Technological Revolutions That Might Happen
 • Based on Future Imperfect: Book on my web page
 • Ways in which technological change
  –Might sharply change the world on your lifetime
  –Because beyond that the future is too uncertain
  –And even then, the key word is “might.”
 • What might happen if technologies develop in 
  certain ways
  –What problems and opportunities will appear
  –How might they be dealt with
    Everyone is Too Conservative
 • Global Warming is a wimpy catastrophe
  –Temperature up by a few degrees by 2100
  –Sea levels up by a few feet
  –I have three different ways of wiping out the human race 
   faster than that
  –Or of making life enormously better
 • My three
  –Biotech: Tailored diseases, made by a kid in his basement
  –Nanotech: Turning the world into grey goo
  –Artificial intelligence: What happens when we share the 
   world with beings much smarter than we are?
         Privacy x 2
  • Encryption makes possible, online, more 
   privacy than we have ever had
  • Surveillance technology makes possible, in 
   realspace, less privacy than we have ever had
         More: Public Key Encryption
 • Create a pair of long numbers, such that
   – A message scrambled by one must be unscrambled by the other
   – Make one of them public: Your public key
   – Keep the other a very strict secret
 • That enables
   – Private conversations: Encrypt with my public key, send it to me
   – Identity online:
    • I encrypt with my private key, you decrypt with my public key
    • So you know the message was from me
   – It is now possible to combine reputation and anonymity
   – Anonymous e-cash so no one knows who is paying whom what
   – Remailers so nobody knows who you are talking with
 • A world of strong privacy
      Less: Surveillance Technology
  • It starts as video cameras on poles
    –Just like a cop watching the park
    –But he can do it in comfort, out of the rain
  • Add in face recognition and databases 
    –Now everything you do is recorded and findable
      • at least in public places and maybe
      • Almost everywhere. Video mosquitoes.
    –David Brin, The Transparent Society, offers a solution
      • The cops can watch us, but we can watch them
      • Problem: They can arrest us, we can’t arrest them