Why either technology will need to end in its current format, or tyranny will need to become the norm in order to protect us from others with large technological powers.
Let’s step through the 5 undeniable tenants that support this theory:
1. Over time, the cost of technology declines.
Is this point even debatable? Technology today is cheaper than it was 100 years ago. Some people may forget to remove inflation costs so it appears tech is getting more expensive, but it is not. The cost to produce food, electricity, and travel are just a few examples of things that are much cheaper today than they were in the past. This is the nature of tech itself: More efficient ways to do things.
2. This includes both creative and destructive technologies
Again, not much to debate here. I am sure the cost of making a gun is much less than it was a century ago because the gun-producing-machines are faster and cheaper to make, materials are easier to source, and supply chains are much faster and efficient. Gunpowder was once the tool of the state, and now you can buy it at fireworks stands.
3. Over time, increasingly powerful technologies are developed.
Here is a brief historical synopsis of weapons. Yes, overlap was considerable I’m sure, so this is not an attempt to be linear.
- Spears and rocks
- Bow and arrow
- Projectile machines like catapults
- Guns and canons
- Bombs
- Nuclear bombs (or atom bombs if you prefer)
A much shorter version can be seen in 2001 A Space Odyssey. In other words, it is increasingly cheaper (on a per person / income basis) to end human life, and the speed and breadth of the weapon increases with time. I imagine in the future with things like bio/electro/light weapons, the efficiency and sterile appearance of killing will only increase.
4. Over time, increasingly powerful tools trickle down to become more affordable and accessible to individuals
A principle fact of technology is that tech (or tools) become more affordable and available to individuals. This is the trickle down effect. Lots of this is happening today such as 3D printing, desktop CNC mills, etc… Processes that were once reserved for large factories are now available at home for under $100. This trickle down process is also a chief component of technological progress, making life easier over time.
No one should be surprised that North Korea, the 206th poorest country in the world today in terms of GDP per capita and #103 by total GDP (on par with Nepal or Iceland), can now afford nuclear weapons; a job once reserved for the richest countries in the world only a few decades ago.
Let’s compare that with the cost of the earliest nukes between 1940 – 1942. Average cost per atomic device/bomb: $5 billion in 1996 dollars (The Costs of the Manhattan Project (brookings.edu)). Adjust for inflation and that is about $10B per nuke.
“If North Korea does indeed have around 60 (nukes), that puts the cost of each warhead at between around $18 million and $53 million.” This is their estimate total program cost by South Korea. I am going to use the average cost for my later analysis, so we will say $35M.
That means the cost of NK program today vs the original costs of the Manhatten Project is 281x cheaper today. Just like how computers and space flight are much cheaper today.
However, those were total program costs. Looking at just the cost of the nuke, it is much lower: “20 nuclear gravity bombs … ~$4.9 million each” (What Nuclear Weapons Delivery Systems Really Cost (brookings.edu)). This means that the nukes really only cost 0.1% of the total program costs, which is remarkable proof of govt. inefficacy, but I digress. Note that those bombs are ” 30 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945″ (The B61 Family of Nuclear Bombs – Federation Of American Scientists (fas.org)) so the cost of destroying billions or trillions of dollars worth of tech (e.g. a city) is possible with tech that is potentially a million times cheaper.
Let’s use the 1940’s US atomic bomb prices and compare with North Korea today. It’s difficult to do without more data points, but I doubt the cost decline is linear. It’s probably geomtric/logarythmic, so let’s do a simple example. So in the same way computer chips double in speed every 1.4 years, I extrapolated that the costs of a mid-size nuclear weapon in 100 years from today: $38,000. In 200 years, a nuke will cost a mere $37. Wow, that is cheap!
Let’s apply the same ratio of program to bomb costs to NK current prices. This would mean that a nuke for them actually only costs $37,000, but let’s err on the side of caution and estimate that it’s 10% of their program costs instead of 0.1%. Okay, that is now only $3M. Do you see the problem?
Even as a kid, I realized college libraries hold lots of books on dangerous processes like how to build fireworks, so logically, a few books or YouTube videos (here you go) on enriching uranium is probably enough to get started for the amateur hack. One online commentor said it might only cost $100 to enrich uranium 235 at home. Either way, the costs of nuclear bombs are coming down quickly. Seems that it is already within reach of states and cities, should our nation-state system fail, which it may.
The only real bottleneck then is the supplies of specialized plutonium that is needed (however see above videos, and they used to make it by filtering with teflon), but you know, scientists are already rearranging individual molecules, and nuclear transmutation, or modern alchemy (a.k.a. turning lead atoms into gold atoms), has been around awhile–it’s only a matter of time, and therefore costs, that it becomes more widely used and available, so turning water air (oxygen) into nuclear bomb fuel is just a matter of time. The dangers associated with Uranium is probably the main reason we have not seen home-made nuclear yet.
But there is probably a quicker route to the current method of blocking plutonium refining (like we do to Iran), and that is via the economic promise of substitute products, which says someone will always find substitutes to all materials like plutonium as such tends to be cheaper and easier to produce over time as well. Like how aluminum displace gold for creating metal objects, like silverware. Aluminum is a lot cheaper to obtain. Consider all the new alloys that are discovered because they are either better or lowesr cost than previous onces.
This is why economic doomsdayers of things like “peak oil” and “running out of resources” is a myth. We always find cheaper ways and materials as long as there are enough people to try to improve things. One example of cheapening tech shows how much the price can be brought down with a little ingenuity, and that is blood centrifuges. Some people at Stanford apparently figured out how to make a blood centrifuge for $0.20 which produced results comparable to a $1k – $5k machine. that is about 5,000x to 25,000x cheaper. This is another way tech cheapens over time; simpler/smaller processes.
Great, now we have better, more affordable health. Likewise, we probably won’t need plutonium in the bombs of the future. Maybe just some baking soda, vinegar, and a desktop transmutator whenever it gets invented. Today, Australia outlaws designs for homemade guns.
Student Designs $2,000 Atom Bomb – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Other Coming Cheapening Tech Risks
Biotech is predicted to become available to the average home brewer that wants to CRISPR his way to a genetically modified bioterror weapon. If you don’t understand what CRISPR is yet, you really need to read up. Here is a good article to understand what it is and the risks and opportunities it brings. Even if the Joker wasn’t bent on destroying the world, other effects could be produced: “For instance, he could choose to make the male or female population of a particular race or class of people or the entire world to lose the capacity to reproduce.” and no one would notice for years after it happened. There seems to be a large and growing cult following for people that want to depopulate the planet.
At under $100 for a CRISPR kit, the sky is the limit, especially if you are a terrorist group. Remember that Japanese subway terrorist group in 1995 that wanted to accelerate the apocalypse? Good thing their biological weapons component failed.
AI/robots, which I talk about extensively on this blog
But what makes nuclear power different is that its destructive history and costs over time is well established.
5. The only way to stop proliferation of destructive technology is increased societal/govt control, ensuring tyranny is the norm.
How do you prevent people from making weapons at home? Create a surveillance state like China and the US. Second, ban information that lets people figure out how to do it on their own. A second, more insidious and unrecognized form of control exists. Societal control. This type is much bigger than people realize, but its mostly seen in media and social media today. It is power of the whole group, instead of power of the ruling group. I have shown elsewhere that the power experiements by Milgram are flawed because he pointed out a less powerful effect (appeal to authority). The larger effect was appeal to society. Logically, I think social control will increase with time too.
Why increasing control? True, most people today are not the harming type, but it only takes a few nut jobs to mess up the world for everyone else. Whether these few people such seek attention, fame, power, or glory, the reasons are likely varied, but the result is the same: more control over the individual by society as the risk to the group increases from the individual. Can you imagine if people had the ability to hack airplanes
As power of the societal group increases to control the risks of the individual, we will also see resentment and attempts to thwart such tyranny through increased defense for individuals and local areas. Does this not describe the world today?
This is for example at the heart of the gun debates today. On one hand, society and govt fears tyranny by a few individuals that can cause unwarranted harm to others; and on the other hand, the individual fears the tyranny of mainly the government (totalitarian, dictators, etc…) but also the society (ochlocracy). On the same note, if the govt uses robots/AI to control society, then we would expect some in society to use the same tools for protection.
Either way, I don’t expect any sort of real solutions because as tech magnifies power for the society, governments, and individuals that wield it, I just assume a leveraging effect with leveraged results. At the end of the day, the world is run by individuals in a variety of institutions or groups, and because we are all flawed, we obviously cannot simply trust others. So as govt gets increasingly autonomous weapons like robot dogs, it’s clear people will eventually need the same technology too to prevent corruption. You do recall that old saying about power? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So what are we do do? Can you imagine a school shooter that prints a nuke, biochemical device, modified virus on his 3D molecular/chemical and materials printers? Ok, so they dont exist yet, but in a few decades I am pretty sure they will.
To prevent such, the best chance is for govt to invade not just our communications, but also our brains like the “thought police,” especially if brain-computer connections become a reality? Thanks Elon. Most people do not know that today, buying fertilizer is quite difficult and govt. also tracks purchasers due to bombings in recent years that used fertilizer. But the future is different. It is possible for example to print a 3-D plastic gun today, but they are one time only use. 3-d metal printers are here too. For $5k, you can buy a machine that will make you a metal object, just like the plastic ones that have been around for a few years now.
Ban 3-d printers? You can make a 3-d printer out of off the shelf hardware in a few hours, printing parts from other 3-D printers even (like a self-replicator). In the future, we will be able to manufacture just about anything at home, and if its not clear from the above statements, we cannot trust govt with weapons either.
Perhaps those are still not large enough risks for you, that is at least until someone can invent a non-collapsing black hole at home in their desktop sized Hadron Collider. By then, I hope my kids will at least developed anti-black holes (white holes?) to counter its effects, or just left the solar system altogether.
Push a button and out comes the product of our imaginations, whether a new toy or new galaxy.
A Workable Solution: Defense-Only Tech
The best hope really is better defense only tech, so regardless of what offensive weapons people create, a defensive one would protect, like force fields to stop nukes and bullets alike. Most weapons today do not meet this classification however. Biological and chemical warfare would need the same defenses.
The two reasons this is so difficult are:
- that it is much easier to make an offensive weapon (e.g. gun) than it is to make a shield that effectively stops, or reflects bullets.
- it is difficult to win any battle if you are always only defensive
This latter point assumes that human nature, greed and survival, will make it nearly impossible under any known conditions today for defense-only tech to become a reality. This is why guns, even if they seem pointless today, are popular in America, contrary to common knowledge: Protection against tyrannical governments. History repeats more than you know.
Perhaps in the future, govt will force newborns to have genetic/brain modification to stop any such feelings (cue Brave New World and The Giver). At least China probably would, but considering their surveillance state is only slightly worse than ours, I am not sure we wouldn’t either. Either govt, the elite, or society at large may demand such. For now, gene editing of children is outlawed. Notice I said “for now.”
Defense-only tech would probably only happen after a major global crisis and decline in the modern nation state model because nation states spend so much money on offense military, and trying to make the switch would be difficult to arrive at naturally.
Are there other workable solutions? The tools that allow some to hurt others will be the same tools to protect ourselves as history shows. So if someone makes a virus, the rest of us need to edit our body’s DNA to protect it from the virus. Seems logical, but dystopian, to me.
So, the most logical outcome to preventing offensive war and weapons is shifting weapons development to protection budgets. If manufacturers/govt. spent increasing efforts on protection instead of attacking, then it would be difficult for offensive tech to even get developed. Defensive weapons today are generally not just defensive. Even missiles that are meant to stop nukes can be very offensive–just ask Russia and our missiles in their backyard. The best middle-ground scenario we have is to ensure weapons are only local, but the reality is we constantly see otherwise because who really can trust a foreign govt. set on growth or power?
Actually, I am not sure this is possible at all because as long as someone oppresses someone else, the need for weapons will always exist to rescue those under the oppression. What we really need is extremely powerful defense tech for every individual to protect against all threats (others, powerful govt) along with the freedom to go wherever the individual wants to go (to avoid social/political oppression). The world may become unruly in new ways (e.g. no way to stop a squatter), but if people cannot physically harm another, that is perhaps a better trade-off, but I am not really sure on this point.
Obviously, we need a global mind-shift on this one. Force fields from weapons and most likely attempts of increasing control by others (govt. and society) is clearly the future. It seems the main reason govt exists is to protect a nation from its enemy, however if no large nations existed anymore, then what would we protect against other than the occasional Ghengis Khan? Perhaps collective defense against lone attackers would become a real possibility then. Ultimately, this is a question of morality, and not weapons. If everyone was moral, then all of our problems on this front would be resolved because no one would (consciously at least) hurt anyone else. Yes, I am not real hopeful on solutions as you can tell.