SL. You also mentioned another thing, you said, when things are possible, people will
do them and you make the example of taxes and drugs. You said, those things are illegal,
but people do them anyways. How can you find them out if you don’t know where things
are? Right? MR. Well, indeed, and that’s why I’m pessimistic.
I think if you ask me, what’s my biggest worry, in the next 20 years, it is pandemics,
which are engineered artificially. As I mentioned, my book, I think, about nine years ago, two
groups of scientists showed they could make the influenza virus more virulent and more
transmissible by engineering it, and that they will be able to do the same thing for
the coronavirus, and they’ll be able to synthesize the smallpox virus and all that.
Obviously there will be regulations against all these things internationally agreed and
academies of different countries are already discussing these. But the point I made and
the reason I’m scared, is just what you say that we can’t enforce these laws globally
any more than the tax laws or the drug laws, and that’s because they don’t require
large, special purpose facilities, like making an atom bomb does. We have the International
Atomic Energy Agency, which can, with reasonable success, monitor what countries are doing
in nuclear arena. It’s very hard for them to get away. I mean, Israel has made a pretty
good job of it but it’s pretty hard for countries to actually get away with too much.
But in the context of biological weapons, the technology is present in many university
labs and industrial labs, it’s dual use, etc. and we can’t monitor all those labs
all the time. I think one of the problems is that there’s
going to be a growing tension between three things we want to preserve: privacy, security,
and freedom. Because even if a few people, mavericks, try to build a weapon, that’s
too many. So I think we’ve got to accept that there will have to be more sort of surveillance.
The way to balance is struck between those three things will be between different countries.
I guess the Chinese will be happier to give up their privacy in order to have security.
The Americans at the other extreme, maybe reluctant and they’ll have to accept greater
insecurity. And but I think that’s a problem simply because we can’t monitor everyone
all the time. SL. Maybe Chinese Communist Party Communist
Party would be happy to give up freedom, maybe not the Chinese people. It’s a different
thing. I think. Probably the Chinese people would want to have more freedom, but the Chinese
Communist Party is not going to give them freedom.
MR. Well, I don’t know, I think they owe a lot to the Communist Party.
SL. Now going back to the threats from Super AI and these kind of weapons. What do you
think about the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction? The MAD concept, which we had
during the Cold War. Is that effective? Is it more effective than regulations?
MR. I think it’s very dangerous because, going back to what we were saying earlier,
there could be false alarms, misunderstandings, etc. If you think back to the Cold War, I’m
old enough to be alive during much of the Cold War, and if we read what was said about
the Cold War by people who were in power at that time, the memos of Kennedy and McNamara
and people like that, it’s fairly clear that they thought the risks were rather high.
In fact, at the time of the Cuba crisis in 1962, Kennedy said the threat of a nuclear
exchange was between one in three evens. McNamara, who was the secretary of defense of America
at that time, he said, they were lucky rather than wise to survive the Cuba crisis. Of course,
there’s been documentation, subsequently, of various false alarms, where this could
be triggered. So I think if we look back at the Cold War
we can say it worked, there was no exchange and mutually assured destruction did work,
because game theory suggests that if people are rational and well informed, then they
might avoid that. But I think and I say in my book, that it was an unwise policy, because
if the chance was one in three and even one in six, it’s like playing Russian roulette
with one or two bullets in the cylinder. You don’t do that unless the stakes are very
high, or unless you value your life very low. That’s a situation we were placed under.
I myself, if I’d been asked, I would not have risked one in three or even one in six
chance of the destruction of the fabric of European civilization, even if the alternative
was a certain takeover by Russia of Western Europe.
SL. “Better red than dead”, which is what Bertrand Russell said.
MR. Indeed, yes, yes. He was quite right and of course, we were lucky, since, but of course,
that’s like the guy who plays Russian roulette, you may be lucky, but that doesn’t mean
if there’s a sensible gamble. SL. And then in the US, after a few years
someone said “better dead than red”… MR. That’s right, I don’t have much sympathy
with them. SL. So we spoke about Cold War. When there
was the Cold War, it was mainly the West against the East, say capitalists against communists.
The good thing there was that we were sort of independent, we could make our goods in
our countries, in the UK, Europe, US, etc. But now the situation is different. Now, if
we say there is a Cold War between, let’s say, US and China, these two countries are
strongly interdependent. So in case there is a war, then there will be a huge disruption
in the supply chains, which is what happened with the pandemic. So what do you think would
be the solution? Of course, the solution would be peace. But that’s not always the thing
that happens. But do you think we should reduce globalization and go more towards like produce
locally and where things are needed? MR. I think globalisation on the whole is
probably good, because it’s an extra disincentive to having some sort of serious conflict. But
on the other hand, I think what we’ve learned is that there is another trade off, which
is the one between efficiency and resilience. And we see these examples of that in it. If
you have a factory and you depend on parts coming from supply chains all over the world,
and if there’s a supply chain that leads to somewhere in the Far East, and if one link
in that chain is broken, then that stopped production, then of course, you’re vulnerable.
I think people have learned that it’s probably worth the extra cost and, in a sense, the
inefficiency of having multiple supply chains, and keeping an inventory in stock, rather
than depending on Just-in-time delivery, in order to be more resilient, if there is some
unexpected crisis. So I think that’s certainly a lesson that we’re going to learn from
this pandemic that efficiency is not the only thing that matters. To take a quite different
example, Germany had a policy of keeping a larger fraction of its hospital intensive
care beds empty all the time, except for crisis, so they could cope with the crisis better
than we could, where we pride ourselves on 95% occupancy, which is, in a sense, more
efficient, but it doesn’t give you the headroom, if there is a crisis. That’s another example,
where it’s worth accepting inefficiency in order to be more resilient when there is
a crisis. SL. Yeah. And then, of course, I mean, trying
to reduce globalization will also help with other things like pollution. Because I mean,
it is a huge supply chains that to go far, to China and so on, they have a huge carbon
footprint. Also, there is the issue of labour rights there. Plenty of issues there.
MR. Yes, I’m not sure I agree with you and wanted to reduce globalisation. But I think
one thing, which I do think very strongly is we need to do something to help Africa.
Because Africa is lagging behind in terms of its economic development. And it’s also
the area of the world, where population is still growing fastest. Sub-Saharan Africa
hasn’t been through the demographic transition towards a lower birth rate. So its population
is growing fast. There’s a risk that Africa be trapped in
poverty, partly because they can’t develop the way the East Asian countries did, which
is by cheap manufacturing, undercutting the wage levels in Europe and North America, because
robots are doing that. We have what called reshoring of manufacturing in rich countries,
because it doesn’t need so much labour. So that’s a ladder that has been kicked
away from African countries. And so it’s not so obvious how they are going to develop.
The other point is that the one thing they do have is information and the ability to
travel. They know by mobile phones, what they missing, they know the injustice to their
fates. If this huge inequality persists between the lifestyle you have in Africa and our lifestyles,
then this is going to be a recipe for embitterment, mass migration, and conflict. So I think there’s
a very strong motive for the northern countries, especially those in Europe, to have a sort
of mega Marshall Plan in order to ensure that Africa doesn’t fall further behind. This
is not just for altruistic reasons is to make a safer and more stable world.
SL. Yeah, but the problem is that I think colonialism never ended in Africa, right?
I mean, we never stopped exploiting Africa in any way on another one. In the past, we
used to send soldiers, now maybe we pay some corrupt politician to get some resources from
those places. MR. And I think there are positives as well
as negative and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.
SL. And also there are the wars that we started in North Africa, for example, that created
all sorts of problems. For example, in Libya... MR. Indeed, yes. The westerners, especially
the Americans, have a great deal to answer for.