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The Future of Violence - Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones: Confronting the New Age of Threat (Robots Germs Hackers & Drones) by Benjamin Wittes
From drone warfare in the Middle East to digital spying by the National Security Agency, the U.S. government has harnessed the power of cutting-edge technology to awesome effect. But what happens when ordinary people have the same tools at their fingertips? Advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to potentially dangerous technologies—from drones to computer networks and biological agents—which could be used to attack states and private citizens alike.In The Future of Violence, law and security experts Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum detail the myriad possibilities, challenges, and enormous risks present in the modern world, and argue that if our national governments can no longer adequately protect us from harm, they will lose their legitimacy. Consequently, governments, companies, and citizens must rethink their security efforts to protect lives and liberty. In this brave new world where many little brothers are as menacing as any Big Brother, safeguarding our liberty and privacy may require strong domestic and international surveillance and regulatory controls. Maintaining security in this world where anyone can attack anyone requires a global perspective, with more multinational forces and greater action to protect (and protect against) weaker states who do not yet have the capability to police their own people. Drawing on political thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to the Founders and beyond, Wittes and Blum show that, despite recent protestations to the contrary, security and liberty are mutually supportive, and that we must embrace one to ensure the other. The Future of Violence is at once an introduction to our emerging world—one in which students can print guns with 3-D printers and scientists’ manipulations of viruses can be recreated and unleashed by ordinary people—and an authoritative blueprint for how government must adapt in order to survive and protect us.
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First published September 21, 2014
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About the author
Benjamin Wittes
21 books43 followersBenjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and co-writes the influential Lawfare blog (http://www.lawfareblog.com/), which is devoted to non-ideological discussion of the "Hard National Security Choices,” and is a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law. Between 1997 and 2006, he served as an editorial writer for The Washington Post specializing in legal affairs. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines. Benjamin Wittes was born November 5, 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1990. He recently earned a black belt in taekwondo.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
September 22, 2015
Disappointing overall, and at times shallow and boring. One emerges with the assessment that the two authors are easily impressed by surface-level phenomena. They maintain that narratives taught in civics class suffice to illuminate the origins and practice of politics. They perceive a simple world, where stated intentions equal actual objectives, costs can be judged relative to ostensible objectives without minding actual effects, correlation generally implies causation, and the direction of the arrow of causality can be promptly determined. These are characteristics more of a Haidtian moral matrix than the dispassionate analysis one might have wished for in a book of this kind.
The authors speak confidently about their ability to understand and predict this neatly modeled world of theirs, not particularly endeavoring to uncover their own implicit premises--brief mentions of Western liberalism aside--and rarely hedging or qualifying their rather confident assertions, many which could readily be challenged. In the gulf between reality and academia, this work is more a product of its environment than a root cause analysis that will stand the test of time.
On the bright side, in largely restricting themselves to disruptive technologies with ETAs defined with pretty firm confidence margins, we were at least spared yet another alarmist narrative of shoddily-premised and amateurishly-informed more speculative futures, which in this instance might have been titled something like "the state v. gray goo".
Indeed, the most readable part of the book is the initial bit that discusses some of the developing technologies of mass empowerment that are set to make the first half of this century an "interesting times" to live through per that purported old Chinese curse. There is nothing new here, but it is at least a useful overview of biotech terrors to come as well as the developing arms race in autonomous weaponry, soon to be wielded by state and non-state actors both.
This is followed, alas, by the middle portion of the book, where I suspect the authors will tend to lose readers who aren't Beltway policy wonks. These chapters are, chiefly, tedious apologia for the ostensible origins and continued existence of the state. The authors glimpse the coming sea change, but prove ultimately unable to transcend or escape the shore.
Almost pathetically obsessed with the continuation of the authority and legitimacy of the status quo in political organization today (perhaps their jobs depend on it?), the authors even go on to disregard their own contention--grounded in the myth of the social contract--that the state is only a means, not an end unto itself. Their own authority bias here leads them down a garden path of motivated reasoning that is sure to not only find itself on the wrong side of history, but soon enough swept into its dust bin.
The authors rehash elementary early modern political theory at length--beginning with the Hobbesian war of all against all--taking it all at face value as would any freshman. To say that this is a historically uninformed and philosophically unsophisticated analysis would only scratch the surface here, and the authors seem impossibly yet genuinely unaware of troves and generations of thinkers and scholars who advanced in leaps and bounds on everything they discuss here.
One might have hoped, ultimately, for a deeper nonideological and amoral ("check your morality at the door, please") analysis premised, say, on an evolutionary and game-theoretic angle instead of this longwinded trite elaboration of the dominant political mythology du jour, consisting of little more than post-hoc rationalizations that already read akin to medieval notions of the divine right of kings. What's a little surprising is that the authors even acknowledge these being mere justifications for the Westphalian order, prompting the question of whether this ought to not be read as an extended bit of demagoguery in the Menckenian sense of "preaching doctrines one knows to be untrue to men one knows to be idiots."
The discussion, as it moves on to the prescriptive last third of the book, is further muddled by the authors' disregard for the precise use of language to aid in clarity of thought. Never, for instance, do they differentiate between positive liberty and negative liberty--a distinction both elementary and essential--which, unsurprisingly, helps lead them absurd conclusions such as that "mass surveillance makes us freer." Edward Snowden's "crime" accordingly merits a whole section in a similar vein.
At root, though, unexamined and uncontested, lies the belief that, given sufficient resources, the state can, in fact, actually achieve its ostensible ends--whether those ostensible ends be the provision of security as such, or the maintenance of a Tofflerian surplus order. This is a perspective uninformed by economic law and untempered by a developed intuition about spontaneous order; both being sides of the same coin, as per Hayek's dictum that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
Scarcely mentioned, for instance, are the more than trillion dollars and countless lives wasted fighting a futile War on Drugs. Other authors from Bill Lind to T. X. Hammes have made the case that the inability of the state, with every conceivable home court advantage that it has, to significantly hamper let alone eradicate these 4GW adversaries--in this case, the drug cartels and their international distribution network--perfectly showcases its impotence in credibly countering more dangerous internal and external adversaries going forward.
Instead of the epistemic humility to limit themselves to the merely descriptive and predictive, the authors here choose to be prescriptive; too bad, only, that it is on such an axiomatically deficient and analytically shallow platform. As such, this amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic--or make that SS Leviathan. The book best serves to underline the incompetence of the extended modern state apparatus to comprehend and cope with the rapidly multiplying and escalating challenges to its formerly unilateral hegemony. As Boyd would cackle, "you're not even in the game!"
A case example thereof is that much of the discussion in the section on so-called "intermediate regulation" has already been obsoleted by subsequent technological developments, and that's all in the span of less than a decade past the authority they cite as the basis for their narrative here. You'd never imagine the authors to have heard of these newer developments, even as events were in the process of overtaking and obsoleting their manuscript.
In their conclusion, the authors tacitly acknowledge that the future is ungovernable, but go on to say that they're "not ready to give up on the state" yet. Good for them. For a deeper, more realistic, and better informed picture of the unfolding twenty-first century, pass on this and read the likes of John Robb and old curmudgeon Bill Lind instead.
The authors speak confidently about their ability to understand and predict this neatly modeled world of theirs, not particularly endeavoring to uncover their own implicit premises--brief mentions of Western liberalism aside--and rarely hedging or qualifying their rather confident assertions, many which could readily be challenged. In the gulf between reality and academia, this work is more a product of its environment than a root cause analysis that will stand the test of time.
On the bright side, in largely restricting themselves to disruptive technologies with ETAs defined with pretty firm confidence margins, we were at least spared yet another alarmist narrative of shoddily-premised and amateurishly-informed more speculative futures, which in this instance might have been titled something like "the state v. gray goo".
Indeed, the most readable part of the book is the initial bit that discusses some of the developing technologies of mass empowerment that are set to make the first half of this century an "interesting times" to live through per that purported old Chinese curse. There is nothing new here, but it is at least a useful overview of biotech terrors to come as well as the developing arms race in autonomous weaponry, soon to be wielded by state and non-state actors both.
This is followed, alas, by the middle portion of the book, where I suspect the authors will tend to lose readers who aren't Beltway policy wonks. These chapters are, chiefly, tedious apologia for the ostensible origins and continued existence of the state. The authors glimpse the coming sea change, but prove ultimately unable to transcend or escape the shore.
Almost pathetically obsessed with the continuation of the authority and legitimacy of the status quo in political organization today (perhaps their jobs depend on it?), the authors even go on to disregard their own contention--grounded in the myth of the social contract--that the state is only a means, not an end unto itself. Their own authority bias here leads them down a garden path of motivated reasoning that is sure to not only find itself on the wrong side of history, but soon enough swept into its dust bin.
The authors rehash elementary early modern political theory at length--beginning with the Hobbesian war of all against all--taking it all at face value as would any freshman. To say that this is a historically uninformed and philosophically unsophisticated analysis would only scratch the surface here, and the authors seem impossibly yet genuinely unaware of troves and generations of thinkers and scholars who advanced in leaps and bounds on everything they discuss here.
One might have hoped, ultimately, for a deeper nonideological and amoral ("check your morality at the door, please") analysis premised, say, on an evolutionary and game-theoretic angle instead of this longwinded trite elaboration of the dominant political mythology du jour, consisting of little more than post-hoc rationalizations that already read akin to medieval notions of the divine right of kings. What's a little surprising is that the authors even acknowledge these being mere justifications for the Westphalian order, prompting the question of whether this ought to not be read as an extended bit of demagoguery in the Menckenian sense of "preaching doctrines one knows to be untrue to men one knows to be idiots."
The discussion, as it moves on to the prescriptive last third of the book, is further muddled by the authors' disregard for the precise use of language to aid in clarity of thought. Never, for instance, do they differentiate between positive liberty and negative liberty--a distinction both elementary and essential--which, unsurprisingly, helps lead them absurd conclusions such as that "mass surveillance makes us freer." Edward Snowden's "crime" accordingly merits a whole section in a similar vein.
At root, though, unexamined and uncontested, lies the belief that, given sufficient resources, the state can, in fact, actually achieve its ostensible ends--whether those ostensible ends be the provision of security as such, or the maintenance of a Tofflerian surplus order. This is a perspective uninformed by economic law and untempered by a developed intuition about spontaneous order; both being sides of the same coin, as per Hayek's dictum that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
Scarcely mentioned, for instance, are the more than trillion dollars and countless lives wasted fighting a futile War on Drugs. Other authors from Bill Lind to T. X. Hammes have made the case that the inability of the state, with every conceivable home court advantage that it has, to significantly hamper let alone eradicate these 4GW adversaries--in this case, the drug cartels and their international distribution network--perfectly showcases its impotence in credibly countering more dangerous internal and external adversaries going forward.
Instead of the epistemic humility to limit themselves to the merely descriptive and predictive, the authors here choose to be prescriptive; too bad, only, that it is on such an axiomatically deficient and analytically shallow platform. As such, this amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic--or make that SS Leviathan. The book best serves to underline the incompetence of the extended modern state apparatus to comprehend and cope with the rapidly multiplying and escalating challenges to its formerly unilateral hegemony. As Boyd would cackle, "you're not even in the game!"
A case example thereof is that much of the discussion in the section on so-called "intermediate regulation" has already been obsoleted by subsequent technological developments, and that's all in the span of less than a decade past the authority they cite as the basis for their narrative here. You'd never imagine the authors to have heard of these newer developments, even as events were in the process of overtaking and obsoleting their manuscript.
In their conclusion, the authors tacitly acknowledge that the future is ungovernable, but go on to say that they're "not ready to give up on the state" yet. Good for them. For a deeper, more realistic, and better informed picture of the unfolding twenty-first century, pass on this and read the likes of John Robb and old curmudgeon Bill Lind instead.
May 12, 2015
Research gem! This book reads as an exhaustive summary and contextual theories on the technological advances that have shaped our lives for better or worse. Our innovation continues to comfort, elevate and destroy us in astounding ways. Oceans and buildings cannot keep any of us apart and that is both beautiful and dangerous. I particularly appreciated the in-your-face excerpts on privacy since we demand it from the government yet keep broadening the access, person to person, without any regard of how much of our deepest selves we share.
March 26, 2021
Brought up some interesting questions for sovereignty, accountability, and enforceability in a world of many-to-many threats where the state is incapable of protecting people. With cost going down and effectiveness going up for private individuals, violence (cyber, biological, and even physical) will become more chaotic in the future and current laws, cultures, and states are not equipped to handle it.
Overall, the book felt a bit disorganized and did not really present a path forward or overall message. Could have used more research for some actual trends instead of examples and anecdotes.
Overall, the book felt a bit disorganized and did not really present a path forward or overall message. Could have used more research for some actual trends instead of examples and anecdotes.
November 6, 2015
Chapter 1 is a very good standalone article about the emerging threats from interconnected computers, biology and eventually robotics and even nanotechnology. After that, a lot of the book devolves into poli sci 101 about the social contract which basically concludes that states are less useful as non-state actors are growing more lethal.
May 21, 2022
Very interesting I read this as a part of my course work but it was extremely eye opening I really enjoyed it.
May 12, 2017
This book is provocative but the concepts are rather basic. I also think the authors does not do a good job to explain a few things, I.e. when they briefly use an example of large volumes of data and says "this is what big data is". Big data is not only lots of data. It makes me think if the other things that he explained are also incorrect like when elaborated on jurisdiction, chemical weapons and others.
June 6, 2015
Started out to be about the technology, then took a hard turn to some history of governance and then governance and legal theory. Interesting read, but not what I expected.
April 19, 2018
Look at the title of this book. The Future of Violence. War, war never changes, but violence? We are absolutely brilliant about coming up with ways to cause grievous harm to one another. What cool military and privatized inventions await is in the much talked about singularity of technology? I don’t know. That’s not what this book is about. The Future of Violence is more concerned about the question of violence on a societal level, which, frankly, is infinitely more interesting.
Drones, 3D printing, and genetic editing (as well as a myriad of others) are what the book calls technologies of mass empowerment, things that decrease the barrier for an individual, organization, or government’s ability to commit violence on any scale. It’s less concerned on the specifics of what it can do and more along the lines of how one could create a legal framework from responding and preventing such attacks from becoming the world’s new normal.
Wittes and Blum give a careful overview of the legal theories that have been argued in the past as well as necessity for our definition of ‘freedom’ to change in the face of these new technologies. Which is where the book gets implicitly political and is going to either get people screaming about ‘muh freedoms’ and how the government is going to go full 1984 and no amount of missile drone attacks on orphanages can justify that loss of freedom.
And they might be right. That’s why writing about the future is hard. The authors do a very good job trying to convey the possible scale of the issue without falling into fear mongering, which is why some of their examples are…rather weak and perhaps worse, unoriginal.
There is a quote by Benjamin Franklin that is used in some circles when the idea of regulation of new tech and general surveillance: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Now, while the quote in context is basically just Franklin admonishing a wealthy family for refusing to pay taxes that would help pay for the defense of towns on the frontier, it’s that sixth word that often gets missed in the resuscitations of this particular bit of wisdom. Essential. In the face of these new technologies and potential catastrophes, it is that word that we all have to grapple with and define as a species in order to prepare ourselves for the future.
The Future of Violence doesn’t give any answers, it just has some options, most of which are going to be incredibly uncomfortable for the modern (American) reader, but it does attempt to open up the discussion as early as possible so that if the worst does happen we don’t go full USA PATRIOT Act and burn the house down because we saw a spider in the sink.
Drones, 3D printing, and genetic editing (as well as a myriad of others) are what the book calls technologies of mass empowerment, things that decrease the barrier for an individual, organization, or government’s ability to commit violence on any scale. It’s less concerned on the specifics of what it can do and more along the lines of how one could create a legal framework from responding and preventing such attacks from becoming the world’s new normal.
Wittes and Blum give a careful overview of the legal theories that have been argued in the past as well as necessity for our definition of ‘freedom’ to change in the face of these new technologies. Which is where the book gets implicitly political and is going to either get people screaming about ‘muh freedoms’ and how the government is going to go full 1984 and no amount of missile drone attacks on orphanages can justify that loss of freedom.
And they might be right. That’s why writing about the future is hard. The authors do a very good job trying to convey the possible scale of the issue without falling into fear mongering, which is why some of their examples are…rather weak and perhaps worse, unoriginal.
There is a quote by Benjamin Franklin that is used in some circles when the idea of regulation of new tech and general surveillance: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Now, while the quote in context is basically just Franklin admonishing a wealthy family for refusing to pay taxes that would help pay for the defense of towns on the frontier, it’s that sixth word that often gets missed in the resuscitations of this particular bit of wisdom. Essential. In the face of these new technologies and potential catastrophes, it is that word that we all have to grapple with and define as a species in order to prepare ourselves for the future.
The Future of Violence doesn’t give any answers, it just has some options, most of which are going to be incredibly uncomfortable for the modern (American) reader, but it does attempt to open up the discussion as early as possible so that if the worst does happen we don’t go full USA PATRIOT Act and burn the house down because we saw a spider in the sink.
May 31, 2017
So the title is misleading; as this book is more concerned with who will have the power/monopoly of violence in the future. Wittes focuses on how disrupting technologies will effect both those that currently have power and those that will gain power in the future.
Why I started it: This book caught my eye in an Audible 2 for 1 sale.
Why I finished it: Futuristic predictions and philosophy is not my go to genre, so this book was an interesting introduction to a new way of thinking about the future... and even a new way of thinking about current and past technologies. I liked that the Roman roads brought greater safety because Roman armies could move faster, but also less safety as bandits started preying on travelers. And that the follow up security measure of guards and policing brought greater freedom to individual travelers. That freedom and security are not always at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Why I started it: This book caught my eye in an Audible 2 for 1 sale.
Why I finished it: Futuristic predictions and philosophy is not my go to genre, so this book was an interesting introduction to a new way of thinking about the future... and even a new way of thinking about current and past technologies. I liked that the Roman roads brought greater safety because Roman armies could move faster, but also less safety as bandits started preying on travelers. And that the follow up security measure of guards and policing brought greater freedom to individual travelers. That freedom and security are not always at opposite ends of the spectrum.
September 17, 2022
The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones: Confronting a New Age of Threat by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum is a pretty good introduction to the many classes of human and national security threats seeming to lurk on the horizon of technological advancement. An key theme of the book is that mass empowerment and the relative lack of oversight or will by the state (or Leviathan) to contain that mass empowerment will result in a many to many threat environment. The answer? A reevaluation of the powers of the state and the role of the international community and policing authorities to better enhance their capacity to prevent potential doomsday scenarios or dystopian nightmares. Otherwise, the book is a tour of threats and some historical lessons to draw from in order to combat those threats. Pretty good, though I have some issues with its organizational structure and the relative generality of its points.
February 17, 2024
In light of globalization and advanced technology, how is the world changing from a defense and security perspective?
This book sought to answer this question and makes a compelling case that the traditional institutions and approach to these security challenges poses significant risks.
Most fundamentally, we now live in a world where the everyday person has access to powerful technologies that can have tremendous effects--particularly in cyber, biological engineering, and drones/robotics. The increase in capabilities raises important questions about the line between military (i.e. state sanctioned)/criminal activities, jurisdiction, and the international order at large.
Although this book leans into an alarmist narrative, I think it raises really insightful questions that all of us should consider (particularly if employed in security sector).
Recommend!
This book sought to answer this question and makes a compelling case that the traditional institutions and approach to these security challenges poses significant risks.
Most fundamentally, we now live in a world where the everyday person has access to powerful technologies that can have tremendous effects--particularly in cyber, biological engineering, and drones/robotics. The increase in capabilities raises important questions about the line between military (i.e. state sanctioned)/criminal activities, jurisdiction, and the international order at large.
Although this book leans into an alarmist narrative, I think it raises really insightful questions that all of us should consider (particularly if employed in security sector).
Recommend!
June 16, 2022
This book was pretty interesting. It ranged from possible future terrorist technologies to how the state can remain legitimate if it can no longer protect its citizens from terrorism in an environment when many people have the knowledge and technology to do something like recreate smallpox. It includes a long aside about how states became legitimate and what holds them together that was pretty interesting. I had some trouble paying attention to the book and I don't know if that is specifically the book's fault or just the way I read audiobooks not being a good match for this kind of in depth book. It was good though, and I may invest in a paper copy to reread so I can pay more attention to it. Maybe.
March 11, 2020
Fascinating book about how technology will empower the masses and upend the national and international order as we know it. The book goes in depth about how recent and expected technological development and revolutions will enable an individual to have a terrifying amount of potentially unregulated power The form of various platforms, consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, biological, and cyber weapons. The book dragged a bit with discussions about international relations and law, but to be expected from an author like Benjamin Wittes. Highly recommend for those considering future power balances and sources of domestic and international friction.
March 30, 2020
A well-researched, well-written, and well-organized discussion of the progression of violence and its implications on future conflict. Authors Blum and Wittes provide information, context, and responsible analysis in a format that is both easily digestible and engaging. This book is of the same ilk as books like Peter Scharre's Army of None, Fred Kaplan's Dark Territory, Sean McFate's The New Rules of War, and Robert Kagan's The Jungle Grows Back. This is a great read for anyone looking to understand the rapidly changing landscape of technology, and its implications on how government and non-government entities deliver/protect against violence.
April 22, 2018
A chilling, yet instructive, primer on the continuing threats of violence that continue to plague us. The book provides a useful summary of a variety of threats and policy considerations, as well as discussions of the philosophical underpinnings for some of our views concerning regulation, privacy, the social contract, etc., as they relate to threats of violence. While I would recommend the book, it is neither a light read, nor one that will put your mind at ease about the current state of the world.
May 20, 2021
In The Future of Violence, law and security experts Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum detail the future of how various states and governments might deal with future threats. While a little alarmist at the onset the myriad of possibilities, challenges, and enormous risks present in the modern world is provided with sound research. The work is detailed and the authors argue that if our national governments can no longer adequately protect us from harm, they will lose their legitimacy. I also say this is a bit over bearing but it is their view. Worth the time to read.
December 7, 2017
I really liked this book It's a good examination of how advancements in technologies influence the ability (of both governments and individuals) to both defend and commit violence. It offers an interesting examination of the role of the state in protecting citizens, how it has changed over time and how it might change when subject to technological pressures. Worth reading again.
June 1, 2021
Good introduction to the myriad threats facing individuals, states, and transnational organization. Due to the breadth of topical coverage, depth was rarely attained, but this is acknowledged by the author.
I appreciated the introduction of morality and legality into the interplay between a state’s menu of options domestically and internationally.
Worthwhile read.
I appreciated the introduction of morality and legality into the interplay between a state’s menu of options domestically and internationally.
Worthwhile read.
March 9, 2022
just like the author wrote at the end of the book, it read rather outdated and quaint. i'm quite surprised it's only been 7 years.
i read this out of anxiety from daily news about Russia's invasion into Ukraine, hoping this book may help me understand hybrid war better. it didn't.
will go look for other book on the topic.
i read this out of anxiety from daily news about Russia's invasion into Ukraine, hoping this book may help me understand hybrid war better. it didn't.
will go look for other book on the topic.
August 16, 2022
A little over-long for the topic, but a great primer on emerging threats and technologies. The book really excels when exploring the legal and political implications of these threats. If you're familiar with these topics from reading magazine publications like the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, etc. you can probably skip this book. If not, a great place to get all that knowledge in one place.
May 30, 2020
I should have read the credentials of the authors more carefully. This book was not what I was looking for, it’s actually about regulation and legal mechanisms. Which I did not find particularly interesting. There seemed to be a lot of repetition without anything actually being said.
October 10, 2020
I picked this up expecting a book about bionic space lasers, but found instead a kind of dry political science textbook trying to define a 21st century framework for navigating policy tensions between liberty, security, and privacy.
March 10, 2021
The book consists of two distinctly different parts, presumably one each written by the two authors. Each part is interesting by itself, but I am disappointed that there doesn't seem to be much of a connection or "golden thread" between them.
March 9, 2022
Really pushed my thinking on alternative ways to see technological development. Highlight was the discussion about the false dichotomy between security and privacy, which I have believed for a while but was never sure how to explain.
November 22, 2023
To be honest, it wasn't as meticulously researched, insightful, or thought-provoking as I had hoped. Nothing wrong with the book as such. I had simply expected more than was delivered. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
July 9, 2024
Lots to chew on. It’s an interesting discussion about how to think about governance in a chaotic and dangerous world. I think it holds up very well to its intention of being abstract enough to be a useful tool even as the breeding edge of technological progress changes dramatically.
Read
July 31, 2025I thought this was released more recently when I decided to read it. It was written in 2015 and is already wildly outdated on a lot of the arguments and suggestions they make. The discussions about sovereignty were interesting though.
June 19, 2017
Overly sensationalist.
March 12, 2018
Shall we all be scared now about the AI?
September 25, 2018
Fascinating and the amount of information was great, but could have used more structure. Many of the chapters seemed a bit all over the place.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews