2017-03-23 Pugwash Meeting: The EPA, Climate, and Trump
Many times before and during his campaign, Donald Trump contradicted scientific consensus on climate change. After winning the election, he proposed a climate denier to lead the transition to his administration for the EPA. As soon as he was inaugurated, several federal agencies who conduct research on the environment and other natural matters were ordered to cease communicating their research. Now the administrator he selected for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has disagreed that carbon dioxide is a "primary contributor" to carbon dioxide and claimed that further study and debate is necessary. Following all of this doubt and obstruction, the new president is expected to undo the work that previous US administrations have applied to protect the environment.
Already, President Trump has proposed major budget reductions for the EPA; NOAA, which conducts weather research and includes the National Weather Service; and other such agencies, in order to feed greater defense spending. He is expected to repeal the 2015 Clean Power Plan soon, which restricts the greenhouse gas emissions of power plants. Given his oath to reduce government regulation, what has been set in motion, and the support of the Republican majorities in Congress, it is quite clear that Donald Trump intends to set back efforts in reducing pollution, addressing climate change, and other past targets of the EPA.
What environmental effects is our country, as well as the rest of the world, likely to experience as a result of the Trump Administration's policies? Are there ways that their policies might change direction or that our environment might be protected despite the deregulation and downsizing?
2017-03-09 Pugwash Meeting: Technology in Education
Despite the potential to provide teaching without restriction of time or place, educational technology has seen mixed results. Students have gained opportunities to learn at their own pace and study curricula that their schools may not otherwise be able to provide. On the other hand, the effectiveness of their learning depends on the quality of the technology, which may be outdated or poorly designed. For instance, many teaching programs use simple, procedural methods to instill knowledge, which research has found to be less effective in some cases than focus on concepts and critical thinking.
What are the differences between effective and ineffective teaching programs? What benefits do applications of technology have over traditional teaching methods, and what is the proper place of technology in education?
Read More:
Silicon Valley teacher: Don’t confuse educational technology that helps kids learn — and doesn’t
2017-03-02 Pugwash Lecture: Mathematical Paradoxes in Democratic Election Systems
This week, we are hosting J. Gregory Yoest's lecture on the decision science involved in election systems, particularly the USA's electoral college. There has been much consternation and debate regarding the electoral college, especially after two recent elections where the victor did not lead in the popular vote. Research by 20th century social choice theorists, however, generated several arguments in favor of the current system. Join us this Thursday as Mr. Yoest examines various possible election systems and compares them against the electoral college.
Tartan Article - Ranking the world’s most pressing issues poses dilemmas
Author: Ray Ye
This week at Student Pugwash, the science, technology, and society discussion club undertook one of the most difficult exercises under our jurisdiction: listing and ordering all the problems humanity needs to face. A daunting task for even the most stable of governments, the challenge was taken head on by our team and we delivered a final ranking of all the issues we thought were important. By the end of the meeting, we had a definitive list — sort of.
Initially, we intended to make a short list of specific problems such as climate change, superbugs, and political extremism. However, in the first hour alone, we had produced up to 30 issues. Therefore, it was necessary to view the task through a different lens.
In an attempt to organize our list, we started categorizing the individual items, as many had overlapping root causes with potentially overlapping solutions. For example, the first category was concerned with ideological problems, such as extremism and xenophobia. Then, we moved on to another category: social issues, which includes problems like aging populations.
Eventually, our list was reduced to six unordered issues that could be categorized easily. They were ideological, economic, social, public health, technological, and environmental issues. Next, we undertook the slightly less daunting task of ranking these six groups. To lessen the potential for major disagreements, we began from the bottom with sixth most pressing issue almost unanimously agreed to be ideological in nature.
This is because there is one major difference that ideological problems have from the rest, in that the solutions are less definitive and somewhat ambiguous. Questions of what constitutes a good ideology have plagued philosophers and politicians for centuries, and even now there is no clear way to solve these problems without some level of ethical breaching. Therefore, it was accepted that ideology would be something not easily solvable, and so it was placed sixth.
The next to be put on the list was technology. Like ideology, we also had the unified opinion to place it second to last, since there seemed to be fewer pressing issues within the category than in others. Furthermore, most of those under the technology umbrella were also in other categories as well.
The fourth was health, which generated much discussion. This is because Pugwash recently covered the concerns over superbugs, which hinge on fears of a global epidemic without an effective cure. Unfortunately, even though fear of superbugs is a very legitimate concern, the lack of possible pathogens that could annihilate all humanity subtracted from the topic’s relative importance. Disease and disability also seemed to be more of an economic conundrum, with some treatment applications correlating with personal wealth and social standing.
We were then faced with the task of ordering the final three categories, namely economics, social, and environmental. Unfortunately, we never completed the rank¬ing, as it became clear that these three generated the most controversy over rank¬ings. In the end, we agreed to rank them all as first. The underlying connections between these three topics made isolating them challenging. Furthermore, varying time frames for their potential dangers and solutions confounded the ability to rank them.
The arguments for the ordering of these final three topics were impassioned and insightful, digging into the complexities of what exactly it means for one catastrophe to be more pressing than the next. Others began to reject the established ordering of the fourth, fifth, and sixth topics as well. By the end of the meeting, we certainly had not compiled the definitive, ordered list of our planet’s most dire needs. In fact, there are hundreds of extinction-level events that are more than possible of occurring.
We accomplished far more meaningful goals along the way. We explored the structure, complexities and relationships between the trials of humanity. By categorizing and considering these topics, the unfathomable challenges of the 21st century seemed more, if only by a bit more, understandable.
2017-02-23 Pugwash Meeting: Ranking the World's Most Pressing Problems
Instead of focusing on a specific issue this week, we'll conduct an exercise in comparing the urgency of the world's most pressing problems. Do you think that the world should be more concerned about climate change or fair government? Should more resources go towards ending starvation or water crises? Does malaria or AIDS pose a greater threat to the people of the world? Join us with all of your thoughts on disasters, diseases, and humanity's deficiencies, and together we'll choose how they rank amongst each other.
Tartan Article - Communication in the science community in under attack
Author: Zeke Rosenberg
Science has a messaging problem. Science is often corrupted in public perception so the general populace gains completely false beliefs that they attribute to science. In the opposite direction, some scientific consensuses are viewed as political or treated with outright denial rather than healthy skepticism. Scientists, who often rely on public funding and therefore goodwill with much of the nation, must communicate effectively and positively with the public. Groups like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service have been stripped of their ability to communicate with the public and other scientists. The problem has gotten so bad that scientists are planning to march in protest of the current president's actions. Pugwash discussed what is causing this disconnect between science and parts of the public and what might fix it.
One of the primary problems with communication science faces is that media often covers science extremely poorly. Often, reporters do not understand what the study actually says and end up reporting a flashy part of a bit of research, completely corrupting the research along the way. John Oliver has already completely blown up his spot for this, but Al Roker once famously said "I think the way to live your life is you find the study that sounds best to you and you go with that." This shows how badly parts of the media misunderstand science. Cherry picking your results is a recipe for bad results. However, because the mainstream media will pick up stories from science media, they’re often reporting on single studies. This is not how science is designed to work, and it causes incorrect information to flow through the public.
Many examples of single studies wreaking havoc on society exist. The famous study linking vaccines to autism has been roundly discredited, but it continues to be a driving force behind the anti-vaccination movement. Similar things happen with climate change research. These lead to decisions that are bad for public safety.
Some of this is an internal problem. Null results are essential to make sure that false positives don’t cause us to gain false beliefs. However, null results often don’t get published in papers. This leads to several outcomes, all of which are problematic. The first is p-hacking, where scientists change their data analysis to get “statistically significant” results from their data and prove their point. This leads to incorrect or misleading information being published. The second is that false positives should happen no matter what due to statistical noise. If 20 scientists perform an experiment and there has no relationship between the variables they are measuring, one of them would be expected to get a significant result. This would be the result most likely to be published, and selection bias creates bad science. This is further compounded by the fact that it’s harder to publish reproductions of other studies, so false positives end up being the final say on a topic. This means that when facts get misreported, it can be difficult to try and publish evidence to the contrary.
Communication of science can be improved by making sure everyone has the tools necessary to interpret basic scientific facts. Understanding that results are not certainty but evidence in favor of a conclusion and other knowledge of the scientific method could be extremely effective in helping people understand the science necessary to make decisions in their day to day lives.
In addition, inspiring the public through science can help make more people interested in pursuing scientific research on their own. NASA’s moon launch inspired a generation of scientists; something similar could help science strike a more positive chord with people today. This could help scientists more effectively fulfill their role of inching closer to completing the public's knowledge of the natural world.
2017-02-09 Pugwash Meeting: Scientific Communication
A worry has developed that America’s new administration is causing difficulties in discussing science with the public. Federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department have seen their public communications heavily restricted. The USDA’s scientific research group was even forced to cease all of its publications. Some have decried these restrictions as contrary to “scientists’ right to speak about their work,” as well as that of the American people to hear about “taxpayer-funded research.”
Already, scientists across the country are planning a rally in Washington, D.C. on Earth Day. Coming off the heels of the Inauguration Day Women’s March, the March for Science carries many intents that scientists hope to share with the country, including respect for evidence-based research and open communication thereof. While hopes are high for many, however, some researchers disagree with the march and see it as overly political or otherwise contrary to the philosophy of science.
How should scientists communicate with the public? Do they need to take forceful measures to draw attention to important issues or maintain an air of non-partisan rationality? And what other obstacles are holding back scientists from sharing their research and passion for science?
Read More:
Washington Post: Federal agencies ordered to restrict their communications
Washington Post: Scientists plan to march on Washington — but where will it get them?
The source of energy once promised to the rid the earth of air-borne pollutants — while providing cheap fuel for an indefinite period of time — lost support from both the public and private spheres. Is our current skepticism toward nuclear fission justified? Or are we ignoring what may be the solution to the global energy crisis?
A nuclear energy renaissance was not long ago, as in the early 2010s support for nuclear power had expanded across the world. However, in the wake of Fukushima, plans to construct nuclear power plants were abandoned in almost every country. Earthquakes such as the one which caused the 2011 Japanese tsunami are a fact of life, and it may not be possible to construct an entirely quake-proof power plant.
Yet, the damage to Fukushima in 2011 occurred mostly because of a tsunami, not an earthquake. Furthermore, certain areas of the world experience significantly less seismic activity than others. For example, building nuclear reactors in the east coast of the United States is, on the whole, safe from these types of geological events. Nonetheless, the rapid increase in hydraulic fracturing may be triggering earthquakes in previously geologically placid areas.
Even given the rare — yet potentially catastrophic — risks of fission reactors, nuclear power may be significantly safer than fossil fuels in the long run. So, why does the public have so much fear towards an economically and environmentally viable fuel? Part of the reason could be miscommunication between scientists and the public. Nuclear power has been represented as a dangerous fuel for decades, and the media has fomented resentment towards the energy source in society. Perhaps scientists who support nuclear power need to communicate with the public directly, and to explain that nuclear plants are not as dangerous as the public opinion implies.
Carbon-free and cheap nuclear fission without accidents still presents a currently unsolved dilemma: the storing of nuclear waste. As of now, we currently enclose nuclear waste in materials that will hold them for potentially thousands of years, and bury these materials deep within the earth. Do we trust these methods for protecting us from the nuclear waste? Is the consequence for these casings cracking — thereby leaking the waste into groundwater — too dire to justify the risks? We do not have any economical clean alternatives at this moment. Perhaps storing nuclear waste is a small price to pay for a clean atmosphere.
While our nation is not currently pushing the construction of new reactors, nuclear research has experienced its own renaissance in recent years. New types of reactors are under development, some of which may alleviate the drawbacks of contemporary nuclear plants. For example, pebble bed and traveling wave reactors may ameliorate safety concerns surrounding 20th century reactor designs.
And then there are Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). While nuclear power provides cheap energy over a long period of time — due to the high energy density of the fuel — the startup cost of building a full sized plant is too high for most companies to shell out. SMRs are smaller reactors that can be built for a significantly smaller up-front cost than traditional nuclear power plants. While still in development, these reactors could be implemented across the country for a relatively low construction cost, each providing cheap energy to neighborhoods rather than cities. But such technology raises another concern: do we truly wish to have a small nuclear reactor as a neighbor?
Nuclear power remains a very difficult subject. The general disregard of nuclear power as a dangerous and infeasible source of power seems to be misguided, and nuclear energy — particularly with the advent of modern reactor designs — is a solution worth serious consideration. As scientists, we must communicate the true complexities of nuclear power to the populace so that we, the citizens, can rationally decide if it is time to make amends with the all-powerful atom.
As the world increases its dependence on technology, global energy demand rises in turn and more power plants are needed. Additionally, fossil fuels are progressively being replaced by cleaner energy sources, such as solar and wind, to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Nuclear power helps considerably with both of these concerns, thanks to uranium's incredible energy density and the lack of greenhouse gases emitted.
There remain, however, contentious debates regarding the cost and safety of nuclear plants. Large nuclear facilities cost about $9 billion to build in the US and show no signs of becoming cheaper, in contrast to natural gas and solar power (along with needed storage), which have greatly dropped in price in recent years. Furthermore, disasters like the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima have painted nuclear plants in the public eye as fatal accidents waiting to happen.
On the other hand, these worries may be invalidated by development of new technologies for nuclear power. Designs for "small modular reactors" are in progress and promise to both be far cheaper to install than current large nuclear plants and have fewer vulnerabilities that could risk a meltdown.
How should we proceed with nuclear power? Is this energy source too dangerous to use, or do its benefits outweigh its risks? Can we count on new technologies to solve these problems of cost and safety?
Read more:
Bloomberg: China’s Nuclear Power Capacity Set to Overtake U.S. Within Decade
Bloomberg: The Dream of Cheap Nuclear Power Is Over
Futurism: There’s No Argument Against Nuclear Power
The field of medicine faces a global crisis as bacteria evolve to resist our most reliable antibiotics. Bacteria have developed these resistances in response to widespread use of antibiotics in both human patients and livestock. According to the World Health Organization, if this overuse continues or grows, modern medicine could become completely ineffective and minor injuries and infections could become deadly once again.
To prevent further development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, we need to reduce our collective use of antibiotics. Collective effort solutions, however, face the incredible difficulty of convincing many people to take an action that may harm or inconvenience them personally in the short term. If antibiotic usage is reduced, doctors won't be able to treat their patients as effectively and farmers won't be able to grow their livestock to such great size and quantities as they do now. But if usage is not reduced, they may experience the same consequences many times over in the future.
What actions need to be taken to counteract the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and by whom? What challenges must humanity address such comprehensive problems like the dilemma of antibiotics, and how can they overcome them?
Read More:
Antibiotic Resistance Is Everyone's Problem
Resistance to the Antibiotic of Last Resort Is Silently Spreading
Does the US need a larger nuclear arsenal? Some scholars have argued for expansion of our deployed arsenal, pointing to present threats from China, North Korea, and Russia. The latter in particular has yet to reduce its deployed arsenal to meet the restrictions of the New START treaty. Other scholars have downplayed these threats, claming our existing firepower to be enough to match them; instead of increasing our numbers, we should focus on modernizing our arsenal to more diverse capbilities. Meanwhile, a new president is preparing to enter his first term, and he has made clear his preference for nuclear expansion in a December tweet. What will be the future of America's nuclear arsenal, and what will be the consequences?
Read more:
Matthew Kroenig: Trump Said the U.S. Should Expand Nuclear Weapons. He’s Right.
Steven Pifer: No, the U.S. Doesn’t Need to Expand Its Nuclear Weapons Program
Polling in recent years has shown some major inaccuracies. Back in 2012, many polls predicted the presidential election to be far closer than it actually was. This summer, Bernie Sanders perplexed the polls by taking a 1.5 percentage point victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary election, while the polls predicted a 21-point victory for Hillary Clinton on average. And finally, in last month’s presidential elections, Donald Trump has claimed victory via key swing states in the electoral college, despite polls estimating most of those states to swing in Clinton’s favor. These and even more flagrant polling misses, including the Scottish independence and European Union exit referenda in Britain, suggest a widespread systematic error in current polling.
Experts have cited reliance on landline numbers as a major sampling bias for polling. Many people have abandoned use of landline phones in favor of cell phones in recent years, but polls continue to primarily survey landline numbers due to a federal law against automated calls to cell phones. As a result, polls tend to underrepresent populations who favor cell phones over landlines, such as young adults and lower income groups. The sample is further limited by landline users who distrust automatic or unrecognized callers and thus do not respond to polling calls or ask to be placed on do-not-call lists. Even when polls try countermeasures, they introduce new biases, such as adjusting weights to match other polls or oversampling heavily ideological groups. What other problems do today’s polls face, and how should they seek to remedy them?
Several universities and private companies have been interacting in ways that worry proponents of academic purity. As tech companies recruit top minds in fields like Artificial Intelligence, academia loses some of their best researchers while industry gains greater expertise to propel itself forward. Some decry this "poaching" practice as the cause of a brain drain that will set back research by years just so that companies can increase their profits. Others support this recruitment strategy for empowering scientists with a competitive choice, creating a free market of employment that may ultimately improve fields and draw more new researchers.
Does the industrial practice of recruiting researchers from academia harm or help fields of research? Is there a good inherent in academic research that industry's interference detracts from? Do relations between academic and industrial parties break through some stagnation that academia suffers when in isolation?
Read more:
Prof. Andrew Moore: It’s not ‘corporate poaching’ – it’s a free market for brilliant people
LA Times: When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers
Tartan Article - Trump presidency leads to uncertainty for future of science
Author: Rob Macedo
Illustrator: Anna Boyle
Recent events have led to many questions about the future of our country, one major question being: What exactly does the Donald Trump presidency mean for the future of science and technology in the United States? Trump’s personal quips on the subject seem at best immature, simple, and uninformed, and at worst anti-fact. Yet, the forces and motives that have led to his unprecedented presidency are complex and nuanced, and paint an uncertain picture of the future for science in the United States.
On one hand, there are many signs that we are entering a dark age of scientific Armageddon. Trump has put a prominent climate change skeptic in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, and has publicly questioned climate change himself. He has supported claims that vaccines cause autism, and in general has expressed contempt for the scientific community. There is ample evidence that a Trump presidency could lead to a decrease in both funding and respect for science in America, and possibly in the world. This may be the tipping point for global catastrophes such as climate change, and this election will forever be remembered as the beginning of the end.
On the other hand, such fears may be somewhat alarmist. In fact, in many ways Trump could act as a catalyst to a certain type of scientific and technological progress in the United States. Trump rose to power because of a nationalism that — while in many ways is fearfully similar to the jingoism that beget Nazi Germany — is also not unlike the American fervor that propelled the United States scientifically and technologically after the second world war. For example, the 1960s space race that led to an acceleration of technological innovation was very much fueled by a nationalist and globally competitive atmosphere. This type of research — large, flashy, and militaristic — may be perfectly in-sync with Trump’s (and more importantly, Trump’s supporters’) agenda.
If marketed correctly, investment into clean energy could capture America’s imagination the way the space race so classically did. Currently, China is leading the world in clean energy research by a significant margin. If Trump and his supporters do truly wish to dominate China in all manners, we must increase expenditure in clean energy technologies. If the motive is spun not as an attack on fossil fuel industries, but rather a rejuvenation of American might, clean energy research could potentially receive a boost.
Yet, this could all be overly optimistic thinking about an administration that has great disdain for scientific inquiry, particularly climate change. While we may see growth in showy and defense-focused research, funding for fundamental climate research could wane, not unlikely funding cuts for stem cell research in the George W. Bush era. In fact, countries such as France have threatened to place tariffs on U.S. goods if the U.S. refuses to address climate change. This, coupled with Trump’s predilection for isolationism, could destroy the global competitiveness of American products (not to the mention the environment as well). As many articles on the subject have espoused, we honestly do not know exactly what Trump means for the future of science and technology. In this scenario, the only thing that is truly certain is uncertainty.
Donald Trump’s campaign and recent victory in the 2016 United States presidential election have wrought many controversies, including many matters where he stands against scientific consensus. He and his running mate, Mike Pence, have gone on record to deny climate change, claim that vaccines cause autism, and make several assertions about technological dangers that scientists dismiss as ridiculous, but are still believed by many. Furthermore, the president-elect has announced controversial appointments such as Myron Ebell, a prominent climate change denier, who may threaten the future of research in climate science and other areas during the Executive Branch’s transition.
What do scientists and science advocates have to fear from the coming Trump Administration, and how should they react? Will they need to fight for the survival of certain policies? Are there ways in which Donald Trump can and should be convinced to change his mind? Conversely, are there any upsides to the development of science and technology that we should look forward to from our new president? Come discuss this and more at Pugwash this Thursday!
Read more:
Washington Post: Trump and Pence on science, in their own words
Nature: What scientists should focus on — and fear — under Trump
Dr. Corinne Le Quéré Q&A: Why It Makes Business Sense for Trump to Tackle Global Warming
Each day, we see the rise of machine learning in new applications and technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, personal assistant AIs like Siri, and decision-making algorithms that may someday drive our legal systems. With every advance, we experience changes in the functions of our society and the agency of each citizen: new jobs are created while old jobs are given to automation, and more of our choices are made to depend on intricate, invisible programs. Because of these changes, we need to determine ethical standards for how we allow computers to affect our society and the lives of all people.
CMU will soon accelerate research in this field with the recently sponsored and announced K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies. We invite you to join us in discussing the fundamental topics of Computational Ethics that they might consider. How should we factor the existence of algorithmic biases in the ways we treat programs? Does the job market need to be protected from advances in automation? How much agency do humans need to retain while depending upon the operation of artificial intelligences? All of this and more will be on the table when you join us this Thursday at Pugwash.
Read more:
Carnegie Mellon Receives $10 Million From K&L Gates To Study Ethical Issues Posed by Artificial Intelligence
Obama: My Successor Will Govern a Country Being Transformed by AI
A New AI Ethics Center Shows Growing Angst About Machine Smarts
Last week, a wide scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack struck the internet, shutting down major websites such as Twitter for small, yet noticeable, periods of time.
A DDoS attack is characteristically simple; it involves simply overwhelming a server with requests, much like blocking an entrance to a building by sending too many people through the door at once. Usually, large companies with formidable firewalls can prevent such simple raids.
Yet, the fact that a DDoS attack successfully disrupted so many mainstream websites raises concerns regarding the safety of the internet. If such a simple attack — when executed artfully — can shut down major websites, how much damage could a more sophisticated hack cause? Consequently, how should we conduct ourselves online when web security protocols are vulnerable to the most forceful of breaches?
The current design of the internet may be inherently insecure, as the web was not built with air-tight security in mind. Perhaps the only way to be safe is to take security into your own hands, and not to rely on the security provided by others to protect you. Furthermore, fully securing the internet may be detrimental to one of the most critical functions of the web: increasing our freedom to information. The security vs. freedom tradeoff is an old debate, but perhaps it is no more prevalent than when considering the consequences of a “100 percent hack free” net. For example, a fully secure internet would require some sort of authority to decide what may be allowed and what is not.
Is this truly what we desire the internet to be? Access to boundless information may, by its very nature, give others endless access to our own information. Technology may not be the ideal solution to internet vulnerabilities. We may have a social problem, rather than a scientific one. If individuals do not take responsibility into their own hands, technologically securing online interaction without sacrificing freedom of information may be futile. In this sense, internet security can be considered a social engineering problem. We must teach people how to be vigilant online, and how to protect their information. These practices can be very simple, such as not opening emails from unknown senders with hundreds of recipients. Yet, many of these protocols are far from common sense. Furthermore, online resources could be designed to ease the process of securing one’s data.
Nonetheless, even if these procedures are widely adopted, it is still naive to assume our information would be impenetrable. How should our government communicate critical and confidential information, which could have catastrophic repercussions if leaked? The recent email scandal involving Hillary Clinton only underscores the tremendous vulnerabilities in networked systems. Linking servers together on isolated networks, not unlike the “ARPANET,” is most likely the solution our government currently implements.
Yet even these networks are vulnerable, though it is perhaps a step in the right direction. Asking our leaders to fully isolate their information to non-networked devices could simply be too infeasible for realistic implementation, and we must accept that there is a small, but certainly present, chance that our country’s most crucial security can be stolen. A solution may lie within the benevolence of major software corporations. For example, Google will alert users if it appears that their computer has become a “zombie,” i.e. a computer that has been maliciously hijacked to execute attacks such as DDoS on other systems. In this sense, the future may belong to “white-hat hackers:” an almost priest-like group of individuals who bestow knowledge of technological security unto the masses, and who alert the populace when cyber evils are present. Due to the complexity of internet security, we may have no choice but to surrender our freedoms to these “anointed” individuals.
But such a future is far from optimal and will be resisted by those who wish to understand and maintain their security privately. Like many topics discussed at Pugwash, the solution may lie within society, and not technology. If we wish to live our online lives protected from malicious intents, without heavily relying on external sources of knowledge for our every transaction, we must educate individuals on all relevant matters of online security. It may also help if we refrained from opening emails sent by Nigerian Princes, no matter the potential monetary reward.
