It seems that the systems needed to avert another similar terrorist
act would be rather complex and/or intrusive. The worst thing is
that even if we implement a defense against hijacked airplanes as
projectiles, the next attack might be a tanker ship with ammonia
blowing up in a harbour, or some other dirty trick. No need for cool
weapons of mass destruction when fertilizer can do.
What really could have worked better yesterday is information. As
soon as I heard about that something had happened, I tried to check
net-based newssources and found them all blocked. If the hijacking
and the likely targets had been detected a bit earlier, many lives
could likely have been saved. The same is true after the crashes: if
survivors and rescue workers would have been able to get accurate
information about each other's whereabouts, the state of the
building and available resources more people could have been saved.
It is all a problem of information management.
This is actually something where some transhumanist technologies
could be very useful. Having implanted location transponders might
be an extreme step, but just having a distributed wireless networ
where each computer acts as a local base station would help. Imagine
a super-redundant network, which would likely be better able to
handle the onslaught of callers, web visitors and queries. By adding
some GPS capability, it would help people navigate in unlighted or
smokefilled buildings, as well as give rescue workers the chance to
find them. Ubiquitious information processing makes it harder to
keep a hijacking secret or hide where it is. Pattern recognition
software might even be able to detect an imminent disaster and sound
the alarm.
This doesn't solve the basic terrorism problem, but helps create a
society more resilient to disasters. Assuming of course that we can
keep the software running without causing its own disasters...
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:29 MDT