February 7, 2002
I have just read your essay on "Plutonium and Civilization," and while I appreciate your careful thought on this issue (few people realize the present relevance of the threat you raise). I must differ with you on the long-term dangers of this terrorist technology.
Plutonium oxide dust is a potentially cheap, simple, stupid contaminant, and lethal-on-inhalation. You are in good company when you talk about its disruptive effects in the short term. (You would enjoy reading Heinlein's excellent Solution Unsatisfactory (1941, reprinted in Expanded Universe) where a plutonium-dust weapon brings world peace at the cost of the loss of liberty.) It's comforting to know that this idea has been out there for over 60 years, and it hasn't yet been tried. I think there are powerful, hidden reasons for this.
My suggestion is that you are overlooking how strong both our cultural and technological immune systems are becoming. Plutonium dust, whether dispersed "widely and weakly" (its lethality is rapidly diluted in atmosphere) or "narrowly and lethally" could be easily vacuumed up by armies of mobile robots. Autonomous robotics are within a decade-or-two of being ubiquitous. Deployment of a weapon of this sort would only strongly accelerate their arrival. And such scenarios will become steadily rarer, as we rapidly move into a transparent society. Nuclear weapons nonproliferation and disarmament efforts are more aggressive now than ever. DOE projections for nuclear energy use show it continuing to drop between now and 2040. Even if oil gets scarce after 2020, as in the most pessimistic of Hubbert Curve scenarios, we'll still go to some renewable source of low environmental impact. We will demand this of our technologies, and they will deliver. Post-Chernobyl, nuclear power has never been politically sustainable (cultural immune systems).
The most important transformation happening on our planet today is the accelerating increase of intelligence, immune systems, and integration (with humanity) in our technologies. Well before this Century is out, we'll have autonomous, self-improving machine intelligence. No computationally-simple threat of any kind (viruses, bacteria, plutonium dust, toxins, etc.) will be a credible threat to local complexity of human/machine intelligences and their immune systems in that environment. Computation is just increasing in scope and power too quickly for this to occur, in a hyperexponential growth process that has apparently continued over the lifetime of the universe (our local technologies are just the latest extension of this growth curve). Only other complex systems are potential threats in a computation-rich environment, but they appear to develop convergent and information-protecting ethics in direct proportion to their complexity. No catastrophe I know of has ever reduced the complexity of information in the local environment (on the contrary, catastrophes appear to accelerate complexity development).
It's a highly "complexity-stable" universe we live in, and we humans are apparently more catalysts than controllers of this process.
John Smart, Chairman
LA Futurists
www.SingularityWatch.com
Understanding Accelerating Change