Saw this in a recent exchange over Cicero's essay "Freedom". After discussing certain elements of the 1918 influenza virus and publication of its genome sequence, Celebrim adds this point. It's a good one, because it defines our future. As you read it, consider its importance to the present global situation, esp. in context of past Winds articles like The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc. Fred Ikle on Intelligence, WMDs and the Future, Tim Oren's chilling addendum in 3 Touchstones, 3 Conjectures, Winds of Change.NET's coverage of the bioweapon threat, indeed our entire 4HA: Nukes, Poisons, Germs Topic Archive.
The Mad Scientist Postulate
by 'Celebrim'
All this brings us back around to the real sense in which 'information wants to be free'. Viruses want to be free too, in the sense that it requires more work to contain a virus than it does to spread one. At some point in the 20th century (or possibly earlier) we crossed a threshold in which in the society that we had created information became more expensive to contain than to distribute. This is not necessarily a natural state for society or information. It's entirely possible that absent the cultural and technological infrastructure that we've created, it takes more work to distribute information than it does to contain it, but it is I would argue a necessary precondition for sustaining our culture are we know it.
Hence we are at a point at which, through great effort we've made information easy to distribute to our own immense benefit. This condition will sustain progress up until the point at which this increasing power 'liberates' a subcommunity which is both capable of and willing to destroy the system. As information becomes more readily attainable and technological capacity increases, the minimum size of a subcommunity capable of destroying the rest of the system decreases. At some point, there will be (at best) equilibrium. No further progress will be possible because the n% dissidents in the system will be able to destroy all the economic output of the other 1-n%. With sufficiently advanced technology, the ordinary person can hold the entire rest of humanity hostage just on the simple fact that it will always be easier to destroy things than create them. You could call this the 'mad scientist' postulate.
Some writers have called the point at which humanity escaped from a perpetual cycle of dictatorial military oligarchies with slave economies by creating an alternative system capable of outproducing them as 'The Exit'. I would argue that we are by no means out of the woods yet. I would argue that the next 'exit' will involve finding a means of escaping the 'mad scientist' postulate.
>finding a means of escaping the 'mad scientist' postulate
Distance.
I don't think it's that pessimistic an outlook.
Making WMD is HARD. Nuclear weapons, the most useful and dangerous, requires very careful and hard-to-do refining of uranium into plutonium, and some very careful milling of plutonium which undergoes something like 17 changes in states when it's alloyed and cooled. Not to mention each are toxic. Then there's the timing and creation of the explosive "lenses" to focus the implosion of the plutonium which requires precision manufacturing itself. None of this is trivial.
There is a reason that Iran has taken more than twenty years despite sustained massive efforts and oil revenues to get nuclear weapons; India and Pakistan took nearly as long. It's not quite as difficult for bio and chem weapons but they are much harder to deliver as the US Army found in it's experiments in the 1950's.
What is truly dangerous is taking "off the shelf" stuff; 9/11 was not mad scientist territory as much as using assumptions (hijacking is hostage-taking) against the West. Something like that is basically not replicable on Commercial Airliners with passengers since they will all now fight to the death to regain the plane. I don't think a Mad Scientist working alone, without State sponsorship and massive mobilization of resources can create a WMD, of any type.
Even a bio weapon needs a method of delivery, and measures to prevent your own forces from being killed. Saddam found it as a practical matter that Anthrax, plague etc was very tricky to use, much as the Japanese before him had discovered. The Japanese DID use plague and anthrax against the Chinese in WWII, and it was effective, but the effort required to make bombs that did not explode too violently to destroy the bioweapons was lengthy and considerable. Beyond the scope of any one organization much less one man.
The true power of modern technology rests in the societies that produce them, which require lots of resources, mobilized quickly and efficiently, This leverages the very deep and specialized knowledge possible in modern societies to make something like the highly survivable (and therefore deadly) nuclear ballistic missile submarine).