Error or Terror: Controlling Emerging Technology
By John Drzik,
CNBC
| 01. 15. 2015
Innovation is vital to progress. Advances in science, have propelled economic and societal development throughout history. Today's emerging technologies have the potential to increase global prosperity and tackle major global challenges.
However, innovation also creates risks. Understanding the hazards that can stem from new technologies is critical to avoiding potentially catastrophic consequences.
The recent wave of cyber-attacks exemplify how new technologies can be exploited for malicious ends and create new threats to global safety. Risk governance needs to keep pace with advances in scientific innovation.
Synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are two examples of the "next cyber"; emerging technologies with the capacity to deliver enormous benefits but which also present significant challenges to government, industry and society.
Take synthetic biology: creating new organisms from the building blocks of DNA offers the potential to fight infectious disease, treat neurological disorders, alleviate worries about food security and create biofuels.
The flipside is that the genetic manipulation of organisms could also create significant harm, through error or terror. The accidental leakof dangerous synthetized organisms, perhaps in the form of deadly viruses or plant...
Related Articles
By Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, The Scientist | 03.15.2024
Scientists have genetically modified isolated microbes for decades. Now, using CRISPR, they intend to target entire microbiomes.
Humans are never alone. Even in a room devoid of other people, they are always in the company of billions of microscopic beings...
By Nancy S. Jecker and Andrew Ko, The Conversation | 02.14.2024
How does a brain chip work?
Neuralink’s coin-size device, called N1, is designed to enable patients to carry out actions just by concentrating on them, without moving their bodies.
Subjects in the company’s PRIME study – short for Precise Robotically...
By Liam Drew, Nature | 02.02.2024
Neuralink, the company through which entrepreneur Elon Musk hopes to revolutionize brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), has implanted a ‘brain-reading’ device into a person for the first time, according to a tweet posted by Musk on 29 January.
BCIs record and...
By Pete Shanks, The Progressive Magazine | 12.04.2023
Five years ago, on November 25, 2018, the world learned that a rogue Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had created the first children whose DNA had been tailored using gene editing before they were born. They were twins, code-named “Lulu” and...