A vision of crime in the future
“I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we’ve been promised, but, you see, I’ve spent a career in law enforcement, and that’s informed my perspective on things. […] Every day we’re connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked. […] more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities and Criminals understand this. Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this. If you control the code, you control the world.”
As our knowledges and our ability to create and shape the world around us have grown, so did our ability to destroy and annihilate. However, we tend to believe that the pros of our technology growth are always greater than the its cons and that, no matter some side effects, the final outcomes of technology’s development are always positive. And this has been probably true, until now.
However, Marc Goodman points out that this trend may be changing and that what a single person is able to do today with the modern technologies is starting to be much more dangerous than what we think. Indeed, technology has made our world increasingly open and all of this openness may have unintended consequences.
The 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai is a great paradigm of this danger. 10 men armed not just with weapons, but with technology, were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill. And terrorism is not the only field where technology improved the danger for our society, there’s also been a big paradigm shift in crime. In the Sony PlayStation hack over 100 million people were robbed. When in the history has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million?
These are just primary examples of how a restrict number of people can now have control on huge number of people just trough an internet access or a gun (that now you can easily print in our apartment with a 3D printer!). Other scenario of this changing trend is Biology, where recent researches are leading us to a whole new kind of treats. Creating diseases in a way that they will affect just one particular person will be probably possible thanks to the recent studies on DNA. How will we be able to defend our leaders then? How will be able to defend our self.
Marc Goodman focus is attention on the fact that a problem that was once restricted to a small number of circumstances and limited by time and space, such were crime or terrorism, is now becoming too big to be controlled. Ironically, the modern development of technology might have lead us to transform a dangerous but controllable situation into a wicked and runaway problem.
https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_goodman_a_vision_of_crimes_in_the_future?language
