This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling. In B

This whole keeping quiet thing is good for you personally—and I admit fault here too—but it's pretty bad if there is a real problem that's worth tackling. In Bruce Schneier's book Click Here to Kill Everyone[0] he mentions how it took him two years to write the book because of a false start. In the meantime, I was stressing over how I must have lost my fucking mind when thought about fleetwide exploits (via class-attack) and autonomous systems together and came to the conclusion that they're effectively WMDs / strategic threats. I kept thinking: "If this true then why is nobody talking about it?"[1] I found no regulations or military think tank pieces addressing it, so (after multiple precautionary measures, including warning the Canadian government about what I was going to do) I finally wrote about it. I would have written about it much sooner were that social pressure to blend in not been there. Now that other more respected people are talking about cyber-WMDs and strategic threats I can update my priors and partially relax. But even so, my fundamental worry about tech is this: Sometimes we see the downsides coming way before they actually materialize, but nobody wants to be the chicken little at the end of the bar before the tech even works reliably. Then when it finally does work we're all so used to it being around we're all convinced someone else surely has figured out how to mitigate the downsides. (It's everywhere, so it must be safe, right guys? Right?!) [0] An otherwise sober book and author with a maddeningly terrible title. My think tank / Nato friends in DC—the very people we need to read this—dismissed it out of hand not knowing who Bruce is until I convinced them to pick it up. I wish he would re-release it with a less crazy sounding title so I could buy a copy for every MP in Canada. [1] From a bayesian perspective, I thought it was more likely that my mind was broken than it was for me to come to the conclusion that there was a new class / domain of WMD out there, and I was the only one that thought of it. The stress of doing the wrong thing (risking lives by publishing or risking a larger eventual hazard by failing to) pales in comparison to the stress of thinking you're going crazy. Tautologically, the crazy can't reason themselves out of it.