Page 84 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution

(MAD), and a nuclear taboo seems to have emerged.

If the logic of MAD has worked so far it is because only a limited number

of entities possessed the power to destroy each other completely and they
balanced each other out. A proliferation of potentially lethal actors,
however, could undermine this equilibrium, which was why nuclear states
agreed to cooperate to keep the nuclear club small, negotiating the Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the late 1960s.

While they disagreed on most other issues, the Soviet Union and the United

States understood that their best protection laid in remaining vulnerable to
each other. This led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT),
effectively limiting the right to take defensive measures against missile-
delivered nuclear weapons. When destructive capacity is no longer limited

to a handful of entities with broadly similar resources, tactics and interests
in preventing escalation doctrines such as MAD are less relevant.

Driven by the changes heralded by the fourth industrial revolution, could we
discover some alternative equilibrium that analogously turns vulnerability
into stability and security? Actors with very different perspectives and
interests need to be able to find some kind of modus vivendi and cooperate

in order to avoid negative proliferation.

Concerned stakeholders must cooperate to create legally binding

frameworks as well as self-imposed peer-based norms, ethical standards
and mechanisms to control potentially damaging emerging technologies,
preferably without impeding the capacity of research to deliver innovation

and economic growth.

International treaties will surely be needed, but I am concerned that

regulators in this field will find themselves running behind technological
advances, due to their speed and multifaceted impact. Hence, conversations
among educators and developers about the ethical standards that should
apply to emerging technologies of the fourth industrial revolution are

urgently needed to establish common ethical guidelines and embed them in
society and culture. With governments and government based structures,
lagging behind in the regulatory space, it may actually be up to the private
sector and non-state actors to take the lead.

The development of new warfare technologies is, understandably, taking

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