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Will You Be Murdered By a Robot? - The Daily Beast

Nick Romeo  - TWO-EDGED SWORD

03.23.15

Frightening but never fear-mongering, the information supplied by the authors of The Future of Violence posits a tomorrow full of techno-threats demanding discerning vigilance.

With a bit of technical knowledge and a good imagination, any malevolent person may soon be able to eradicate the human race. This is a mildly exaggerated version of a fundamental claim in The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat, an alarming and informative new book by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriela Blum.

By combining the elements of the subtitle in sinister ways, Wittes and Blum conjure a number of nightmarish scenarios: a drone hovers above a packed sports stadium and sprays invisible anthrax spores into air breathed by tens of thousands, a miniature robotic drone that looks exactly like a spider assassinates a businessman as he showers, a malign molecular biology graduate student modifies the smallpox virus to enhance its lethality and overcome vaccinations.

Of course with a bit of technical knowledge and a good imagination, any thoughtful person can already eradicate the human race in all manner of weirdly engrossing hypotheticals. In fact some people, like the philosophers at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, seem to make a nice living by contemplating scenarios of mass death. But Wittes and Blum are not professional prophets of doom. Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Blum teaches at Harvard Law School.

Their book doesn’t aim to convince us that terrifying but seemingly outlandish scenarios are in fact imminent. They start from the premise that the terrifying scenarios are not only possible, they’re almost certainly inevitable in some form. 

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