Strategic Latency: Red, White, and Blue Managing the National and International Security Consequences of Disruptive Technologies Zachary S. Davis and Michael Nacht, editors Center for Global Security Research Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory February 2018 Disclaimer: This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States government. Neither the United States government nor Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, nor any of their employees makes any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. LLNL-BOOK-746803 Strategic Latency: Red, White, and Blue: Managing the National and International Security Consequences of Disruptive Technologies Zachary S. Davis and Michael Nacht, editors Center for Global Security Research Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory February 2018 Table of Contents Introduction Strategic Latency: Red, White, and Blue Zachary Davis and Michael Nacht _______________________________________________________________ 1 Section 1 The Red Side: S&T Threat Analysis for Strategic Warning 11 Chapter 1 Biotechnology, Commercial Veiling, and Implications for Strategic Latency: The Exemplar of Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Research and Development in China Celeste Chen, Jacob Andriola, and James Giordano ______________________________________________12 Chapter 2 “Sputnik-like” Events: Responding to Technological Surprise Ron Lehman _______________________________________________________________________________ 33 Chapter 3 Curious Incidents: Dogs That Haven’t Barked C. Wes Spain_______________________________________________________________________________ 52 Chapter 4 Emerging Trends in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: Directions for the Intelligence Community James Canton _____________________________________________________________________________ 71 Chapter 5 3D Printing: Acknowledging the Dark Side and Why Speaking Openly About Technology Threat Vectors Is the Right Answer Jennifer J. Snow ___________________________________________________________________________ 88 Section 2 The White Side: Latent Technology Trends and Timelines 103 Chapter 6 New Technologies and International Order Paul Bracken ______________________________________________________________________________ 104 Chapter 7 New Is Not Always Better David S.C. Chu, with the assistance of Allison Fielding Taylor ____________________________________ 115 | III Chapter 8 What’s Old Is New Again: Nuclear Capabilities Still Matter—and Will for a Long Time to Come Joseph F. Pilat ____________________________________________________________________________ 130 Chapter 9 Backseat Driving: What Happens When Technology Outpaces Strategy? Leo J. Blanken and Jason J. Lepore __________________________________________________________ 146 Chapter 10 Terrorist Tech: How Will Emerging Technologies Be Used by Terrorists to Achieve Strategic Effects? Zachary Davis and Michael Nacht ____________________________________________________________ 160 Chapter 11 The Latent Potential of Privacy Technologies: How Our Future Will Be Shaped by Today’s Privacy Decisions William Welser IV, Rebecca Balebako, Cameron Colquhoun, Osonde Osoba _______________________ 171 Chapter 12 An Effects-Based Framework for Evaluating Latent Technology Daniel Tapia-Jimenez _______________________________________________________________________ 187 Section 3 The Blue Side: Technology Innovation and National Security Applications 201 Chapter 13 What Works? Public–private Partnerships for Development of National Security Technology Frank D. Gac, Timothy P. Grayson, and Joseph M. Keogh ________________________________________ 202 Chapter 14 Moving at the Speed of S&T: Calibrating the Role of National Laboratories to Support National Security Lisa Owens Davis _________________________________________________________________________ 233 Chapter 15 Picking Winners and Losers: How the Government Can Learn to Successfully Assess Technology Potential and Turn It into a Battlefield Advantage Toby Redshaw ____________________________________________________________________________ 250 IV | Chapter 16 Strategic Latency, Technology Convergence, and the Importance of the Weapons Mix Brian Holmes _____________________________________________________________________________ 262 Chapter 17 Predicting and Guiding Change in the New Economy of Strategic Latency Ben Forster _______________________________________________________________________________ 269 Chapter 18 Closing Thoughts: Humanity, Machines and Power Zachary Davis and Michael Nacht ____________________________________________________________ 287 Author Biographies | V Introduction Strategic Latency: Red, White, and Blue Zachary Davis and Michael Nacht Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. —Steve Jobs Steve Jobs got it half right. People imagine, develop, and use technology to achieve “wonderful things,” but they also use technology to pursue harmful objectives. Insecurity, anger, jealousy, and greed are just as likely to motivate technological innovation as love, compassion, creativity, and altruism. Judgments about whether technological feats are wonderful or terrible are themselves highly subjective—one person’s big scientific breakthrough can just as easily turn out to be another person’s political, military, or economic disaster. Nuclear technology, for example, makes possible life-saving medical treatments and clean energy that can help save the world from catastrophic climate change, yet also creates the means to wage nuclear war. Most technologies possess this Janus-faced potential, which we call strategic latency. The challenge for national-security policymakers is to harness the benefits of technology while preventing it from being used against us. This volume explores that dilemma. We live in an era preoccupied with technology. Much has been written about Moore’s Law and the pedal-to-the-metal acceleration of technological progress in recent years. What will the onslaught of ubiquitous technology mean for individuals, society, nations and the world? Technology optimists speculate about how technology will solve the world’s hardest | 1 problems and herald a new age of abundance.1 Utopians, technocrats, some futurists, and Silicon Valley icons embrace technology as the lead agent of human progress. Pervasive technologies such as genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things will (or already do) touch every facet of human existence, thereby making life easier by liberating people from the struggle for survival, freeing them to pursue more creative, productive, and enlightened lives. With disease and poverty on the run, people around the globe will use universal access to information to satisfy the basic food, energy, and transportation needs of an enlightened populace. In a world of material abundance, there will be nothing left to fight over. Global commerce and consciousness will render nation-states obsolete and pave the road to permanent peace.2 Technology will leapfrog over politics to provide the missing link in a progressive evolution worthy of philosophical optimists in the tradition of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Other observers of technology futures warn of potential dangers, including existential threats associated with artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and the unintended consequences of genetic engineering. Even high-tech luminaries such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak openly express concern about the potential loss of human control over these otherwise beneficial developments.3 In open letters about unintended consequences, concerned scientists warned that massively powerful machines could misinterpret human intentions and turn on their masters, or give terrorists unprecedented destructive power. Military leaders promise to “keep humans in the loop” to preserve the role of ethical norms in warfare, but what happens when the machines determine that they know better than their flawed creators? From Frankenstein to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Terminator, the risk that our creations could betray us is inherent in the notion of technological progress. Echoing Manhattan Project scientists’ admonitions about proliferation and the effects of atomic power on world politics,4 concerned scientists have called autonomous weapons “the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” poised to wreak havoc throughout the world, not necessarily as weapons of mass destruction, but as easily acquired commodities loaded with potential to upend global norms of war and politics.5 The specter of rogue drone swarms, genetic monsters, robot armies,