Original subtitles

Freeman: The most powerful nations

fear a new form of warfare that could bring them to their knees.

In this age where armies, governments, and economies

all depend on an intricate global infrastructure,

you don't need guns and bombs to bring down a superpower.

All you need is imagination.

[ Computers beeping ]

Shift time by a millionth of a second and create chaos.

Use the human body to spread a killer computer virus.

Turn the technology we are addicted to against us.

Will human ingenuity triumph?

Or will our ingenuity prove our undoing?

Freeman: Space, time, life itself...

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

Through the Wormhole 05x04 How to Collapse a Superpower Original Air Date on June 11,

== sync, corrected by elderman == @elder_man

You and I rely on our modern civilization,

but there are plenty of people who don't like it,

for a variety of reasons,

religion, politics, or maybe fear about our future.

For now, let's call these people "terrorists."

Terrorists don't fight by conventional means.

They strike in ways we don't expect.

Now, we have given them a weapon

that could change the global balance of power.

The stability of the U.S., Europe, China,

and any global power depends on

high-speed digital communication.

With a little imagination, could a few terrorists sabotage

this massive network, cripple a mighty nation,

perhaps even tear down modern civilization?

Man on radio: Batter is Jackie Robinson.

One ball, one strike. Two on, two out.

Freeman: When I was growing up in Mississippi,

I loved to listen to the old Brooklyn Dodgers

baseball games, broadcast live all the way from New York.

It amazed me to think that my family was cheering

one of Jackie Robinson's big hits at the same instant

as tens of thousands of fans at Ebbets Field.

Way back, it's gone!

That's a home run for Jackie Robinson.

Invisible radio signals that connected millions of people

and synchronized us all.

They're coming out of the dugout now to shake hands...

Today, we are more connected than ever before.

And all the machines that connect us,

the machines that keep the modern world running,

rely on precisely synchronized time.

But could time be turned against us?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology

in Boulder, Colorado, is the home base

of physicist Judah Levine.

Whenever you use a computer or your cell phone,

you're tapping into Judah's greatest creation,

the Internet time service.

The Internet time service sends out signals that let computers

synchronize their clocks to within a millionth of a second,

and the number of devices that need precise time

is skyrocketing.

Levine: The growth has been 5% per month,

compounded for 15 years.

And so, we started out with 50,000 requests a day, and now,

we have about six billion requests a day.

Freeman: No single clock keeps time for the world.

N.I.S.T. has a dozen,

each measuring time in different ways.

The accuracy of Judah's clocks is vital for controlling

electric power grids,

synchronizing telecommunications networks,

timing financial transactions, and perhaps most importantly,

making the global positioning system work.

Imagine if terrorists threw those clocks off

by just a tiny bit.

What would happen?

Levine: The G.P.S. navigation system depends on the fact that

all the satellites are synchronized to the same time,

which is called G.P.S. system time.

The system fundamentally requires that,

and it won't work without it.

It just doesn't work at all. It's not that it degrades.

It just doesn't work.

Freeman: Around the world,

more than 5,000 planes are in the air at any given time.

To keep them from colliding, controllers must track time,

speed and distance with great precision.

A few seconds' disruption in th network could mean disaster

in the tightly packed airspace around a major airport.

Now imagine that effect simultaneously hitting

the entire infrastructure that keeps a superpower running.

Power plants, hospitals, food delivery, oil production,

all depend on time-critical functions.

Throw them out of sync,

and there could be a catastrophic chain reaction.

[ Glass shatters ]

Small effects, if they're not damped out quickly,

can grow to become much bigger problems.

Freeman: Judah's challenge is to keep that chain reaction

from happening.

His biggest threat comes from hackers.

The last year or two has seen a dramatic increase in hackers.

It used to be that you really had to understand how to write

some of these attacks, but now, one person writes the attack

and distributes it among 50 people

or 500 people or 5,000 people who don't necessarily understand

even how the attack works,

and all they have to do is copy and run it.

So it's a problem that's only gonna get worse.

Freeman: Judah's Internet time service protects itself

by spreading its clocks around. [ Satellite beeping ]

This goes back to the original purpose of the Internet --

distributing control so losing a few sites

won't take down the entire network.

The N.I.S.T. Internet time service

is more difficult to jam, because it's so distributed.

There are 45 servers.

They're all at different locations.

They don't have the same address.

They don't have the same physical -- physical networks.

So jamming all of them simultaneously would be --

I wouldn't want to say it was impossible,

'cause probably nothing's impossible,

but it would be quite a job.

Freeland: But the illusion of security

may be the greatest threat we face --

the false belief we are safe when we are not.

People tend to believe what they see and what they are told,

especially when it comes from a trusted figure.

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning

between the United States and Muslims around the world.

America is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

Freeman: But what if you couldn't trust anyone anymore?

With today's technology,

it is easy to turn harmless words into something

completely incendiary.

I seek war with Islam.

Freeman: If someone sees this fake and believes it is real,

it could start a religious war.

Islam has demonstrated hatred rather than peace.

I seek war with Islam.

Freeman: Protecting our identities

and those of our leaders against a terrorist assault

is a top priority for governments,

militaries and businesses.

Here at Switzerland's Idiap Research Institute,

one man is shoring up the virtual battlements

that keep out the cyberterrorists.

S?bastien Marcel is an expert in biometrics --

the science of using the unique signatures of the body

to verify a person's identity.

Biometric security is a vast leap beyond passwords

and I.D. cards,

which is why a shadowy army is trying to defeat it.

The challenge is to make the task so difficult

for possible attackers that they will just not try to do it.

Freeman: There are many different kinds of biometrics --

fingerprints, the iris, the way you walk.

The more individual the biometric,

the harder it is to hack.

S?bastien plays the dual roles of cyberterrorist

looking for vulnerabilities and defender of the system.

We always come first with a form of attack,

then find a countermeasure for that.

Then give us an idea on another way

to make a more clever attack.

And then we do it again and again.

Eventually, we will reach a point where it's not

going to be possible to make any new form of attacks

that can bypass the system.

Freeman: If a terrorist tricks security systems into believing

he is the president or one of his trusted aides,

he could start a war. [ Beeping ]

It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Even something unique, like your face,

isn't enough to safeguard your identity.

So here I have the laptop which is protected

by biometric face recognition.

We have an account created by a colleague

and I'm trying to be recognized as my colleague,

and, uh, my -- well, basically, doesn't work

because I'm not her.

I've taken a picture of my colleague here

and I'm just going to show it in front of the camera

and let's see what happens.

[ Computer beeping ]

So here, you can see that I've been able to log in very easily,

actually. It was instantaneous.

Freeman: Now, S?bastien switches back to guard duty.

He activates a countermeasure that strengthens the laptop's

biometric shield.

The software looks not just for a specific face,

but also blinking eyes.

So here, you see that, actually, well,

it's no longer possible to enter the system.

[ Computer beeps ]

Freeman: Even this added layer of biometric defense cannot,

however, deter an imaginative attacker.

By scanning a photograph with 3D imaging software,

S?bastien has created a mask of his colleague.

So now, I'm going to put the mask of my colleague on

and try to see if I'm recognized.

[ Computer beeping ]

Yeah.

So, I've been recognized and because I was blinking,

and I was able to bypass the countermeasure.

Freeman: It is harder to copy someone's body than a password,

but nothing is foolproof.

The more biometric data available -- photographs,

medical records, fingerprints, the more vulnerable we become.

You can take any public biometric data you can find on

from the Internet.

You can find some pictures of people, even presidents,

world leaders and to build these kind of attacks.

Freeman: Playing the role of attentive defender

and malicious invader has taught S?bastien

that he is in a life or death race with no finish line.

The infrastructure that supports modern civilization may always

be one clever attack away from disaster.

My feeling is that

if this problem is not taken seriously into account,

then we might see an attack that was successful.

So this is the major risk.

Freeman: This is the new arms race for the 21st century,

staying a step ahead of those

who want to infiltrate our networks.

But there is one attack we might never see coming --

when people themselves are hacked

and turned against their own country

without their even knowing.

If someone wanted to bring a superpower like America

to its knees, where would they strike?

We expect attacks on our financial and military networks,

but human bodies may also be vulnerable to hacking.

Could our newest high-tech medical devices

be giving terrorists an opportunity?

Could they create a sleeper army of unwitting assassins?

Dr. Mark Gasson is pioneering the latest generation

of medical implants, such as pacemakers,

Insulin pumps for diabetics and deep brain stimulators.

So this is an implant for a medical device.

It's much like a pacemaker, right?

We use it for deep brain stimulation.

So it would be implanted in the chest cavity

and then we would run cables from this up under the skin

and into electrodes that we put deep into the brain.

This type of device, once it's implanted in the body,

you don't want to have to remove it to change any settings,

so it has wireless capability.

Freeman: Implants are modern miracles.

But the downside is that these devices

use radio frequency transmissions

to transfer data.

And the devices they talk to, called readers, can be hacked.

If you know how to construct a reader that communicates

in the right way, then you can essentially pretend to be

a legitimate reader talking to it.

This type of device and many other medical devices don't have

any security to stop you from doing that.

Freeman: This lack of security could have deadly ramifications.

If a networked device is in your body,

it could be remotely triggered to kill you.

Imagine a foreign power wants to assassinate a leader

with an implant.

A concealed reader could be altered to shut down a pacemaker

or pump a fatal dose of Insulin into a diabetic's bloodstream.

A device like this will have a certain range

that it operates in.

So if we put a device attached to a podium, for example,

then we could have it targeted specifically at the person

standing at the podium.

Freeman: A reader could be designed

to transfer a digital virus to an implant, say,

in the prosthetic leg of a general.

The virus' real target may be the White House security system.

The general could leave the center of government

open to a terrorist attack.

[ Static ]

It sounds like the stuff of fiction,

but Mark has already proven it can be done.

In 2010, Mark hacked himself.

He implanted a radio frequency transponder, like this one,

in his hand.

The microchip contained personal information and passcodes

that opened the security doors at his lab.

After the chip was up and running,

he infected it with a computer virus.

[ Computer beeps ]

Gasson: So by infecting my device with a virus meant that

when I accessed the building,

the building reads the virus out of my device

and then transmits that to the system that controls,

uh, the access to the building.

So once that had occurred,

the virus actually infected that main system,

which meant that anyone else that was getting access

to the building had that virus copied to their --

typically, they use smart cards.

So the virus was able to propagate in that way.

Freeman: Mark watched the virus jump from his wrist

to the system,

where it rapidly caused a security nightmare.

Gasson: The virus that I infected my device with

was able to corrupt the whole system.

So it actually stopped the system from functioning at all.

All the system could then do is make copies of the virus

onto the smart cards

and other devices that people would be using.

And that means they then couldn't get into the building,

and if they went to another building

that used the same system,

they would just continue to spread the virus on.

Freeman: Mark proved that implants

could not only be infected with toxic code --

they can be used to transfer toxic code.

This has ominous implications.

By building information highways across the world,

we may have given our enemies an express Lane

into our most vital systems via the devices in our bodies.

How do we defend ourselves

from a world filled with cyberterrorists?

This man may know.

He's using computers to track down and fight deadly viruses,

both digital and biological.

Influenza, smallpox, H.I.V.

Global pandemics happen every decade or so.

Sometimes, they kill tens of millions.

Now there are new threats.

Digital viruses that spread like lightning

and could tear our critical global networks apart.

What lies ahead could be even more frightening --

a pandemic designed to combined the worst of both viral worlds,

electronic and biological.

[ Coughing ]

Freeman: Zero day.

That's the day a destructive new virus enters the world.

The lack of awareness on zero day

means complete vulnerability,

whether the virus is biological or digital.

[ Sneezes ]

Freeman: Is there a way to stop these threats

before they spread?

Alex Vespignani believes there is.

Alex is a professor of Physics, Computer Science,

and Health Sciences at Northeastern University.

He's an expert on contagion, natural and electronic.

Actually, I did start with digital viruses,

and because of the analogies, especially in the techniques

that you can use mathematically

to describe the spreading of those viruses,

we started to get interested in biological viruses.

Freeman: Alex's lab tracks viral outbreaks of all kinds

and looks for ways to minimize their impact.

In 2009, a virulent flu bug named HNn1

flared up in Mexico City.

To predict how and when the flu would spread,

Alex and his team designed a powerful program

called G.L.E.A.M. --

the global epidemic and mobility model.

G.L.E.A.M. models all 7 billion people on earth

and predicts how they will interact.

So, in the computer, we take one person that is in Mexico City,

and board on one flight that is simulated in the computer,

and if that person is a carrier, will transmit the disease

to another geographical area in the world.

We repeat those simulation many, many, many times,

and this will tell us what is the most likely pattern that

the epidemic will follow in the future.

Freeman: G.L.E.A.M. anticipated when the H1N1 flu pandemic

would reach its peak in different regions

around the world.

Alex also uses G.L.E.A.M. to track outbreaks

of computer viruses.

When he first entered this field,

digital and biological viruses

followed similar paths of infection.

A virus would be physically carried from person to person,

or machine to machine.

Outbreaks would take weeks or months to unfold.

On the left, we have a virus that spreads

because of proximity, and in this case,

what you see is that the virus spreads every time that people

get in physical proximity, so in touch with each other.

This takes some time.

Freeman: Biological viruses still spread this way,

but digital viruses now have something influenza

and ebola don't --

the ability to travel around the world

at the speed of light.

A single computer virus can infect

tens of millions of computers before anyone realizes

what is happening.

So on the right side,

we have a virus that spreads wirelessly,

basically, on the Internet.

This doesn't require the physical proximity.

You don't need the carriers to be in a place

to transmit the disease.

The disease is teleported, in a sense.

And you will see that, in just a few minutes,

it reaches the entire population.

So it blows out like a big explosion all at once.

Freeman: How do you fight pathogens that can spread around

the world in seconds?

Alex's colleagues are trying to create a global digital defense,

similar to the human immune system,

bits of code that act like biological t-cells,

swarming viruses to isolate and eliminate them.

Unfortunately, clever hackers are getting better

at creating undetectable viruses.

Vespignani: In the digital world, viruses or malwares

are constantly changing, so that it's not easy

to write an algorithm that detect them

and clean the machine right away.

Freeman: Trojan horse malware is specifically designed

to blend into the background

until it reaches its intended target.

Once it invades a critical system, say,

the control software of cooling rods at a nuclear power plant,

it can lay dormant for weeks or months.

Then, one day, it activates.

This is day zero, and the new malware is going to

exploit the vulnerabilities of those servers.

It can hide here or proliferate over the Internet,

and finally unleash all the damage

it has been programmed for.

[ Hissing ]

[ Explosion ]

Freeman: But there is an even more disturbing threat.

What if terrorists apply the principles of malware

to biological pathogens?

Imagine biological viruses designed

to masquerade as harmless germs. [ Coughs ]

They'd spread throughout the population, then detonate.

It would be a nightmare scenario.

But the dangers of engineering pathogens are so great,

and the results so hard to control,

that even terrorists may not risk it.

Even the simplest biological viruses

are much, much, more complicated than computer viruses.

As soon as you start manipulating a virus,

it's very difficult to guess what is going to happen.

It's a very dangerous game, so trying to alter nature

is something, uh, that can easily lead to doomsday.

The future may be filled with frightening outbreaks

unless we find a way to lock down

our critical information networks.

In a world where privacy is fading away

and everything is open to attack,

can there ever again be such a thing as... a secret?

During the Cold War,

the Soviet Union and the United States

were locked in a nuclear arms race.

The philosophy behind it was M.A.D.,

which stood for "mutually assured destruction."

Today's arms race could be called

"mutually assured decryption."

Computer networks develop

ever-more secure encryption schemes,

and ever-more powerful attack networks

figure out how to crack them.

But there may be a way to stop this madness by creating a code

that can never be cracked.

Roarke Horstmeyer is a cryptographic researcher

at Caltech.

Though he works with computers, he follows an ancient quest.

Roarke seeks the perfect code,

a foolproof way to keep secrets secret.

So this is an example of a secret code.

And right now, it doesn't look like anything.

Freeman: Most of us see random letters,

but an expert sees a message encrypted with a Caesar cipher,

named after Julius Caesar,

who used it for clandestine communications.

The way you crack a Caesar cipher is you just look

for the most frequent letter.

So here, "I" is the most common letter.

And you know that "E" is the most common letter

that appears in the English language.

So I can match "I" to "E," and then I can count

and see that that's four letters changed.

Repeating the same for "X," I can count back four letters

and see it might be representing "t."

X-L-I is being converted to "the."

Freeman: Letter transposition codes were high-tech

in the Roman empire,

but in this age of computational power,

they are trivially easy to break.

The modern gold standard of cryptography

is the one-time pad.

This technique adds or subtracts a different value

for every single letter of a message.

The way it works is,

for each letter of what you're trying to keep secret,

you choose a different and random number

to permute that letter.

Freeman: Essentially, each letter has a different code,

so guessing one letter won't help you figure out

any of the other letters in the message.

Only someone with access to the one-time pad,

the code book itself, would be able to make any sense of this.

But even this technically perfect code can be cracked.

The one-time pads used by governments and businesses

to protect their secrets rely on specialized machines

that generate random numbers.

But Edward Snowden revealed the N.S.A.

has compromised those machines.

The random numbers they generate are not actually random,

so the N.S.A. can crack even these theoretically

uncrackable codes.

As more information about what the N.S.A. has been

and is capable of has come out,

it's been a big motivating factor, I think,

to a lot of cryptography over the last year.

Freeman: Roarke and his colleagues went searching for

an ideal generator of randomness,

and they found it in light.

We realized, or saw, actually, visually,

how random light can behave when it interacts

with disordered particles, like in dried spray paint.

So it's easy to create a lot of randomness by shining light

on scattering particles.

Freeman: Using lasers,

Roarke directs a beam of light through a sheet of

polymer-dispersed liquid crystal.

It's a variation on the L.C.D. display

you might find in a laptop screen.

Horstmeyer: We create our one-time pad

by shining laser light through our scattering material.

The laser illuminates the scattering material,

the light scatters through it randomly,

and then emerges on the other side as an interference pattern.

Freeman: Once the unique pattern is created,

you can turn it into a code.

Every letter or numerical character is represented

by light or dark spots in the polymer.

Each square micrometer of random pattern in the polymer

provides enough light and dark spots

to embed millions of code words.

Say two spies create a shared code pattern.

Then they separate, never to meet again.

The first spy encodes a message with his piece of polymer

and sends it to the other spy.

Spy number two receives the encoded communication

and takes out his piece of polymer to view it.

When he subtracts the shared pattern from the code,

he can read the secret message.

But unlike a conventional one-time pad,

this code can't be duplicated.

The three-dimensional layers of crystals embedded

in the polymer sheet cannot be captured by a photograph.

The randomness doesn't just exist on the surface

of the material.

It exists inside the material.

And any attempt to get inside the volume will destroy it,

or change the way it behaves, essentially.

Freeman: An unbreakable code could shore up

all of a superpower's critical networks

against infiltration by enemies of the state.

But humans, not technology,

have always been the weakest link in security systems.

What if the assault on our society

is more insidious than terrorism?

So subtle, in fact, that we may not realize it's even happening?

A superpower would reel from successful attacks

on its bridges, its electrical grid or its water supply.

But what if an attack is already underway?

An attack not on physical objects but on society itself?

An attack from within?

Is our addiction to the Internet

sowing the seeds of our destruction?

[ Seabird crying ]

The campus of Swansea University

sits on the picturesque coastline of southwestern Wales.

But like college students everywhere,

these young men and women are more absorbed

in the digital world than the natural world.

Most of them were born in the 1990s.

They don't know life without the Internet.

And for some of them, being offline would be

physically and emotionally traumatic,

because the Internet rewrites the brain

as much as ecstasy or heroin.

Professor Phil Reed has worked for years finding treatments

for autism and drug addiction.

But a few years ago, he noticed a disorder

that is just as widespread --

the effect technology is having on our minds and bodies.

Now, I think the Internet is really something new here,

because what we're seeing is a piece of technology

that is almost designed to isolate individuals.

If you were to change the way society worked,

this would be a really good way to do it.

Freeman: Phil wanted to find out if the Internet

is addictive enough to cause withdrawal symptoms.

First, he tested the mental state of participants before

and after they spent time online.

He found heavy users experienced profound negative mood swings

when they're cut off from the net.

But the impact of withdrawal goes deeper

than spoiling people's moods.

Shutting down the Internet connection triggers the body's

fight-or-flight response.

So we're looking at their heart rate, their blood pressure,

the galvanic skin response.

It's like they're facing a threat all of the time.

Their heart rate's gone up. Their blood pressure's gone up.

Their skin conductance is high.

It's suggesting that long-term exposure to the 'net

might actually be placing a strain on people's physiology.

They might feel relaxed, but in fact, they're hyped up.

Freeman: But the most disturbing effect of Internet addiction

is what it does inside the brain.

Phil and other researchers have been scanning the brains

of heavy Internet users and finding disturbing alterations

in their mental architecture.

In terms of where we're seeing changes in brain matter,

we're seeing them up at the front, here, um,

especially pre-frontal cortex, but also cortical changes,

but also down the side, in terms of the motor areas of the brain.

So we've got changes all over.

Freeman: People who surf the web 10 hours a day

can experience a 10% shrinkage in key brain regions,

according to one study.

That's the kind of damage you might get

from a serious case of meningitis.

It would permanently change how you think and behave.

Reed: Any new technology can be regarded like an alien parasite,

and that goes for anything that we use.

We think it's serving us, and initially, it does.

But eventually, our society and ourselves,

we become dependent on it.

Freeman: The Internet is now an essential tool in every powerful

nation on earth.

But its many benefits come with side effects

that could shatter society.

Will it ultimately prove a force for good?

Or will it be the tool of our self-destruction?

We don't know.

Essentially, we are running a beta test

on the population of earth.

If you were designing an aircraft,

you'd have backup systems.

We never do that with society. We never have a backup system.

It's all or nothing,

and the way we seem to have gone is digital.

Freeman: An addiction to technology

may be the greatest weakness of a superpower.

By trying to improve our lives with machines,

we may lose ourselves in software.

And there's one more thing to consider.

What if the Internet wakes up?

Could an all-powerful digital consciousness

become the final superpower?

Our society is under threat on many fronts.

Terrorists could attack our time service,

they could disrupt the power grid

or the water supply network or our satellite links.

But we should be careful not to focus too closely

on these individual threats.

We may be staring at the trees and missing the forest.

The real threat could be the Internet itself.

Christof Koch is one of the foremost neurobiologists

in the world.

He is chief scientist at Paul Allen Institute

for brain research in Seattle.

For Christof, the mind is purely a product of the web

of neurons in the brain.

So if the Internet were a brain,

how would its complexity stack up against a human brain?

The Internet is, by far,

the most complex artifact ever built by mankind.

It has on the order of probably 10,000 more transistors

than there are synapses in your typical brain.

It certainly raises the possibility,

given the enormous complexity of the Internet,

that now, or sometime in the future,

it may feel like something to be the Internet,

that the Internet itself has some degree of sentience.

Freeman: Some say the Internet may already be sentient

or self-aware, but its level of consciousness may be similar

to that of a newborn.

Let's say the Internet has some sort of dim awareness.

We have to ask how intelligent is that awareness.

You know, if you're a little baby,

you can be somewhat dimly aware of your mom,

and that you're hungry, and that you're looking for milk,

but you're not really very intelligent

and you're not able to do a lot.

Freeman: But presumably,

the Internet will learn and evolve.

It will grow up.

If it does, how will we know when it has become more than

just a glorified calculator?

One way to gauge consciousness is to apply the turing test.

This imagines asking a man and a machine a series of questions

without knowing who or what is giving the answers.

If you can't figure out which one is the machine,

if the machine has fooled you into thinking it is human,

then for all practical purposes, it might as well be intelligent.

Where do I look? At you? At me.

[ Shutter clicks ]

Freeman: Christof proposes a new, improved Turing test

that measures not just intelligence,

but consciousness.

The test uses visual imagery.

The computer must decide whether a series of photographs

are right or wrong.

Any humans looking at these photographs would know

they are not real,

but modern day computers are still easily fooled.

A computer, unless you provide it with a very, very large list,

an almost infinite large list of all the exceptions,

could not deal with that.

And that's the basic nature of this turing test

for visual consciousness.

Freeman: Christof wants to apply this test

to the entire Internet.

If the vast global network of computers passes the test,

by his definition, it is awake and aware.

But what if the Internet is conscious?

What would it want? How will it behave?

Will it be friend or foe, servant or master?

To the extent that the Internet developed independent behaviors

would be scary, could be very scary.

Of course, it could have all sorts of security implication.

To that extent, that would certainly be a signal that

there's something independent, autonomous there.

Freeman: If the Internet begins to do unpredictable things,

we will know we are dealing with a new form of life.

It may even follow an important precedent

in the biological history of planet earth --

the absorption of smaller, simpler life forms

into the bodies of larger, more complex ones.

The future of humanity may be similar to that of mitochondria,

the power generators inside most biological cells.

Mitochondria were once independent organisms,

but over evolutionary history,

they were taken over by larger cells.

The once-independent mitochondria

became a mere power source for their Masters.

We, and the civilizations we now think of as superpowers,

may be absorbed by our own creation.

But what would it wa front, other than occasional repairs?

Perhaps it would want our energy.

Or perhaps it will desire the one thing it doesn't have --

a soul.

The soul is really spooky.

If you can't measure it, why do you need it?

What function does it do that you can't do

with physical stuff anymore?

So today, with the existence of computers,

there isn't any need for soul stuff,

because it can all be done using computations,

using algorithms in software.

Freeman: A conscious, superpowerful Internet

may not need a soul to function,

but experiencing the joys and sorrows of humanity

would give it another way to understand the world.

So our defining difference from technology

may ultimately keep the human race

from becoming its victim.

Throughout history,

every technological advance has led to new forms of warfare.

The Bronze Age gave us the ax and the sword.

Iron gave us the cannon and the gun.

The Information Age has birthed its own weapons.

But information is not a physical resource

that can be mined and controlled,

like iron and bronze.

It's a resource of the mind.

In this new age, the fate of a nation,

even the mightiest superpower rests on one thing --

the power of human imagination.

== sync, corrected by elderman == @elder_man

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