Counselors helping troubled families sometimes advise them to talk about the "elephant in the room."
The elephant is an issue so sensitive or difficult that family members pretend it's invisible and don't talk about it.
Nationally, the elephant in the room is technology. Computers and the machines they inhabit are getting smarter and more powerful. Their impacts on human lives grow bigger by the year. Future impacts may be awesome or awful and will depend on how humans choose to use technology.
Control it we must—or others, who wish to manipulate humanity to their own ends, will control us.
This is not science fiction or misplaced paranoia.
Consider the unmanned drones America is using for surveillance and attack in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, drones are controlled remotely by humans, but computer scientists and researchers who met recently in California said predator drones that can kill on their own without human intervention are on the horizon.
Consider the ever-decreasing size of computer chips that can hold gargantuan amounts of information. Inserting scanable chips into dogs is commonplace so as to identify them if they wander off and to return them to their owners. Combine that with global satellite positioning technology and voila! It will be easy to find Rover.
Yet, Rover is one thing, but human beings are another.
How simple it will be to identify each of us with a numbered computer chip, perhaps inserted in the birthing room.
How easy it will be to track the whereabouts of children—for their own safety.
How convenient it will be to encode a lifetime of health or employment or financial information on the same chip.
If not on a chip, then how about in an efficient bank of computers that never sleeps and is never wiped clean?
Simple, easy, convenient, efficient—a dangerous and slippery slope
The potential for abuse of computer technologies is enormous in the wrong hands—or in the hands of cold and uncaring mathematical formulas, the basis of artificial intelligence. The spread of the Internet across the globe has made all kinds of Web-dependent systems vulnerable to attack by computer viruses.
People cannot allow themselves or their nations to become unsuspecting victims of potentially malevolent technologies.
Scientists, ethicists and lawmakers need to start a public discussion about the elephant in the room and begin to figure out how to tame it in order to maintain free, democratic and humane societies.
Otherwise, a big unfettered elephant could do deep and lasting damage.
