UNLEASHED

Living in the Age of Risky Science

In August, 1945, American pilots dropped newly engineered atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, evaporating tens of thousands of people in an instant, and killing many tens of thousands more in the ensuing fallout.

Three months later, J. Robert Oppenheimer addressed the scientists who, under his supervision, had built the new weapon. His crew of wunderkinds and geniuses had furnished all sorts of justifications to explain why they built the bomb, Oppenheimer said. But the truth was that they had no choice: It was an “organic necessity”— a kind of compulsion, baked into the pursuit of science, that had now gifted humanity with the power to obliterate itself.

“If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing,” Oppenheimer said. “If you are a scientist, you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”

Some 80 years later, that spirit of hope, danger, and inevitability seems more alive than any moment since the 1940s.

In Silicon Valley, teams of computer scientists are designing artificial intelligences that some experts believe might one day pose an existential threat. In some cases, these worries are expressed by the very people building the technology. A growing number of pathogen labs around the world allow scientists to handle tools that, through malice or error, could be used to launch the next pandemic. Elsewhere, scientists are advancing technologies that could reengineer the global climate, while others seek new ways to alter the human genome.

Like nuclear technology, these fields have the potential to radically improve human life — or to tragically upend it.

Over the coming weeks, Undark will be exploring life in an age of risky science. We’ll dig into the development of autonomous weapons and cover the international expansion of high-risk pathogen labs. We will unpack the mechanics of gain-of-function research — a contentious term that remains murky for most ordinary citizens — and explore the evolving regulatory schemes that seek, however imperfectly, to keep such work in check. From atmospheric experiments to expeditions into our own genetic soup, we will seek to illuminate the organizations, companies, and government actors determining what we do and why.

Not everyone agrees, after all, with Oppenheimer’s paean to scientific inevitability. The development of these technologies are choices, and somewhere, someone — or very often a small collection of someones — is deciding which scientific explorations are worth pursuing, and which represent too great a threat. In her book “Politics and Expertise,” the political theorist Zeynep Pamuk explores this central question of consent and consequential science. What would it look like, she asks, if people in democratic societies, or in the world at large, could truly and collectively decide where science takes us? And would that be a good thing?

For now, that’s not the world we live in. But in an age where humans have learned to manipulate the very stuff of life, and to breathe a chilling and self-enhancing intelligence into algorithms, citizens of every nation have, at the very least, a right to know what’s being done, and to consider for themselves whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

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