Light and infrared targeting devices for games. (Photo by Rob Stradling | website)
Al Qaeda technicians have apparently pioneered the use of electronics in old SEGA game cartridges for bomb detonators. A smaller precedent than the use of the airliner as suicide missile, but no less remarkable as a demonstration of the the transnational terrorist group’s acumen and artistry at the reuse of civilian technology for military purposes.
The West, having derived its military advantages from the possession of advanced technology for centuries, has been preoccupied with the security risks of technology transfer perhaps since the classical Greeks. But the emergence of massive civilian technology transfers from modern to relatively underdeveloped cultures, and the accelerating pace of Western technological advance, presents a new challenge that promises only to expand in risk and complexity.
International travel to the underdeveloped regions of the world can often be an interesting journey for the technical antiquary, as he will soon discover that technologies long discarded in the developed world have been exported in vast quantities offshore. Indeed, the West has been dumping its unwanted obsolete equipment on poor countries for nearly a century, and most people would rightly regard the trade as mostly of mutual benefit. Unwanted technology in the West is recycled by people who want and need it, and typically at an equitable price for both cultures. But there are fundamental structural risks associated with the transformation of poor countries into the offshore junk heaps of modernity.
Confronting an identical but purely hypothetical problem, the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking surprised a great many people in the 1990s, when he spoke out forcefully against attempts to establish contact with extraterrestrial civilizations if they were ever found to exist. Hawking criticized the value of any such contact as implicitly dangerous, even for the optimistic purpose of peaceful knowledge exchange. His caution was informed by his experience with biology, where the strong victimize the weak wherever possible.
But there was a deeper dimension to his apprehension, in that there is no reason to assume that a non-human civilization would develop evenly on a broad front in all fields of scientific inquiry. Much like own, an alien civilization might prioritize some areas at the expense of others due to environmental or cultural mandates. Human technology in electronics is fantastically advanced for instance, but we remain remarkably primitive in engine design for transportation, due to the geological accident of a ready availability of petroleum resources. Even in past advanced cultures, the Romans for example possessed most of the requisite scientific knowledge to construct a rudimentary steam engine, but in a culture relying heavily on slave labor, might have found few reasons for doing so.
The trouble with any scientific and engineering exchange between cultures that have developed different technical priorities of this sort, is that every technology has a potential military application and the scale of a technical advantage to a foreign culture can often be difficult to anticipate. It’s doubtlessly safe to say that the use of old SEGA game cartridges as explosive detonators, never entered the minds of Western distributors looking to unload unsellable inventories of them from their home markets.
In the case of a hypothetical civilization, it’s not difficult to imagine a culture which hadn’t placed such large demands as we do on expanding the capacity of portable electronic media storage. A gift to an alien culture of a blueprint for a older, obsolete CDR burner would seem an innocent enough prize, given our substantial expertise in this area. But of course, were you to do that, you’ve just unintentionally given your alien friends the key secret to laser guided munitions. Something the opponents of post-Vietnam Westernized armies have been repeatedly taught the spectacular military advantages of.
And so it is that we see a relatively less alien culture here on Earth, in the form of an Al Qaeda member from Yemen, finding innovative military applications for technology most of us would erroneously regard as entirely harmless, obsolete, and unwanted. As a political proposition, an obsolete technology that could have been widely distributed before the emergence of Al Qaeda as a serious security threat to the West, also demonstrates the inability of the transferring power to anticipate the very purposes of technology reapplication.
The lesson of this experience is that the only secure technology exchange with a foreign culture is the one you don’t have. But as in the hypothetical conversation with an alien civilization would doubtlessly prove, the temptations for communication and trade are too overwhelming to resist.
Given the inevitability of this trade, it might be an interesting exercise to look around your house for moment. It’s probably filled with consumer electronics if you’re a resident the West. Perhaps you might ponder what will become of some of this ”harmless” civilian tech when it eventually gets dumped on a street bazaar in Yemen, as it inevitably will be.
(HT: Kotaku via Tech Radar)