Peter Cochrane: Where does death come from?

The internet has become the biggest source of subversion - of all kinds - in history. How should we respond, asks Peter Cochrane

I think we can safely say that people are very poor at risk assessment.

Okay, scientists and engineers consider this as an important part of their work, and organisations put great faith in their ability to de-risk investments, market strategies, and management decisions.

However, globalisation, connectedness and the rapid advance of technology has eroded our ability to gauge and mitigate risk of all kinds.

In reality, our world has become far less predictable than the mechanistic, step-by-step, linear, and simple world of the industrial era. It is now more ‘biological' and evolutionary with everything dominated by non-linearity and chaos, with risks far more difficult to quantify.

Ask the average person, or even many professionals, what are the biggest risks to our species and you will get a very predictable list including: nuclear/chemical/biological/cyber war; pollution and ecological damage; water and food shortages; population growth and so on.

In my experience all risk and ‘metaphoric death' situations always follow a somewhat perverse rule set:

Death comes from a direction you are not looking

By a mechanism you have not contemplated

At a time that is really inconvenient

This seems to apply to all forms of warfare, security, systems failure, natural and man-made disasters. In the case of our societies, we have a precarious ‘house of cards'.

The bottom layer sees science, discovery and all our fundamental knowledge. Next comes technology, engineering and infrastructures. Then we have farming, food production, industry, institutions and defence. Finally, the top layer sees government and society. Each of these layers is critically dependent on the ones below, above and to the side.

Given the apparent stability of our societies it can come as a surprise to find just how critical and ‘edgy' all this is. For example; If scientists falsify reports results and discoveries that are then used by engineers, the outcome will be system failures that may be disastrous.

At the other extreme, should politicians underfund science or discount expertise the concatenation of ignorance will end in tragedy. Sadly, this has all happened many times, but it has been on a sufficiently small scale that it could be corrected.

Like a small child learning to walk we also discover from accidents!

The trick is to limit the damage

So what is the biggest risk to our societies, democracies and freedoms? In my view it is the distortion of the truth on a grand scale by our adversaries including: Terrorists, institutions, rogue states, governments, political factions, hacking groups, despots, dictators, extremists, companies, conspirators and so on.

Ironically we empowered these groups by engineering the necessary tools and made them available on the internet. So now the most ambitious rogue states employ strategies made possibly by the availability of IT in every home and office. Broadly, their objectives and methodologies looks like this:

Ideological subversion: Change the perceptions of populations to such an extent that despite an abundance of data/information no one can to come to sensible conclusions to defend themselves, their family/community/country. To be completed in four stages:

1) Demoralisation ~ 20 years: Re-educate generations of students to change their ideology and perceptions

2) Destabilisation ~ three years: Target essential structures of a nation: economy, foreign relations, infrastructures and defence systems

3) Crisis ~ six weeks: Violent disruption to, and change in power structure, and economy

4) Normalisation ~ four weeks: Take over with population living under a new ideology/reality

So how can we combat such threats? In a word; technology: fighting fire-with-fire and fact/source checking; a library of lies; a rogues gallery of offenders; internet purging; and, the education of our students.

We might also include: some form of access penalty for habitual liars and those posing a threat to freedom. For sure, we are on the back foot, but just as in cyber security we have superior forces, equipment and networks. It is up to us to solve the problem.

Together we might just win

Divided we will definitely fall!

Peter Cochrane OBE is the ex-CTO of BT, who now works as a consultant focusing on solving problems and improving the world through the application of technology.