Internet Archives - Martin van Creveld

For many years now, what I have liked most about the Net is that it is full of surprises. Press a few keys, even at random, even by mistake, and you never know what is going to pop up at you from around the corner. Just a few days ago, purely by accident, I came across the following sentence: “when everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). So, to make myself and perhaps a few of my readers think, I thought I’d draw up a (very incomplete) list of a few of the things everyone thinks are true.

Well, almost everyone.

Global warming is real and threatens to put an end to us all.
The earth’s resources are about to run out.
“Natural” (as opposed, I suppose, to “unnatural” and “supernatural”) is always better.
Thin is good.
Our understanding of, and control over, nature is growing all the time.
What one author has called, “the better angels of our nature” have been steadily gaining the upper hand. As, for example, abolishing slavery, granting women equal rights, and so on.
The singularity is near. Computers, aka artificial intelligence, can, or will soon be able to, think as well as, or better than, we do.
Psychology is a science and has made great advances since, let us say, the time of Homer.
All people are equal. The only differences between people of different races are slight physiological ones: such as the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, and the like.
It is better for some innocent people to be falsely convicted than for some guilty ones to go unpunished.
Liberal democracy is the best form of government (that is why even totalitarian governments, such as the Chinese one, claim to be democratic).
Colonialism was/is absolutely bad and had/has no redeeming characteristics at all.
Whatever a man can do, a woman can do too.
Men have it better and oppress women.
Depending on the time, place, and the gender to which you belong, unless you are over 17, or 16, or 13, sex is bad for you. The more so if you have it with someone who is older than you.
Starting with the Biblical Joseph, Every time a woman cries “rape,” or “sexual harassment,” she was speaking gospel truth.
For any half way competent woman to stay at home and raise her children is demeaning and a waste of her precious talents.
The best way to raise children is to separate them from their parents at an early age—often, no more than a few weeks—and send them first to a nursery and then to school where the most important thing they will learn is to sit down and shut up for so and so many hours each day.
Children under 12, or 14, or 16, should be prohibited from doing any kind of paid work and, by so doing, gain confidence and self-esteem.
Children who, rather than doing homework, watch TV or play computer games are wasting their time.

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Note: I do not claim that even one of the above propositions is necessarily false. Only that, and if only because (to repeat), when everyone thinks alike no one thinks at all, rethinking them from time to time may have some real benefits. So thank God for the few among us who do have what it takes—and, believe me, it can take a lot—not to think alike.

Roey Tzezana, Rulers of the Future (Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 2017).

Dr. Roey Tzezana is an Israeli computer expert who works for Tel Aviv University among other places. His book was recommended to me by my son, Eldad van Creveld, who plays a key role in teaching computer networking here in Israel. Like so many other computer experts from the famous Ray Kurzweil down, Dr. Tzezana is trying to look into what a computer-dominated world might be like. His conclusions are not encouraging, to say the least.

As most of us have already realized, and as those who have not will discover soon enough, we are going through a truly revolutionary period. For the first time in history everything—and I mean, everything—that takes place anywhere can be recorded. Driving this development are millions upon millions of miniature sensors sufficiently small and sufficiently cheap to be mounted wherever they are wanted. On the streets. In cars and other vehicles. On doors and windows. Inside buildings. Inside individual rooms. In the sky, on board drones so small that they are hardly noticeable. Inside every kind of gadget, however innocuous. On the clothes we wear. Inside our bodies, should that be considered necessary or desirable and in case the legal hurdles are removed.

Once recorded, the information can easily be stored and kept forever. And edited, and altered, should those in charge feel inclined in that direction. With the aid of artificial intelligence capable of discovering patterns, it will also be analyzed and searched for whatever it may mean. Your health, your habits, your movements. The things you eat and drink and wear and carry with you. The things you see and hear and say and read and watch and do. The kind of relationship you have, or do not have, with anyone else. The things you take up and put down and lose and find (and do or do not return to their owner) and lend and borrow. And every financial transaction you make, of course.

Briefly, Goebbels’ claim that, in Nazi Germany, privacy only existed in people’s dreams looks as if it is about to become reality (some scientists believe that even dreams will end up by becoming transparent, but let’s not go into that here). To say nothing of any thoughts and emotions you may have. The question Dr. Tzezana raises is, qui bono? Who profits? It is at this point where leviathans, sharks and clouds come in.

Leviathans, obviously enough, are named after Thomas Hobbes’ famous 1651 book. Starting at least as far back as the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, rulers have always done their utmost to obtain whatever information they could about their subjects. The more and better information they had, the more able they were to hold those subjects in check, increase and perpetuate their own power, prevent rebellion, etc. Thus one possible, in many case even likely, outcome of the enormous network of sensors, data links, computers and artificial intelligence now being constructed by every more or less “advanced” state would be a tyranny. One which would make even North Korea looks as harmless as a Fischer-Price Toys Chatter Telephone.

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In China something of the kind is being constructed even now. Meet the so-called Social Credit System. See, for the details, R. Botsman, “Chinas’ New Viral App Could be Straight Out of Black Mirror,” 21.10.2017, Wired, at http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.). Supposed to be completed in 2020, in principle it will resemble today’s credit rating system. Gathering all the above-mentioned kinds of data and then some, it will automatically rate every citizen on a scale ranging from 350 to 950 points. Are you neatly dressed? Your score goes up by so and so many fractions of a point. Did you obey your doctor and lose weight? Ditto. Did you cross a street without marching to the next pedestrian crossing first? Down it goes by another fraction. Did you raise your voice at a government official? Did you try to access a foreign-generated article on the situation in Tibet? The results will be used to determine whether you will or will not have access (and under what conditions) to any number of desirable things. Starting with credit and ending with health services, the right to enter certain educational facilities and work in certain fields, the right to travel, and a great many other things.

All these decisions, whose number will run into billions per day, will be made automatically. In charge of the computers that run the system will be the government, of course. Its officials will decide exactly how many points each piece of praiseworthy behavior (e.g. telling people that Xi Jinping is the greatest leader, as well as the nicest man, in history) or transgression will add to your score or cost you. From time to time, the rules will be changed so as to take account of changing circumstances. Some will no doubt be published so as to help people understand what is wanted of them. Many others will not be, leaving them in the dark as to what is happening to them and why.

At the moment China is the only country publicly known to be building such a system. But this will probably change. I do not mean just tin-pot dictatorships such as exist in many different parts of the world. But also highly developed Western countries such as Canada, or Britain—the latter, in my experience, has already in many ways been turned into a mixture of political correctness and police state—or the Netherlands, or Switzerland. And he US, of course.

Technologically speaking they, and a great many others, can easily do what China can. The only thing that stands in the way are laws concerning privacy, transparency, and respect for the individual. However, should terrorism turn into a more serious problem than it already is, surely such laws will be quickly and quite easily swept away.

So what to do? Enters, says Dr. Tzezana, something he calls DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Such an organization will use the same methods to collect just as much information as China’s Social Credit System will and process it in similar ways. Instead of keeping it secret and available only to the country’s rulers, though, the information in question, as well as the rules by which it is classified and used, will be available to any member of the Cloud. Somewhat like Uber and AirBnB, but without their centralized headquarters. Operating in such a way, it will provide members with such benefits as “peer to peer insurance, peer to peer conflict resolution systems, peer to peer document storage and peer to peer support.” All incomparably faster, cheaper, and in some ways more reliable than anything available today. That way, Dr. Tzezana hopes, sharks and leviathans will be thwarted and democracy preserved. The flipside? Everyone will be publicly rated by everyone else on everything all the time.

From bad to worse, I myself would say.