John Mecklin
Scientists from the Manhattan Project launched the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945 to focus world attention on a new technology that posed a truly existential threat to humanity. In the words of founding Bulletin co-editor Eugene Rabinowitz, the Bulletin wanted “to awaken the public to the full understanding of the horrendous reality of nuclear weapons, and of their far-reaching implications for the future of mankind; to warn of the inevitability of other nations acquiring nuclear weapons within a few years, and of the futility of relying on America’s possession of the ‘secret’ of the bomb.” But in that same article, Rabinowitch noted that the problems raised by the nuclear bomb were “but one aspect of a broader and more complex challenge with which the scientific and technological revolution confronted mankind” (Rabinowitch 1970Rabinowitch, E. 1970. “Twenty-Five Years Later.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 26 (6): 4–34. doi:10.1080/00963402.1970.11457818.
“It was anticipated,” he wrote elsewhere, “that the atom bomb would be only the first of many dangerous presents from Pandora’s box of modern science. Consequently, it was clear that the education of man to the realities of the scientific age would be a long, sustained effort.”
Indeed, the Bulletin has covered a broad range of scientific and policy subjects through the decades, publishing, for example, its first cover story about the danger of climate change in 1978, long before it was anything like a matter of general public concern. Now, climate change is as much a focus as nuclear weapons in the calculus by which Bulletin experts set the Doomsday Clock each year. Advances in newer “disruptive technologies” – cyberweapons, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and advanced robotics, among others – represent potential threats to the future of human civilization and are therefore also part of the Bulletin’s purview.
In fact, extraordinarily fast-paced advance across the full breadth of the world’s scientific and technological enterprise constitutes a defining characteristic of the 21st century. In this issue of the Bulletin, leading experts explore how these quickly changing technologies increasingly intersect with one another and, as they do, pose new types of global threats. Those threats are in some cases now so likely to manifest themselves that, as experts from the Council on Strategic Risks argue, nations around the world have a “responsibility to prepare” for them.
Will unchecked climate change cause rising seas and extended droughts that destabilize countries with nuclear arsenals and power programs? Will some combination of artificial intelligence and cyberweapons undermine the strategic nuclear balance that has held since the end of World War II? Will some nation or nations exploit technological developments in gene editing, cognitive manipulation, and computer-brain interfaces to create human-machine superwarriors? Might drone swarms of cooperative, autonomous robots – reacting on the battlefield much as flocks of birds – revolutionize the way militaries fight, giving some countries a sudden and unexpected advantage? Will gene editing, synthetic biology, and new artificial intelligence applications be used to create crops that are more resilient to climate change – or will such efforts lead to disastrous unintended consequences?
The possibilities embedded in the preceding questions are not science fiction imaginings but expert assessments that need to be understood by citizens and addressed by governments around the world. As science and technology advance exponentially, the effort to manage and direct them toward good ends will need to expand and become more effective. Because the Pandora’s box of modern science can never be closed, we must be constantly attentive to the potential dangers of its latest issuances.
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