[onceKnowable]

There’s precedent here. Einstein notified the US President when it became clear as to the danger associated with, what were then, recent developments in high-energy particle physics. That allowed politicians, who would have had very little knowledge of physics, to do their job effectively according to the “new landscape” that such developments presented.

The mistake he made was that he only alerted authorities. Which lead to atom bombs being developed in secret without any feedback from the public as to whether this was a direction that they supported.

What we need in 2018 and beyond is for current and future developers of new technologies to alert both authorities and the public so that politicians can legislate for that technology’s use with public input as to what limits are deemed appropriate by the public at large.

The deep fakes example highlighted elsewhere in the thread is a perfect example of this. How can politicians legislate for this technology when they don’t even know it exists? How can the public indicate to those same politicians that they feel that deep fake technology used to create revenge porn is something that the public wishes to be made illegal?

Laws, and society as a whole, are a feedback mechanism that rely on information. Those with that information have a moral obligation to alert the public to consequences that will affect them all.

[carry_bit]

> The mistake he made was that he only alerted authorities. Which lead to atom bombs being developed in secret without any feedback from the public as to whether this was a direction that they supported.

The risk there is that if you dithered the enemy could get it first.

If Pandora's box exists, there is only so much you can do to stop someone from opening it.

[onceKnowable]

His disclosures were before the war. If the public had a chance to chip in, along with a public debate that would inevitably lead to our current MAD theory, then it’s reasonable to imagine that the current “let’s not go to war with each other anymore because MAD” might, even before WW2, have been “let’s not go to war with each other anymore, or develop these expensive yet terrifying weapons, because MAD”.

The key point is that without the public’s input, politicians acting rationally, decided to direct their engineers & scientists (also acting rationally) to develop these weapons in secret, with everyone involved knowing that nukes were “extremely powerful” and “terrifying” and “war-ending” but not fully appreciating the whole MAD aspect that happens when your enemies play development catch up.

Tons of technologies today, while not as much of an instant threat to our civilization as nukes, are loaded with ethical concerns that current politicians and the public at large are just not aware of. Just reference the deep fakes saga for one recent example. There’s currently no laws outlawing the use of deep fake techniques to produce revenge porn but there’s every reason to believe that these techniques will be outlawed for such use in forthcoming legislation now that the public and politicians are aware of the risk. Extrapolate that to any number of innovations. With informed debate we can keep laws ahead of the game and prevent new techniques and technologies from being legally used for unethical purposes.