Science, Technology, and Public Policy

David W. Kearn argues that deployment of nuclear weapons cannot rectify a perceived imbalance in conventional forces in the western Pacific.

A future where A.I.s interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom, warn Jonathon W. Penney and Bruce Schneier.

In a keynote speech delivered during the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2023, Bruce Schneier argues that we need to recreate our system of governance for an era in which transformative technologies pose catastrophic risks as well as great promise.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

Tarah Wheeler and Ciaran Martin write that banning ransomware payments may be seen as as unwarranted state interference in private commerce, but they believe that a coordinated country level response would rectify the glaring deficiency in the current reality: the near-total privatization of national security risk. 

Bruce Schneier and Nicholas Weaver recommend disrupting cryptocurrency markets, as opposed to banning cryptocurrencies outright,  to combat ransomware attacks.

Bruce Schneier warns that AIs are becoming hackers. They're able to find exploitable vulnerabilities in software code. They're still not very good at it, but they'll get better. It's the kind of problem that lends itself to modern machine learning techniques: an enormous amount of input data, pattern matching, and goals that permit reinforcement. We have every reason to believe that AIs will continue to get better at this task and will soon surpass humans. They'll even come up with hacks that we humans would judge creative.

Amy Ertan and Tarah Wheeler describe how the World Health Organization is uniquely positioned to help secure all facets of vaccine information.

The cryptocurrency depends on the integrity of the blockchain. But China's censors, the FBI, or powerful corporations could fragment it into oblivion, warn Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier.

Bruce Schneier explains how the modern market economy, which aggressively rewards corporations for short-term profits and aggressive cost-cutting, is also part of the problem: Its incentive structure all but ensures that successful tech companies will end up selling unsecure products and services.