON!!! THIS IRRESISTABLE, BECKONING, RED BUTTON OF TEMPTATION!!!

:boom:

4

That would have been funnier if I had just quoted the original instead of trying to do it from memory. This is one of the funniest bits ever from the episode of Ren & Stimpy entitled Space Madness:

Does a history erasing machine qualify? If so, I vote no.

DaLovin’ Dj

5

I’ve nothing valuable to add, I just wanted to mention that I too feel concerned by the issue the OP is mentionning. I’m not at all convinced we’ll be able to handle safely the more and more powerful tools we’re going to invent. It’s one of my major long-term worries.

6

Just to add something that is actually productive, check out this essay. It deals with this issue in a pretty in-depth fashion. The only real options it offers as far as counter strategies are shields (equivalent technologies) which may be just as dangerous as the technologies they are trying to protect us against, and treaties. A treaty could only prevent disaster if ‘cooler heads prevail’. When mass destruction reach the hands of individuals, privacy and liberties may have to be greatly infringed upon. Jefferson said “A nation that is ready to sacrifice freedom for security doesn’t deserve either.”, and while that is a great sentiment in theory, he never had to deal with humanity’s new-found powers to wipe us all out of existence rather quickly. No easy answer here. It seems clear that we are headed for some strage days. I hope we pull through. Too close to the cave, too far from the stars. Limitless potential & great peril.

Welcome to the new world. Hope you remembered to bring your towels . . .

7

Well, the OP makes the case for the fact that it’s not the development of the tools, its the tendencies of the people who use them.

Part of the problem, in this country at least, is that society changes so rapidly now, we have lost the ability to use education for one of its prime tasks: to indoctrinate others into the proper functioning of our society. Many of the skills I was taught as a child are completely useless now.

When you have that situation, where the society must try to keep up with the invention, the younger generation has no way to use the existing social structure to determine how to use the new tools.

8

Another option is to improve humans. Make us more resiliant. Unkillable. Maybe brains in a nuclear-proof vat in a cave controlling remote bodies, or living in a virtual world jacked directly into our cortexes. Defeat tech that can kill us by ending death. Perhaps it sounds farfetched, but machine-man links are already here, neuroscience is quickly decoding the way the brain works, and geneticists are working on understanding how to build life. Our next steps as a species will be deliberate and engineered (hopefully), unlike the current system which demands the deaths of billions of sentient creatures (and untold lesser-developed creatures) as payment for incremental increases in capabilities and defenses.

DaLovin’ Dj

9

I have nothing poignant to add yet, but I did want to say bravo Cervaise on one heckuva post.

10

Should I say that your “solution” is one of these perils I’m worried about?

11

It’s all in how you use it - and that is kind of the point. The technology of the Matrix, for example, if offered to people openly (instead of secretly forced on us by evil machines) could be wonderful. Imagine that we are all Neo’s with the power to fly and make cool things happen by just thinking about it. Playstation 9, if you catch my drift. If forced on us it is evil, if it is elective entertainment than it is good.

New technologies will make us vulnerable in ways that only new technology can preotect us from. If you hope to someday die and never want to be jacked into anything, then cool for you. Me, I’d prefer never to die and I’d love to spend large chunks of time in a virtual paradise. Lord knows I spend loads of time playing Zelda & GTA games. But the thing is, if evil folks are going to develop the stuff, then good folks need to do so as well. If only the bad guys have the best tech we are screwed. So it’s not a question of whether or not these technologies should be developed, it’s a question of making sure it is used for good. Nuclear power can be of tremendous benefit to humanity or it can be our ultimate doom. We must allow progress to continue, you can’t keep this stuff in the box. You just have to really hope that cooler heads come up with the stuff first, and then come up with safety measures and checks to keep us safe. This part, unfortunately, may involve the sacrifice of privacy and liberty to some degree.

DaLovin’ Dj

12

Thanks, it had been bouncing around in my head for a couple of weeks but I didn’t think it was ready to be aired until the red-button-on-the-airplane metaphor came into focus and gave me a viscerally effective starting point.

Yes, I think this is key, which is why I started off with the passenger-jet metaphor. Knowledge and tools are in and of themselves neither moral nor immoral; it’s only the use (or intended use) by humans, I believe, that causes a value judgment to be attached. The question I’m focusing on is whether humans have the capacity to responsibly manage their own creations. And given past history, I think a favorable answer is in doubt; I raised the question in an effort to find out just how doubtful.

This gets into a somewhat related issue that I wanted to mention but decided to omit in what was already a long OP. Just how quickly can a society integrate new technological developments? Is there a maximum density, so to speak, of technological innovation? We see in the computer industry that new benchmarks and breakthroughs are being achieved with such rapidity that hardly any consumers bother to keep up with each and every iteration; instead, we skip generations until the available technology is sufficiently different from the previous version. What happens when these sufficiently-different generations are coming at the pace of our currently incremental advances? Even aside from the possible societal chaos this might cause, wherein our youths are using knowledge and devices that the older folks simply don’t have a clue about, is there a maximum rate at which these innovations can be developed, brought to market, forced into our consciousness, and successfully sold? Not really the same question as I’m asking in the OP, but certainly tangentially related insofar as it’s about our relationship with and trust of our technology.

I like that phrase: “Too close to the cave, too far from the stars.” In this formulation, doesn’t it therefore become imperative, almost a survival mandate, to get ourselves to Mars and beyond? We aren’t just trying to protect ourselves from our own creations; we are trying to protect ourselves from our own nature. However, even this isn’t guaranteed to be foolproof:

This is what I was trying to get at in the OP with the idea of spreading ourselves across multiple worlds and thus insulating the species from the danger of having all our ova on one rock. But even then you aren’t necessarily out of the woods: If we manage to put a colony on Mars and make it sustainable, we’re still at risk of some as-yet-unfathomable technology that messes with the sun somehow. If we begin migrating to nearby stars, then maybe some bright bioengineer will come up with a time-delayed disease that spreads easily from human to human but doesn’t actually go off until ten years down the line, after everybody is infected.

True, but what I’m suggesting is that for every countermeasure, one can imagine a counter-countermeasure.

I agree that progress must continue, and indeed that it is simply inevitable that it will; it’s impossible to hold us back. My central question is not about the technology itself but about human nature, and whether we can trust one another — whether we can trust ourselves — not to throw giant rocks through our cherished windows just for the sheer bloody-minded hell of it.

13

This is the central theme behind Alvin Toffler’s classic study, “Future Shock” (read the book, the movie version is just a gee-whiz curio). The title is the author’s coined term for our increasing inability to cope with increasing rates of societal change.

I used to live in MA, and was frequently near MIT. MIT has its own nuclear reactor, to which certain grad students are given access. The more MIT grad students you’ve met, the more this fact scares the PISS out of you. What the hell is this thing doing in the middle of a major metropolitan area?

We build increasingly larger particle accelerators, to try and generate enough energy to recreate the conditions at the time of the Big Bang. We don’t in fact know that we won’t trigger a NEW Big Bang if we achieve this goal, but we strive nonetheless. We can’t help it. It’s the monkey in us all. Imagine it, you’re just sitting there, watching “American Idol”, and some clown you’ve never heard of ends it all for us.

Sadly, I doubt there’s a lot we can do. No one knows from what direction useful change will come, which was the point of “Connections” by historian David Burke (see the 1970s TV series, the book is just a gee-whiz curio). Attempts to manage lines of research could easily stifle desired discoveries.

If we had a better education system, we might all be trained in risk-assessment and the basics of the discoveries of the last century, However, as long as your High School history teacher runs out of semester a decade before WWI (like mine did), and as long as we assume our exponentially expanding body of knowledge can somehow still be crammed into 13 years of lower education, most people will lack the knowledge to even begin to address the issues of the OP.

14

Enh, it’s an arms race. The airplane allowed diseases to spread further and more rapidly; the injectable vaccine enabled us to curb that same spread. I’m not ready to go all Chicken-Little on society’s ass yet; anti-red-button technology will proliferate quickly in the wake of red-button technology.

15

Cervaise, you’re talking about human nature here…not technology.

I explain: For good or ill the decision to be an ever more technological society has been made and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop. Hell, I don’t think it CAN be stopped.

All those silly luddites arguing for a return to less technological ways. Fah. Have any of them considered that returning to 1900-era farming techniques would probably require the death by starvation of 3 billion people or more? Fools.

So how does one improve on human nature? Beats me. As a species we’re both social and individualistic (and sometimes remarkably solipsistic). Efforts to stop the (apparently) ever-growing alienation brought about by the growth of consumer-culture and technology might do some good. Give people (especially young men) a greater sense of being part of the whole instead of being outsiders and their empathy levels should rise. Stop the focus on sales and shift over to household productivity instead. Kill television and get people out more…seeing fewer ads and meeting more people should (crosses fingers) lead to a greater personal recognition of others as people and not as objects.

Beyond that? I just don’t see a means of halting technological progress. There is no means to put the djinni back in the bottle. The best you can do is harness him for your own benefit.

16

Much as I’d like to take credit for coming up with such a cool phrase, it is actually something I jacked from Ray Bradbury. He has a book due out later this year called “Too Soon From The Caves, Too Far From The Stars”, which is a collection of essays regarding his own personal philosophy. He seems to have faith that we will overcome the danger that we pose to ourselves.

As far as space travel goes, it’s ultimately our only shot and it is, I hope, our destiny to populate this universe with intelligence. . .

17

Umm, like, seriously bad analogy, dude. I have a knife within easy reach. I could stab myself, just to see what it feels like. If I was three, I might. But I’ve learnt not to. So have almost everybody.

The point is that one such wackjob might be able to cause widespread mayhem. Also, notice that it’s not just increasing technology that’s the problem: sometimes tech makes it better, sometimes worse; it’s just that eventually you’d get to a position where one crazy can cause MAJOR damage, and you might not recover from that point.

Your description of nukes, bioagents, etc was more apt imho. How do you protect yourself from a nuke? You don’t, really. This is scary. OTOH, greater government control looking in cellars for nukes could be balanced by increased cryptography and communication, making you in some ways freer.

18

What happens? The same thing that’s always happened. I can procure, with a few hundred dollars and a drive to Boston, a capacity to cause mass death that would have been unthinkable two hundred years ago. For example, I could buy an AK-47 from a “collector”. With one of those, I could easily kill a dozen people in less than half a minute. Far sooner, if I knew what I was doing. I can kill more people, if I set my mind to it, than my grandfather could. And he could kill more than his grandfather, all the way back at least to the 1800s (when we started to see really, really fast improvements in firearms technology, so far as I know).

We’ve had this problem of an escalating ability to kill for a long, long time - and we still have our civil liberties. We have dogs and metal detectors, and gun registration. We have people getting searched as they go into concerts. But by and large, it’s hard to argue that we aren’t freer now than we were two hundred years ago. For anyone who isn’t a white landowning male, I’d say it’s pretty much impossible. We tend, as a society, to find solutions to these threats to our safety that don’t overly curtail our freedoms - I am confident we’ll find acceptable solutions to further problems that leave our liberties more or less intact. I’m not sure what those solutions are, exactly - but I’m willing to bet on our track record.

19

One aspect that hasnt been mentioned here yet is that our definition of freedom changes radically. Many people today are worried that we are losing our civil rights, privacy, etc due to computers–and they are right, in a sense…But look at the privacy that people had 150 years ago, and you could argue that we had already lost much ofl our privacy, by about 1970 or so.
Today we want and expect the government to do things that would have appalled our great-grandparents. In 1870, anyone could buy a horse,hitch up his wagon and go wherever he wanted.Today, you have to take lessons and pass a test to get government permission to drive your “horse”, and your wagon needs annual inspections. Did the sherriff of Carson City think it was part of his job to arrest drunken cowboys for “driving under the influence”? Today, we all want the sheriff to do so.

In 1870, did the sheriff consider it part of his job to stop domestic violence?
In 1870, did the sheriff raise a posse to go hunt down an unfit mother?(about 2 years ago, remember the national outcry when a woman in a Walmart parking lot in Indiana was caught on film slapping her child in the car-seat? The black and white surveillance camera clip was big news, and it set off a nation-wide manhunt to track her down.

Today, we agree that these are good and legitimate uses of police power, not invasion of privacy.

a wild speculation:–the use of cell phones will lead to a huge change in people’s attitude to privacy.Today’ s teenagers are addicted to their phones, and never turn them off, for fear of missing out on the latest gossip or party.They are totally comfortable with the idea that they are always accessible. They feel lost without that permanent connection hooked onto their belt.And cell phones now can be combination phone\ GPS locators\camera devices. This technology, which seems much too intrusive to me (and old fart in his 40’s, raised on 1960’s -style freedom to roam) may not seem so intrusive to the next generation. who gladly attach it to their bodies

So—yes, technology will change our (current) civil freedoms.The question is whether or not those changes will upset people.