Cyber Security with Peter Singer

Welcome to the twenty-first century! This is something that we wrestle with in the robotics world, but the problem looms in cyberspace, too. There is a vast array of both capabilities but also political, military, and business, legal, moral, and ethical questions that we thought were science fiction a generation ago, but they are now with us. And yet a century ago people back then had to figure out strange things like “horseless cars” and “flying machines.” Hopefully, we will muddle our way through in this century. The point of the book is that you simply cannot respond appropriately if you do not understand how cyberspace works, what its implications are, and why it matters.

I think of the parallel to the introduction of the horseless carriage. Many were astounded by this new thing and realized that they had to have something that they had never needed before when everyone rode horses, which was the strange thing called the traffic law. That change went beyond laws, extending to norms of conduct. In the United States, a man wrote a book about the proper way to drive a car; not technically but socially the proper way to drive. From that book we got the idea of two lanes, passing on a certain side, signaling before the turn. These were not just legal laws but also norms.

Yet, if you go back and look at it, some of the early laws on the government side were insane because they did not understand the technology. One of the early laws related to horseless carriages was that someone was supposed to walk in front of the car with a flag to let people know that it was coming. And when they got into an intersection and wanted to turn, they pulled out a flare and fired it into the sky. This made great sense in a world of horses but makes no sense in a world of cars. “There are similar proposals out there now about cyber security that one day we will look back on in the same way we do on the above example.”

“I fully understand what you are saying. It is also possible that you have exponential technological change that you will start to run into gaps between what we experience and anything that we have ever encountered before. If you, for example, start to grow brain cells, in the tens of thousands or millions and sort of create a being, it is basically going to throw a monkey wrench into all of the assumptions we have.”

In my writing, what draws my attention is exactly those game-changing technologies, these disruptive technologies, ‘killer applications,’ however they are described. These are technologies that fundamentally alter the political, military, legal, business, and ethical discourse.  We have had these game-changing technologies before in history. They range from fire, the printing press, gunpowder, steam engine, to the atomic bomb and the computer. The difference today is that with the speeding up of technological change, they are coming at us faster and simultaneously happening in multiple domains. So, we are having a tough time keeping up with Moore’s Law in IT.