The Future of Violence: Robots and Gerais, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat.

• Author: Harper, Jim
• Position: Book review

The Future of Violence: Robots and Gerais, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat

Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum

New York: Basic Books, 2015, 336 pp.

On Memorial Day this year, link-aggregator The Drudge Report displayed a shocking banner headline: "Drone Hits 2 People during Parade." Playing on readers' expectations of some titillating new horror disrupting a beloved American holiday, the site linked to a story about a small, remotely piloted aircraft flown over a parade in the New England town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Its owner had lost control and run the drone into a building. On its descent, the drone hit a man on the head and nicked his neck, then caromed off another parade-goer's shoulder before falling to the ground. The injured man declined treatment, according to the news item. As for the drone operator: "A police report described the man as very apologetic and embarrassed."

Drones are among the suite of new technologies authors Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum offer up as "technologies of mass empowerment" in their book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat. "By delivering dramatic new capabilities to humanity in general," they write, "technological development creates the certainty that some of those individuals will use those capabilities to do evil." The prediction is undoubtedly true, as a literal matter. Most every technology empowers someone bent on doing wrong to do it better. But it is not at all clear that technology will cause the human capacity for evil to outstrip its capacity for good, or that our capacity for self-defense will not grow to meet our capacities for offense. It is not a given that enhanced capacity to do evil translates directly into evil actually done.

Most people are nice. Give them technology and they'll do nice things with it. Wittes and Blum make an unconvincing case that drones, or the advance of technology generally, are particularly threatening.

Their premise in greater detail is that advancing technologies have produced a new era of security challenges. Unlike in the past, technologies of mass empowerment are creating an unprecedented "many-to-many" threat environment, where anyone can mount a devastating attack on anyone else. On the basis of that premise, they set out to rethink states and the social order; the relationships among privacy, liberty, and security; legal jurisdiction and sovereignty; surveillance...