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cal terrain that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld.
“That’s partly because technology is unregulated and people
have access to the tools to create malware and the medicine to
treat it. Today’s software viruses are clever and stealthy and not
simpleminded.
Very
clever.
“But here’s the thing: you don’t see people advocating shut-
ting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean,
malware is potentially more than a nuisance — emergency sys-
tems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable
software. It’s an important issue, but the potential damage is still
a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet.
“I hope it’ll remain that way — that the Internet won’t become
a regulated space like medicine. Malware’s not the most impor-
tant issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are.
People are concerned about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD
would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college
labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently
with long incubation periods.
“Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn’t have to put
malware through the FDA’s regulatory approval process, but sci-
entists working to fix bio-malware
do
.
“In Huxley’s
Brave New World,
the rationale for the totalitarian
system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be
controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where
it becomes
less
stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the
irresponsible who won’t listen to the regulators anyway.
“The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale
is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a
totalitarian regime of Draconian control.
“I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate
the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to
combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have
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