The scientific journal Nature's online news site interviewed futurist/inventor/author Ray Kurzweil when he gave a keynote on "Warfighting in the 21st Century" at the recent Army Science Conference.
How does your vision of robotic, virtual-reality warfare square with the notion that many modern wars involve terrorism or suicide attacks in civilian settings?
Centralized structures such as buildings, aeroplanes and cities are targets for terrorism, but decentralized, self-organizing systems are far more secure: meetings conducted through the Internet will not be subject to physical attack, and these will move towards full immersion virtual reality environments. And if we devise decentralized sources of energy, for example, nanotech solar panels and nanoengineered fuel cells, these will be less easy to disrupt. Decentralization of our infrastructure will result in suicide bombers becoming less of an issue. On the other hand, the ability of a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered virus will introduce new dangers. There are emerging strategies for dealing with this – for example applying RNA interference to combat newly introduced viral pathogens – but we need to increase the priority of developing these defences. Similar issues will arise when we have full molecular nanotechnology.
