Alan Jacobs


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I met Daniel Ellsberg for the first time recently. Ellsberg was a US military analyst, turned conscious objector, who released the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 as an act of civil disobedience to try to stop the Vietnam War. He has also since been heavily involved in the decades-long battle to eliminate nuclear weapons. In our short conversation he kept returning to an idea that I found alarming. When talking about what technology wanted his hope for the future was technologies that were incorruptible. We had to make things, he said, that would not turn against us. Ones that could not be abused, unlike say, nuclear energy. Or genetic engineering. I was speechless for a while. Ellsberg considers himself a realist, but this call for incorruptible technology is a utopian dream. There can be no incorruptible technology, just as there can be no incorruptible free will. Any free will capable of producing a constructive thought will — by necessity — be capable of producing a destructive thought.