License To Kill

Mr. Wittes and Ms. Blum, from their respective perches at the Brookings Institution and Harvard Law School, are worried chiefly about what they almost pejoratively describe as “technologies of mass empowerment”—the Internet, gene-splicing, nanotechnology, robots, 3-D printing and so forth. Sure, the authors sporadically concede, TMEs (as I began to internally abbreviate the term after its 20th or so use) have been beneficial, but they threaten to produce “an environment of unaccountable freedom to do great harm.” The authors assert that the proliferation of TMEs “renders all of us, at once, naked, vulnerable, menacing, and essential to security.” But in place of concrete examples of new threats, we mostly get a series of what-ifs.

What if, the book begins, the post-9/11 anthrax terrorist, instead of scrawling out warning signs on his deadly envelopes, had used a sneaky drone to disperse the stuff over a crowded football stadium? What if a “disgruntled molecular biology graduate student” re-creates and then weaponizes the smallpox virus? How about a business competitor deciding to assassinate you in the shower via a self-destructing robot-spider? Despite the authors’ penchant for Bond-movie plotting, the questions giving rise to these fantastical scenarios are surely some of the most critical of our time: What do we do about security in an environment of “many-to-many” threats, where multiple individual actors could strike in any way at any time? How do states cope with stateless foes? And are things indeed getting more dangerous?

Mr. Wittes and Ms. Blum, like Cassandras everywhere, are one Black Swan event away from looking prophetic. Some of the threats that keep them up at night, such as hard-to-trace cyberattacks on strategic government institutions and private companies, seem increasingly likely in an age of expansionist bad guys like Vladimir Putin. In these cases, the authors have created some useful frameworks to help think through the ways that governments in particular might adapt.

The problem with “The Future of Violence” is a relentless tone of moral panic and fear, leading to the inescapable conclusion that only a strengthened state can prevent our nightmarish future.

Take something a bit more prevalent nowadays than lethal pseudo-arachnids: robotic drones. “It is not too hard to imagine someone weaponizing something the size of the Nano Hummingbird,” the authors warn. Solution? Vague paeans to “the power of direct regulation,” worried observations that non-American countries are developing the technology, and a non sequitur of a comparison to genetically modified food. Governments are already taking steps to manage drones: There will be in the near future a domestic de-monopolization of drone activity and likely some kind of international convention on usage. But the book is sparing with suggestions for either, other than fretting that drones “have already found their way into the world of hobbyists.”

In general, the book obsesses about the threat from the “countless Little Brothers and Medium-Sized Brothers our technology is creating” while dreaming up ever-greater roles for Big Brother—including, during one flight of fancy, the creation of “some sort of transnational Leviathan.”

Three hundred and fifty years ago, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes dreamed up such an authoritarian government on the nation-state level as the cure for what he called “the war of all against all.” The authors acknowledge that this is not a workable model in the free world but insist that Hobbes’s “broader point remains an essential insight: we need the protection of a strong state as a precondition for the meaningful exercise of liberty.” It requires a striking lack of faith in human progress to imagine that after centuries of individual and international gains, 21st-century life “threatens” to become “Hobbesian” due to asymmetrical warfare.

In fact, the world has been getting less deadly in recent years, and this phenomenon deserves more than passing consideration in a book titled “The Future of Violence.” The elephant in the room here is Steven Pinker’s acclaimed 2011 study, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” which noted the startling drop in state and private violence over the past several centuries (a decline that has accelerated in the Internet era). More to the point, Mr. Pinker’s book gave some of the credit for this development to the very democratization of communication and technology that gives Mr. Wittes and Ms. Blum the willies. Yet about the only engagement of Mr. Pinker’s argument in “The Future of Violence” is the authors’ statement that it just “captures one side of the coin,” since technology also “threaten[s] to enable people to cause each other infinitely greater harm than ever before.”

In calling for precautionary solutions to supposed problems that have not even reared their heads, “The Future of Violence” not only demonstrates an open sympathy for the powerful over the powerless; it also rules out a more Pollyannaish possibility. Namely, what if there’s no other side to Steven Pinker’s coin? What if the same stuff that is making us more safe and prosperous is also making us more prosperous and safe? Democratizing power—not just to injure and threaten, but to defend—may be inherently unsettling to the monopolists in Washington. But it might just be working.

Mr. Welch is editor in chief of Reason magazine.