Neuro, Cyber, Slaughter: Emerging Technological Threats In 2017 (thebulletin.org)

"Wouldn't it be nice if advances in technology stopped throwing new problems at the world? No such luck," writes Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "Several emerging technological threats could -- soon enough -- come to rival nuclear weapons and climate change in their potential to upend (or eliminate) civilization." Lasrick writes: In 2017, the cyber threat finally began to seem real to the general public. Advances in biotech in 2017 could lead to the deliberate spread of disease and a host of other dangers. And then there were the leaps forward made in AI. Here's a roundup of coverage from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on advances in emerging technological threats that were made in the last year.
One article even describes the possibility of malevolent brain-brain networks in the future, warning scientists (and the international community) to "remain vigilant about neurotechnologies as they become more refined -- and as the practical barriers to their malevolent use begin to lower."

Comments

If this all sounds incoherent, get used to it.

[hey!]

Visualize human knowledge as a sphere. The surface area of that sphere increases as the square of the radius -- in other words our contact with the unknown grows more rapidly than our reach.

At the edge of that sphere is a shell of things we've only recently become aware of -- the known but unfamiliar. For a stone age hunter-gatherer this was a very thin rind, like the skin of an apple. For us, that rind is big fraction of the fruit's volume. In other words Og the Caveman almost always knew exactly what he was doing. In comparison we spend a huge amount of effort in making things up as we go along, and it will only get worse as knowledge continues to advance.