Episode 1 : Technology, Trust, and the Accelerants of Global Crisis

Welcome to Shifting Ground, the podcast of the Orbis Journal of World Affairs brought to you by the Forum Policy Research Institute and the Sam Nunns School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Join us every other week as our editors connect the pages of Orbis with the issues of the day. I'm Larry Rubin, an associate professor at the Sam Nunns School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Together, we serve as editors of Orbis, the Journal of World Affairs. Each episode will speak with scholars, policymakers, and practitioners about the forces reshaping global politics, international security, and world affairs. You can find this in future episodes of Shifting Ground on our website, orbisjournal.org, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major streaming services. Please know that the views expressed by the host and participants in this episode are their own. This is Shifting Ground. Stacey Dixon, we are really, really incredibly thrilled to welcome you and have you on our podcast today to talk a little bit about your article and everything else that comes to mind, immediate current events excluded in the Middle East because we know that things are changing so rapidly, but we will ask you a couple of questions to think a little bit more broadly about these. And I'd like to put a time stamp on in case it comes up in the discussion right now. It's Friday, March 13th. Nobody's checked the news, I think, in the last. I'm not sure how long and it's mid-afternoon, but I don't think we're going to go that timely here. And what we'd really like to talk to you about is your article entitled The World's Hidden Accelerance Technology Trust and System Frajility. And first, though, we want to hear a little bit more about you. We want to hear how you got to this podcast. Absolutely, Larry Nick. Thank you so much for having me. It's really excited to be talking to you today. I always start with I am an engineer from Washington, D.C. I was trained at Stanford University where I see my bachelor's and then Georgia Tech where I received my master's in PhD. So I'm an engineer who was surrounded by government and the intelligence community growing up, but who never thought that she would end up either working for government or the intelligence community. I found myself on an academic path pursuing a career as a professor, potentially, and then did this sort of hard pivot before, right when it was time to decide whether I was going to go to a university and found myself in the intelligence community at a time when there was also a recession happening in the world. My first job was as an engineer working for the CIA, working at the National Reconnaissance Office Building Satellites. From there, I had very interesting experiences working on the hill, working in congressional affairs, working in research, and then later in my career, really looking at management positions and looking across the community, leading the organizations of the intelligence community. My last position, after 18 years as a career employee, was a political appointment as the principal deputy director of national intelligence, who is responsible for looking across the intelligence community, the 17 other elements or agencies, and helping to essentially keep the country safe, trying to help the United States provide the intelligence that's needed to keep the country prosperous to help protect national interests, both within the US as well as overseas, and really working as an integrated community to provide the kinds of information that decision-makers like Congress and the President need to make policy decisions. I know you touched on it a little bit, but tell us a little bit more about that bridge between becoming an engineer and then making your way to not just because you're working in national security, but policy somewhere along those lines. So as I mentioned, I did big start my career as an engineer, but then really quickly moved to have all of these other non-engineering experiences, and it was partially because, as someone who could talk about technology to people who were non-technical, those skills were very valued on the hill in particular. And so when I went from the executive branch to the legislative branch, I was able to use those skills to help the members of Congress understand all of the investments in technology that the community was making at the time. Found my way back into an agency as a legislative affairs director, using the skills that I'd used, learned in the last job, but knew that I wanted to get back into research. And so found my way back in the research and engineering, and it was always fun to be part of the organization, building the capabilities that would be used to collect all sorts of information around the world to help us with Addels Intelligence questions. One of the things I'd love to say is that as an engineer, you learn how to break down problems into smaller subsets and then work as teams to figure that out. And those are very, very similar skills that you need even in non-technical subjects, like managing others, like figuring out sort of the foreign policy complex issues around the world. You can approach them in similar ways and bring those really interesting, different way of thinking to the table to have those conversations. And one of the things that I think we had thought about discussing well ahead of this crisis, I think, maybe even before we invited you on and planned you to come, was really just to talk a little bit more about, I guess, the role of restrictions and thinking about the benefits of technology, in particular, some conductor exports and AI chip access. And what are kind of your thoughts both from the experience and government that you can talk about when it comes to questions about how to keep the United States current model of technology competition sustainable, or is it even sustainable? And are we triggering and accelerating indigenous innovation in other places? It's absolutely something that we had thought about and talked about in the previous administration. And I have no doubt this administration is actually having similar conversations. It's that balance between national security, protecting the security of the country, and helping and allowing US companies to play out in the global market, not hindering them from selling whatever capabilities they create, but understanding what the threats are going to be. And sometimes you see the government putting in regulations and restrictions as to what can be sold overseas, with the goal of keeping very sensitive or very advanced technologies out of the hands of those who might use it for harm, either against our country or against our interests. And it's a really delicate balance that frankly, we don't always get right. Sometimes we restrict companies, and I say we still admit government doesn't always get right. Sometimes restricts the ability for companies to sell their wares overseas because the government or the US company has the advantage and has something that no other company around the world is creating. The question is, are the regulations released in time for that company to then be profitable? And sometimes we keep the regulations in place a little too long. One of the other things that you have to make sure you're doing is not locking something into statute, knowing that it may be very difficult to actually change the law. So while the law can say that there are going to be regulations on what is sold, you wouldn't want to put the specific, the specifications in the law itself. That's where your regulations or your executive orders would come out so that you could change it as technology changes, because technology changes so fast and what was state of the art one day, three months later, one week later, whatever the time frame is won't be state of the art anymore. And you have to be able to balance that well. And I think that's sort of a constant conversation that the government is having with industry, because industry will know where they're headed, where their investments are going to be, where they're going to be in three, six months, and sometimes they will even have a better sense of where their competitors are around the world. And that information should be at the table where those discussions are taking place. So one of the things that has been raised is that too often we seem to have in our policy process that someone starts off in the policy world and then learns on the job about the technology side, the business side. What do you think about those who say that we should be reverse engineering in the different direction? That is that we should be getting people from the tech and business side and then have them learn the policy process as they go go forward. I think we will be much better off when we have a nice balance of people who have the subject matter expertise or in that technology and then bring that to the policy side, but it's also useful to have people who've been thinking about policy and then putting them at the table with those individuals who have the technical expertise only. I think I learned it the other way. So I learned it with the technical expertise and then had to learn how policies are made. How do you have the kinds of conversations that are going to lead to either laws or regulations effectively so that you can not create laws and regulations that impede, especially the innovation that we're hoping to see more of in this country. But I think it's a nice mix. If you've got people who understand the technology and learn the policy side later and people who learn the policy side and then can work with those folks who have the subject matter expertise, it's sort of a win-win situation, so I want to see both at the table. One of the things kind of to take this conversation into somewhat of the current context, but just rather regionally. If we watch the conflict in the Middle East unfold, what do you think it reveals about how accessible technologies, such as drones, precision systems, or cyber tools, and what it reveals about them and how they're reshaping the character of warfare? It's interesting looking at, so this is sort of March 2026, current conflicts around the world. I don't know that anyone should be surprised that we see the use of drones in particular in the Iran, Israel, U.S., war that's happening right now. I would say some other locations around the world, one would say, how did those drones, how did that advanced technology get there, knowing that there's no indigenous industry, for example. So clearly, it's being sold by others around the world into those conflicts. And frankly, you can have a huge impact on where those conflicts goes, who the winner is, how long those conflicts last. That is one of the things that I brought up in the article, literally, that this democratization of technology is changing not only the face of conflict, but a lot of technology is going places that would not have indigenously produced it, at least in the timelines that we're talking about. Maybe years down the road, they would have had some capability like this, but they're getting it now because other countries are sending it to them or selling it to them, and it really is changing the way the conflicts go. And I think we're only, you know, we've seen that also in the aspect of the internet. The internet gives people the ability to leverage tools like large language models and other things that can give them advantages in whatever it is they're trying to pursue. And we want to, you know, we're excited when that's used for good, but in many times this can also be used against the US in ways that are threatening to our country or our national interests. You know, and a related point, and both to what you wrote, one of the interesting parts was you really talked about the idea of information and trust and we'll get into that a little bit. But one of the things we've been seeing in this conflict in particular is this competing narratives or incorrect or disinformation, disinformation, all rapidly spreading online and really as we'll probably analyze later, potentially having a significant effect on conflict and it could even have an effect on how others outside of the region understand this conflict and maybe mobilize or radicalize. So how do you think this current information environment complicates crisis management in general? I think it absolutely can lead, it can lead certain things to happen in conflicts that would not have happened otherwise. It can lead people in the society to take sides that maybe they would not have otherwise. It can lead others outside the conflict to react in different ways to it, especially if it's compelling. You know, we've seen in this particular conflict in Iran as well as in other conflicts around the world, the use of social media to try to change public thought about things, whether it is trying to persuade people that one side is having an outcome, more of an impact, more success than they actually are, which we did see in one case where I think the social media post suggested that bombing had happened on a US base or base where there were US service members that actually hadn't happened, not in that conflict anyway. And so that was trying to change the narrative of how successful Iran being, for example. You can imagine this happening in many places around the world where there are conflicts where one side wants to get the public behind them because what the public thinks, what individuals in the society think, what companies in the society think and do, absolutely can have an impact on the way that a conflict progresses. And it's almost an additional factor of war that needs to be taken into consideration that many times we're not thinking about all of the possible stakeholders in a conflict. You think about the people that are actually fighting, but so many more people, their say really does matter, especially if they decide to support the government or they decide not to support their government. That really has an impact on whether the government can stay within that conflict. And this ties in actually really well, because I was kind of leading in that direction. We're heading in that direction with our conversation about the main focus of your discussion and your paper is all title and obviously plug it, one of the points of, of to really elaborate some of the, on some of these points, the world's hidden accelerants, technology, trust and system fragility. And in it, you argue that some of the most consequential forces shaping global politics are underlying accelerants rather than headline crises. What do you mean by that? What I mean is that, you know, the certain, the things that hit the newspapers, big wars, big attacks, you know, large, large things that anyone would look at the thing happening and say, that is the thing that we need to be worried about, whether it is sort of a nuclear thing happening around the world or whether it's the war itself. I would say that, yes, those things are absolutely important and we spend a lot of time focusing on those big events, but underneath those big events are trends that can make the events worse or better. Make them things that the government can manage or not manage. Things like this, this disproperation of technology, if you go into a conflict thinking you've got this sort of asymmetrical advantage and then all of a sudden there are weapons being used by the opponent that they didn't have before, all of a sudden you didn't know that they had or that they were using, all of a sudden you no longer have that same advantage. If you go into a conflict thinking that the public is behind you and then through misinformation and disinformation, someone tries to convince them that, you know, this country being involved in this particular conflict is a bad thing and then you get protest in your society, then all of a sudden now you've got to deal with something that you didn't anticipate. If you look at the artificial intelligence and the way that, yes, it's got a lot of benefits. I think we can all say that we see it changing the world in positive ways, but, you know, we've also seen our inboxes and we've got even spam that's even more effective than it used to be that, frankly, now sounds like it's coming from individuals in our countries and also looks very increasingly like the kinds of correspondence you would get from a bank or your government, you know, IRS, whatever the case may be. And so more of us are getting fooled, frankly, into responding to these things. All of this underlying capability is having a huge impact. It's not the thing that's going to necessarily make the headlines, but it will make those things in the headlines much worse. Can I ask you to elaborate a bit on that because of this notion of trust and assured reality. As we're seeing in this current conflict and past conflicts, you can spoof GPS. You can, people think that they're on a safe maritime or air corridor and it's not. They think that food or medicine that they're consuming is safe because it's past an inspection and it's not or variety. So, I mean, beyond just, you know, I think people are aware, emails may come and you may get the spoof call that sounds very much like a friend or a spouse who says, "I need you to wire me $300," but beyond that, I mean, are there concerns? Because that our ability to travel, our ability to consume food, the safety of our water supply can be negatively impacted by the ability of these tools to unassure reality. Absolutely. If you sort of think from a government perspective, it was always about, you know, how can we use the information we have to try to keep the country safe, to try to keep society, to try to support society and allow the threats to society to not have the kinds of impacts that they could have. But it relies on the fact that society trusts the government and trusts other institutions. And when you call that into question, all of a sudden, the government's advice that, you know, there's certain medical interventions or health interventions that will keep you safe or help keep things from spreading, all of a sudden that is questioned. If the government comes out and says, you know, there is something, you know, there's a natural disaster coming and we need you to sort of take this, you know, we need you to leave an area or, or, you know, stay and stay where you are to stay protected. And if there's mistrust there for whatever reason by those that are hearing the message, they may not do that. And so you, as a government, you would be, you're in a position where you have something's life saving that you're trying to get your citizens and those living the society to do. But because there's a lack of trust, they don't do it in which case now, not only are they in harm's way, but your ability to be effective and carry out effective services is compromised. So, you know, Matt, that's one thing if there's just a lack of trust because, you know, there is, if you look over time, there's been a significant decrease in trust, both in institutions in general, but also specifically in government. And so we've seen this happening, you know, in the course of the past couple of decades. And then, frankly, it continues to go in the wrong direction. So it's something that we have to worry about. But now you've got adversaries who, frankly, can, you know, inject either through bots or through just, you know, creating through bots or through individuals, narratives that seem true, but are not true, that actually make that trust, that help to decrease that trust even further, or completely give information that is wrong, that people can, for various reasons, believe to be true, that again, we'll now shape how they're thinking about it, but also make it harder for them to have that thought process reversed by the government. And when the government can show compelling information that something is not true that's not, then put out there, it's very hard to change minds after people have sort of believed something and then sort of set behind it. What does this mean for politics, even at the local level? I, that's, it's, I'm glad you asked that question because in many ways, it's the way that impact society in negative ways that we should be most worried about. And we are, where we are. are sort of in the sort of trusted institutions in the US, right? You know, we may slowly figure out ways to build it back up. And we should be trying to do that. We're not going to change it immediately. But we definitely need to make sure that people can go and have sources-- nowhere's there are good sources of information. They have to be able to go and find something that's true. That has to be out there. Unfortunately, a lot of the things that people tend to take issue with and disagree with and that kind of causes this societal strife tend to also be lumped into these very political buckets when it may be political because one party or another thinks a certain way. But the thing itself really is nonpartisan. There's not any politics behind it. It's just a thing. However, we've sort of allatched it on to politics, in which case, it makes it very difficult to talk about it in sort of a civil conversation at times. And those are the things that I do worry about. There are already divisions in the country that, frankly, can be made worse through injections from adversaries or those who want to make the division worse than it is. Our adversaries would be perfectly happy to sort of sit back and just sort of do these little injections low cost that but really can have a really negative impact on how our country goes through and does anything, whether it's listening to government in health warnings or safety warnings, or even whether we believe that elections are protected or not protected. We can expect, as we get into election seasons, that there will be others outside trying to so doubt within there. And we have to be able to point people in the direction where they can go and get fine facts. Just so, no, this is not actually happening or this image that you see is actually a manipulated image that has taken years and years and years ago and then still manipulated. And it's not something that's happening now. So there are things that government and others can do to provide places people can go and find truth. But it's so much easier for people to believe something negative and the negative thing also tugs at the emotions. It's really, really hard to counter it. And I think those who would seek to use that as a threat factor, absolutely know that. One of the things that comes out in this discussion is that while we can focus on the vulnerabilities in the United States and among our allies that in fact, this affects everyone. So we've seen over the last years, we've seen how drone strikes inside of Russia where Russia's vulnerabilities are. We've had the shutdown of the internet and cell phone services and Moscow and St. Petersburg at various points. Is there a sense that it's not just the United States, but are all countries vulnerable? Is there an interconnectedness in this vulnerability that makes it that it's not just the United States which is the recipient, but that other countries may fear that they could be on the receiving end of these types of disruptions? Absolutely, absolutely. I have definitely seen around the world misinformation, disinformation campaigns that are typically targeting the part of the government that's in control or targeting the part of the part that's trying to run against who those that are in control. And it is increasingly useful in the beauty. The beauty, I guess the beauty of artificial intelligence and large language models is, yes, it can tailor things to look great in English, but it can also tailor them in any language possible around the world, in which case you can make culturally relevant content that is extremely believable. And then if there's already a seed of doubt that's there or distrust or really anything, it's easier to sway those emotions. And so every country really should be looking at this. If there's something big happening in the country, whether it's an election, whether it is a-- even like a celebratory event like US250, like other countries are celebrating their anniversaries and their birth as well, things like that. It's easy for people to try to inject and sort of raise the discontent level around something that could be a celebration. And so we do have to not only us have to look at that, but other countries should be very aware of it and out there trying to help their citizens understand when someone is using misinformation and disinformation to try to affect how they think, affect their actions, affect what they believe, and affect how they feel about their country and the leaders in their country. How do you think this is different from the past? And in a certain sense of misinformation, disinformation, and it was also part of the Cold War just on a, I guess, a higher or broader scale. But what makes this different, is it the penetration, is it the societies, is it the speed at which it happens, or I don't want to lead you too much into my question? I do think-- and Nick mentioned the word interconnectedness. I really do think it there, that thinks it's there. The internet has provided a way for us to feel like the world is extremely small, and that there were so many degrees of separation, like everyone is closer to someone else around the world than ever before. And the fact that information can move as quickly as it does. And for good or bad, we've got algorithms out there that have learned that people appreciate bad information in particular, and I don't know that the algorithms are prioritizing it, but the algorithms are trying to keep people looking at social media and other things, and so it happens to be spreading some of this disinformation and misinformation. We've created a situation also where the ability to curate information is seen very negatively, and which also gets mixed up into not just freedom of speech, but also some politicization issues. So it becomes very difficult to counter some of the things you're trying to see without it feeling like you're censoring something in some way. And so that's an added thing that makes it a threat that people don't really want to touch. But absolutely, the speed that the internet provides, the ability for information to get out there, the ability for a lone person to suddenly find themselves having this platform where they can touch millions of people if the message is interesting enough. So you have new players where it used to be governments, large corporations that were the voices that you would hear out there. Now you've got all people, many people, who have the ability to be that large voice. And it's hard when you've got that many people who can really make a shift in society and or impact the way that many people think about a particular topic. And one of the things we didn't get a chance to talk about, and I want to kind of wrap this into the conversation, is this notion, which I think is very interesting, and I hope a lot of people will pick up on it, is this notion of an accelerant. It was a key accelerant. And basically, I would like you to just elaborate a little bit on what that means for you, and then we'll give you a little time to think about what key accelerants might be for the future that you would look out for. - The example that I like to give of an accelerant is a pretty straightforward one. You, a lot of places around the world, the investment in infrastructure. And I'll use water infrastructure as the example of choice. It's not great. You know, there are already issues of getting clean water, two places, or even dealing with regular rains that happen to come through, you know, you get flooding or whatever. We've also seen recently a lot of extreme weather events, and these events sometimes have caused tremendous amounts of rains to fall in a very short period of time on those same locations. Whereas there already was going to be a problem, the fact is the underinvestment in the infrastructure can now make for basically situations where people can die as a result. People were already frustrated that the government wasn't taking care of the population. And now this has made it even more so. These lies have been lost. And all of a sudden, now you have protests and people that are possibly negatively have negative feelings towards their government who may be willing or persuaded to take activity. And so just this underlying thing of this sort of underinvestment in the infrastructure coupled with something that's just a natural thing, rain, all of a sudden is a problem that could possibly spiral out of control for that particular city, town, state, country, whatever the case may be. And so it's those kinds of things that I think about when I think about accelerants. There are sometimes there are things that are just naturally there, but if you put that on top of an event that's already taking place, it may get to a point where the government actually no longer can control the outcome in a way that benefits the population that is now experiencing this event. And to build on that, then, what would be some of your recommendations that you think the US government should be looking at over the next number of years in addressing and coping with the accelerant challenge? So I'll stick on the infrastructure one for a moment. We know and we hear-- and frankly, we see in the news quite frequently failures in our critical infrastructure, whether it's a natural failure because of a cold wave in Texas that freezes the turbines in the wind farms, or if it's literally the water situation that I describe where you've got floods at our historic highs that are impacting a particular location and taking lives. We've got a lot of infrastructure in this country that was built a long time ago. And we need to make sure-- and then the government is doing this, assessing how healthy, how strong these things are, whether it is communications infrastructure, whether it's transportation infrastructure, certainly energy infrastructure, health care infrastructure, like all of these things should be monitored. by the government and frankly others, figure out where your points are, where your major points of failure and make sure that you're investing in these things so that we don't have the issues that might happen. Should there, you know, particular node be impacted, all of a sudden it isn't having an effect in many, many places around the world. The government in partnership with localities and industry and what we know about our commercial or our critical infrastructure is not all of its own by the government. And so now you've got players involved that you have to also interact with to make sure that everyone is making the kinds of investments that are needed. So that's one thing, you know, know the infrastructure, know where the vulnerabilities are, put extra protection against those vulnerabilities. The second thing is, and we've seen this over and over again, our cyber hygiene in many ways is not where it needs to be. I know I've been looking at cyber security for quite some time and I was on the hill when the initial large tranches of cyber dollars came in and we had the cyber czar and we were really aware of the fact that, and this was in the 2007-2010 time frame. So this is not recent. Cyber security is something that you're never done investing in because people who do cyber attacks are always going to try to get better. We need to do better not only in protecting our systems, but you know, leveraging technology to help us protect our systems. Individuals need to be, take the responsibility that we have as individuals for patching our own systems. So there's a lot of things that we can do there. So knowing the threat, knowing where the most significant vulnerabilities are so that you can protect, put extra protections there is absolutely something that our country needs to be figuring out. And then, you know, on that whole idea of misinformation and disinformation and this is absolutely something that the intelligence community and others are looking at, but are there people that are trying to, are there adversaries are there that are trying to influence the way that our citizens and those who live in the US think and try and encourage them to take action that will be sort of negative towards the government. We can watch that. We need to figure out how to partner with other voices though to make sure that as tools are developed that kind of parse through what is true and what is not, that one, they don't get politicized, but two, that there's somewhere that people can go to find what is actually truth and then training that into students from very young ages and then reminding people over the over the time, like that they need to go back and look at the sources of information. Where's this stuff coming from? We have to have that knowledge and ability and, you know, we call it now critical thinking skills, but we really have a lack of teaching that along the way from the earliest, earliest, in the earliest children all the way through. We're reminding people to think critically about what they see coming their way. We just gave people this opportunity to be able to be immersed with all of this social media, all of this information without giving them the tools to really be able to protect themselves and to know what's true and what's not true. I think the last part is also, before we kind of move on, really interesting both for Nick and I because we teach it different institutions and I think at least for me and Nick and obviously speak for himself where he comes from, we just kind of took for granted in the past that people would understand what trusted sources are and we've seen this evolve over the last five to ten years and if people remember at first, Wikipedia came out, people didn't really trust it and then now it seems like, you know, it's not a bad source because it's been democratized to some extent even though there are huge problems and fights, but now we really have to keep an eye on this and then it becomes really not just about the information, but information generation is what, you know, we've been dealing with in AI right now. So the last kind of question I want to ask is if you have big questions in the sense that you've laid out some things you would want to, you know, you would want the government to focus on, but what are your questions that you would ask and maybe we won't be able to chance to, well, answer it another time, but if you had big questions to ask, what would they be? I'll take that in two directions. One of the questions that I have is, and we talk about it a little as we're talking about technology getting out into the world, we talk about artificial intelligence and how it's going to change jobs in many, many ways. I would love to see, and it's great, you know, talking to some people who are in the academic institutions because I think this is where the research needs to be done, but really an assessment of truly, how is it going to affect society when if the most negative predictions happen? And I don't know that they will, but at the most negative predictions about the number of jobs that will go away over time happens, and there are less people with jobs. How does societies deal with that? How does the government get into a place where it's able to counteract that negative, potentially negative, influx of people into the unemployment market? You know, how is society going to change as a result of all of the automation that's coming? Automation is great, but if it does take away some jobs and it takes away enough of them, then there's going to be other problems that are created. And so that's that's one of the questions that I have that I would love to see, you know, someone think about and truly use. The other one is there is a lot of technology out there, and one thing that we can do now that I don't think that we could do as well before is predict unintended consequences of things. So as researchers are creating new capabilities, I would love to see a requirement somehow for them to think about how what would someone who wants to do harm do with what it ever the thing is that you created? Like I need some sort of evil geniuses out there to kind of start taking the good thing that they've created and figuring out how it can be used for bad so that we can put guardrails in place. Not trying to slow down innovation, but the problem is for many things we get them out there in the world and then we're surprised by the negative things people do with those things. I've personally seen and I think you both have too the increase in the use of modeling and simulation and many of the very complex things we're seeing in this world. And I think there's a place for that. So being at a university and being able to put into a simulation the same questions that I'm asking to try to see what possible outcomes could be there. I think that'll help us to to figure out some of those unintended consequences and sort of be able to deal with them ahead of time. And of course, someone else will come up with some other idea, but at least we've thought it through a little bit. And so I guess the question is, are we willing to use technology to help us with the possibility that the good technologies we create will be used for ill? And if we do so in advance that won't that put us on a much better place at the end of the day when some of those unfortunate negative consequences come to light? Well, thanks so much. This has really been a fascinating discussion and I actually didn't expect it and I'm not sure about Nick whether we would focus so much on information this way, but it really all ties together. Anyway, I want to thank you tremendously for joining us in this show. It's really been a pleasure and I know all of our readers and listeners will be enriched by what you've written and also what you've spoken about today. Thanks so much. Thanks, Larry and Nick. And I hope that the readers will write back with their own ideas and suggestions and let us know what they think about the articles. Thank you. It's the start not the end of the conversation. Exactly. This has been an episode of Shifting Ground, a podcast of the Orbus Journal of World Affairs. For more information about the articles mentioned in this episode, please visit us at orbusjournal.org. Until next time.