Over the weekend I had a conversation with a client who was asking about the growth of technology and it’s impact on society and the future, and as these conversations tend to go, it melded into the most recent news cycle with the situation in Israel and Palestine. Specifically, we discussed Hamas using low tech rockets and bombs for their terrorist activities only because they don’t have access to more advanced technology. Apparently most of their bombs incorporate household products like baking soda and fertilizer amongst other compounds and the explosions are actually pretty small in comparison to modern bombs. Now, if they had access to it, how much more powerful their attacks would be with more advanced technologies?
Our conversation spiraled down this route and into what are some of the kinds of instruments that current and future bad actors may be able to get their hands on.
But this isn’t just about one geopolitical hotspot. It’s a microcosm of a more significant global challenge.
Throughout history, technological advancements have always presented both incredible opportunities and daunting challenges. For instance, the Wright brothers might have dreamt of a world interconnected by flight, yet it was commercial airliners, symbols of that very dream, which were repurposed as missiles during the tragic 9/11 hijackings. In a similar vein, while the discovery of various chemicals has led to breakthroughs in medicine and industry, they’ve also been weaponized, as evidenced by the deadly Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995. The digital realm is not immune either; as we usher in an era of global connectivity, we also witness its dark side. The 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, which affected over 200,000 computers across 150 countries, showcases the dangers lurking in our interconnected world. As technology becomes increasingly accessible and powerful, its potential for misuse grows in parallel. As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, its democratization ensures that advanced tools, once exclusive to state actors or big corporations, become cheaper and more accessible, amplifying the potential for misuse by a broader range of bad actors. Today, we’ll dive into this concern, exploring some scenarios where exponentially growing tech could exponentially grow threats to civilians and our collective society.
There are of course a number of recent and well known examples, many of which have already been talked about on the podcast before. These include: 3d printed guns like the 99% plastic liberator, miniaturized or portable nukes which have been even in mainstream media for several years, cheaply assembled weaponized drones which we’ve even seen play a role in the Ukraine-Russian conflict but have been used to bring attention to the larger autonomous weapon issue with the viral 2017 ‘slaughterbot’ arms-control advocacy video, and of course social media being manipulated for political means as shown through the cambridge analytica scandal. But there are also, depending on the person of course, less well known and perhaps more future oriented emerging technologies that will give non-state bad actors more opportunities for violence. Other sources:
https://www.hoover.org/research/technology-converges-non-state-actors-benefit
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/FP_20211122_ai_nonstate_actors_kreps.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23257139
