Perhaps the best illustration of how the bar is being lowered for groups seeking to develop or use such sophisticated systems comes in the form of “Team Gray,” one of the competitors in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Gray Insurance is a family-owned insurance company from Metairie, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. As Eric Gray, who owns the firm along with his brother and dad, explained, the firm’s entry into robotics came on a lark. “I read an article in Popular Science about last year’s race and then threw the magazine in the back of my office. Later on, my brother came over and read the article, and he yelled over to me, ‘Hey did you read about this race?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘You wanna try it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, heck, let’s give it a try.’ ”
The Grays didn’t have PhDs in robotics, billion-dollar military labs backing them, or even much familiarity with computers. Instead, they brought in the head of their insurance company’s ten-person IT department for guidance on what to do. He then went out and bought some of the various parts and components described in the magazine article. They got their ruggedized computer, for example, at a boat show. The Grays then began reading up on video game programming, thinking that programming a robot car to drive through the real-world course had many parallels with “navigating an animated monster through a virtual world.” Everything was loaded into a Ford Escape Hybrid SUV, which they called Kat 5, after the category 5 Hurricane Katrina that hit their hometown just a few months before the race.
When it came time for the race to see who could design the best future automated military vehicle, Team Gray’s entry lined up beside robots made by some of the world’s most prestigious universities and companies. Kat 5 then not only finished the racecourse (recall that no robot contestant had even been able to go more than a few miles the year before), but came in fourth out of the 195 contestants, just thirty-seven minutes behind Sebastian Thrun’s Stanley robot. Said Eric Gray, who spent only $650,000 to make a robot that the Pentagon and nearly every top research university had been unable to build just a year before, “It’s a beautiful thing when people are ignorant that something is impossible.”
And:
When we think of the terrorist risks that emanate from unmanned systems, robotics expert Robert Finkelstein advises that we shouldn’t just look at organizations like al-Qaeda. “They can make a lone actor like Timothy McVeigh even more scary.” He describes a scenario in which “a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan with relative ease.” (Given that my publisher is based in Manhattan, we decided to leave the details out of the book.) Washington Post technology reporter Joel Garreau similarly writes, “One bright but embittered loner or one dissident grad student intent on martyrdom could—in a decent biological lab for example—unleash more death than ever dreamed of in nuclear scenarios. It could even be done by accident.”
In political theory, noted philosophers like Thomas Hobbes argued that individuals have always had to grant their obedience to governments because it was only by banding together and obeying some leader that people could protect themselves. Otherwise, life would be “nasty, brutish and short,” as he famously described a world without governments. But most people forget the rest of the deal that Hobbes laid out. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long and no longer than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”
As a variety of scientists and analysts look at such new technologies as robotics, AI and nanotech, they are finding that massive power will no longer be held only by states. Nor will it even be limited to nonstate organizations like Hezbollah or al-Qaeda. It is also within the reach of individuals. The playing field is changing for Hobbes’s sovereign.
Even the eternal optimist Ray Kurzweil believes that with the barriers to entry being lowered for violence, we could see the rise of superempowered individuals who literally hold humanity’s future in their hands. New technologies are allowing individuals with creativity to push the limits of what is possible. He points out how Sergey Brin and Larry Page were just two Stanford kids with a creative idea that turned into Google, a mechanism that makes it easy for anyone to search almost all the world’s knowledge. However, their $100 billion idea is “also empowering for those who are destructive.” Information on how to build your own remote bomb or the genetic code for the 1918 flu bug are as searchable as the latest news on Britney Spears. Kurzweil describes the looming period in human history that we are entering, just before his hoped-for Singularity: “It feels like all ten billion of us are standing in a room up to our knees in flammable fluid, waiting for someone—anyone—to light a match.”
Kurzweil thinks we have enough fire extinguishers to avoid going up in flames before the Singularity arrives, but others aren’t so certain. Bill Joy, the so-called father of the Internet, for example, fears what he calls “KMD,” individuals who wield knowledge-enabled mass destruction. “It is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of individuals.”
The science fiction writers concur. “Single individual mass destruction” is the biggest dilemma we have to worry about with our new technologies, warns Greg Bear. He notes that many high school labs now have greater sophistication and capability than the Pentagon’s top research labs did in the cold war. Vernor Vinge, the computer scientist turned award-winning novelist, agrees: “Historically, warfare has pushed technologies. We are in a situation now, if certain technologies become cheap enough, it’s not just countries that can do terrible things to millions of people, but criminal gangs can do terrible things to millions of people. What if for 50 dollars you buy something that could destroy everybody in a country? Then, basically, anybody who’s having a bad hair day is a threat to national survival.”
More (#6) from Wired for War:
And:
Inequality doesn’t seem so bad now, huh?