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Yet despite epidemic after epidemic, despite mass killers like smallpox and the 1918 flu, at no point has disease threatened humans with extinction. Even the Black Death, likely the most concentrated epidemic of all time, now appears as little more than a minor downturn in what has otherwise been a bull market for long-term human population growth. That’s true for animals as well. The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that of the 833 plant and animal extinctions that have been documented since 1500, less than 4 percent can be attributed to infectious disease. Those species that were eradicated by disease tended to be small in number and geographically isolated—very much unlike human beings, who are both numerous and have spread to every corner of the world.38

With the exception of HIV—which can now be managed as a chronic condition with antiviral drugs—every major epidemic mentioned above took place before the dawn of modern medicine, before the development of antibiotics and widespread vaccines. Smallpox was even fully eradicated from the wild in 198039—the only known samples of the virus are kept at highly secure government facilities in Atlanta and Koltsovo, Russia.40 Plague is now so rare that when it breaks out in countries like Madagascar, it makes global news—yet fewer than 600 deaths from the disease were reported between 2010 and 2015. Studies have shown that most of the fatalities from the 1918 flu were actually due to secondary bacterial infections that today could be controlled by antibiotics,41 which were introduced less than a century ago. Influenza pandemics remain the great fear of infectious disease experts, but the most recent one in 2009 killed only about 284,000 people worldwide.42 That was fewer than the number of people who die from seasonal flu in an ordinary year.43

Are we safe now from events like this? Or are we more vulnerable? Could a pandemic threaten humanity’s future?10

The Black Death was not the only biological disaster to scar human history. It was not even the only great bubonic plague. In 541 CE the Plague of Justinian struck the Byzantine Empire. Over three years it took the lives of roughly 3 percent of the world’s people.11

New cable investments and upgrades to existing systems have increased competition in undersea bandwidth significantly, resulting in dramatic decreases in the price of international undersea bandwidth. Total international internet bandwidth has grown more than six-fold in less than a decade from 2008 to 2016, rising from 30 Terabits per second (Tbps) to 185 Tbps in 2016.19 International internet bandwidth prices for IP transit have dropped an average of 27 per cent on a Compounded Annual Average Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2015 to 2018, whereas for the more expensive traffic routes, annual price declines have been even greater as more undersea capacity comes online.20

Considering geographic proximity to terrestrial fibre nodes, almost two-thirds of the global population (excluding North America) is within at least 50 kilometres of an operational fibre point-of-presence.21

And yet in many respects the benefits of internet connectivity have never been greater. Broadband connectivity does not merely transform individual human potential, it also underpins national efforts to develop knowledge economies, foster digital transformation in government services and digital transition across economic sectors, expand opportunities for enterprises, and provide greater value for citizens and consumers.

Broadband connectivity is also widely recognized as a critical enabler of efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The importance of digital technologies in international development efforts was emphasized by the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, which issued its findings earlier this year.

When is the Internet going to collapse? The answer is NEVER. The Internet is amazing for no other reason than that it hasn't simply collapsed, never to be rebooted. Over a decade ago, many pundits were predicting an all-out catastrophic failure, and back then the load was nothing compared with what it is today. So how much more can this network take? Let's look at the basic changes that have occurred since the Net became chat-worthy around 1990. First of all, only a few people were on the Net back in 1990, since it was essentially a carrier for e-mail (spam free!), newsgroups, gopher, and FTP. These capabilities remain. But the e-mail load has grown to phenomenal proportions and become burdened with megatons of spam. In one year, the amount of spam can exceed a decade's worth, say 1990 to 2000, of all Internet traffic. It's actually the astonishing overall growth of the Internet that is amazing. In 1990, the total U.S. backbone throughput of the Internet was 1 terabyte, and in 1991 it doubled to 2TB. Throughput continued to double until 1996, when it jumped to 1,500TB. After that huge jump, it returned to doubling, reaching 80,000 to 140,000TB in 2002. This ridiculous growth rate has continued as more and more services are added to the burden. The jump in 1996 is attributable to the one-two punch of the universal popularization of the Web and the introduction of the MP3 standard and subsequent music file sharing. More recently, the emergence of inane video clips (YouTube and the rest) as universal entertainment has continued to slam the Net with overhead, as has large video file sharing via BitTorrent and other systems. Then VoIP came along, and IPTV is next. All the while, e-mail numbers are in the trillions of messages, and spam has never been more plentiful and bloated. Add blogging, vlogging, and twittering and it just gets worse. According to some expensive studies, the growth rate has begun to slow down to something like 50 percent per year. But that's growth on top of huge numbers. Petabytes. So when does this thing just grind to a halt or blow up? To date, we have to admit that the structure of the Net is robust, to say the least. This is impressive, considering the fact that experts were predicting a collapse in the 1990s. Robust or not, this Internet is a transportation system. It transports data. All transportation systems eventually need upgrading, repair, basic changes, or reinvention. But what needs to be done here? This, to me, has come to be the big question. Does anything at all need to be done, or do we run it into the ground and then fix it later? Is this like a jalopy leaking oil and water about to blow, or an organic perpetual-motion machine that fixes itself somehow? Many believe that the Net has never collapsed because it does tend to fix itself. A decade ago we were going to run out of IP addresses—remember? It righted itself, with rotating addresses and subnets. Many of the Net's improvements are self-improvements. Only spam, viruses, and spyware represent incurable diseases that could kill the organism. I have to conclude that the worst-case scenario for the Net is an outage here or there, if anywhere. After all, the phone system, a more machine-intensive system, never really imploded after years and years of growth, did it? While it has outages, it's actually more reliable than the power grid it sits on. Why should the Internet be any different now that it is essentially run by phone companies who know how to keep networks up? And let's be real here. The Net is being improved daily, with newer routers and better gear being constantly hot-swapped all over the world. This is not the same Internet we had in 1990, nor is it what we had in 2000.

CIOs need to put aside the Hollywood-induced fear that machines will take over the world and that humanity’s days are numbered, according to AI expert Toby Walsh.

“We’re a long way from building machines that match human brains,” said Walsh, UNSW professor and research group leader at Data61 (CSIRO), during his keynote address at the CIO Summit in Sydney.

In 2014 SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted: “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” That same year University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also cautioned: “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence.”

How the AI apocalypse might unfold was outlined by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky in a paper in the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks: “How likely is it that AI will cross the entire vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop at the level of human genius?” His answer: “It would be physically possible to build a brain that computed a million times as fast as a human brain.... If a human mind were thus accelerated, a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours.” Yudkowsky thinks that if we don't get on top of this now it will be too late: “The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words ‘I should do something’ you have already lost.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk worries it is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, “AI could be a big danger in the not-too-distant future.” Fear mongering about AI has also hit the box office in recent films such as Her and Transcendence.

So as an active researcher in the field for over 20 years, and now the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, why am I not afraid?

I don’t think at AI will become an existential threat to humanity. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but we would have to be very stupid to let that happen. Others have claimed that we would have to be very smart to prevent that from happening, but I don’t think it’s true. If we are smart enough to build machine with super-human intelligence, chances are we will not be stupid enough to give them infinite power to destroy humanity. Also, there is a complete fallacy due to the fact that our only exposure to intelligence is through other humans. There are absolutely no reason that intelligent machines will even want to dominate the world and/or threaten humanity. The will to dominate is a very human one (and only for certain humans). Even in humans, intelligence is not correlated with a desire for power. In fact, current events tell us that the thirst for power can be excessive (and somewhat successful) in people with limited intelligence. As a manager in an industry research lab, I’m the boss of many people who are way smarter than I am (I see it as a major objective of my job to hire people who are smarter than me). A lot of the bad things humans do to each other are very specific to human nature. Behavior like becoming violent when we feel threatened, being jealous, wanting exclusive access to resources, preferring our next of kin to strangers, etc were built into us by evolution for the survival of the species. Intelligent machines will not have these basic behavior unless we explicitly build these behaviors into them. Why would we? Also, if someone deliberately builds a dangerous and generally-intelligent AI, other will be able to build a second, narrower AI whose only purpose will be to destroy the first one. If both AIs have access to the same amount of computing resources, the second one will win, just like a tiger a shark or a virus can kill a human of superior intelligence.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI. The Guardian, a British newspaper, warned recently that “we’re like children playing with a bomb,” and a recent Newsweek headline reads, “Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out.”

Numerous such headlines, fueled by comments from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are strongly influenced by the work of one man: professor Nick Bostrom, author of the philosophical treatise Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is an astonishing book with an alarming thesis: Intelligent machines are “quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced.” In it, Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has built his reputation on the study of “existential risk,” argues forcefully that artificial intelligence might be the most apocalyptic technology of all. With intellectual powers beyond human comprehension, he prognosticates, self-improving artificial intelligences could effortlessly enslave or destroy Homo sapiens if they so wished. While he expresses skepticism that such machines can be controlled, Bostrom claims that if we program the right “human-friendly” values into them, they will continue to uphold these virtues, no matter how powerful the machines become.

These views have found an eager audience. In August 2014, PayPal cofounder and electric car magnate Elon Musk tweeted “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Bill Gates declared, “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” More ominously, legendary astrophysicist Stephen Hawking concurred: “I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Proving his concern went beyond mere rhetoric, Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute “to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.”

Yoo’s op-ed is less interesting as a statement of constitutional theory than as a reminder of something liberals do not like to admit: that the “rule of law” and other bourgeois norms are hardly a good check on presidential mischief. For many decades, presidents were able to exert their worst abuses not despite, but really through, the established rules of our legal order — especially with people like John Yoo on hand to lend them some legitimacy.

So what does it say about our current president when he’s decried by those who turned the country into a land of torturers and snoops? In some ways, Trump’s brand of quasi-authoritarianism is a rupture from past precedents: more vulgar, less crafty, and more cruel. But I can’t help but think back to the dictatorship of Louis-Napoléon, which Marx famously described as being “contained readymade in the [preceding] parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.”

Fundamental human rights are reported to have diminished in almost two-thirds of the 113 countries surveyed for the 2018 Rule of Law Index, amid concerns over a worldwide surge in authoritarian nationalism and a retreat from international legal obligations.

“All signs point to a crisis not just for human rights, but for the human rights movement,” said Professor Samuel Moyn of Yale University. “Within many nations, these fundamental rights are falling prey to the backlash against a globalising economy in which the rich are winning. But human rights movements have not historically set out to name or shame inequality.”

One major failing of catastrophe scenarios is that they discount the robustness and resilience of modern economies. These economies present multiple targets and configurations; they are harder to damage through cyberattack than they look, given the growing (albeit incomplete) attention to cybersecurity; and experience shows that people compensate for damage and quickly repair or rebuild. This was one of the counterintuitive lessons of the Strategic Bombing Survey. Pre-war planning assumed that civilian morale and production would crumple under aerial bombardment. In fact, the opposite occurred. Resistance hardened and production was restored.1

The study, by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-funded research organization, finds that existing technology can protect various components of the electric grid to buffer it from the effects of solar flares, lightning strikes, and an EMP from a nuclear blast all at the same time: a three-for-one surge protector. “We have a strong technical basis for what the impacts [of an EMP] might be,” says Randy Horton, EPRI project manager and author of the report being released today. “That is one thing that didn’t exist before.”

Horton says that EPRI technicians worked with experts at the Department of Energy labs at Los Alamos and Sandia to simulate some effects of an EMP on substations and distribution systems. They also did real-world testing of electrical equipment at an EPRI laboratory in Charlotte, North Carolina. The study, which took three years to complete, looks at the effects of three kinds of energy spawned by a nuclear detonation.

The US electric grid is not about to go down. Though it’s understandable if someone believed that. Over the last few weeks, numerous media reports suggest state-backed hackers have infiltrated the US electric grid and are capable of manipulating the flow of electricity on a grand scale and cause chaos. Threats against industrial sectors including electric utilities, oil and gas, and manufacturing are growing, and it’s reasonable for people to be concerned. But to say hackers have invaded the US electric grid and are prepared to cause blackouts is false. The initial reporting stemmed from a public Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presentation in July on Russian hacking activity targeting US electric utilities. This presentation contained previously-reported information on a group known as Dragonfly by Symantec and which Dragos associates to activity labeled DYMALLOY and ALLANITE. These groups focus on information gathering from industrial control system (ICS) networks and have not demonstrated disruptive or damaging capabilities. While some news reports cite 2015 and 2016 blackouts in Ukraine as evidence of hackers’ disruptive capabilities, DYMALLOY nor ALLANITE were involved in those incidents and it is inaccurate to suggest the DHS’s public presentation and those destructive behaviors are linked. Adversaries have not placed “cyber implants” into the electric grid to cause blackouts; but they are infiltrating business networks – and in some cases, ICS networks – in an effort to steal information and intelligence to potentially gain access to operational systems. Overall, the activity is concerning and represents the prerequisites towards a potential future disruptive event – but evidence to date does not support the claim that such an attack is imminent. The US electric grid is resilient and segmented, and although it makes an interesting plot to an action movie, one or two strains of malware targeting operational networks would not cause widespread blackouts. A destructive incident at one site would require highly-tailored tools and operations and would not effectively scale. Essentially, localized impacts are possible, and asset owners and operators should work to defend their networks from intrusions such as those described by DHS. But scaling up from isolated events to widespread impacts is highly unlikely.

Equally important, liberal internationalists and others tend to assume that international relations are a positive sum game (Keohane, 1984; Ruggie, 1993). Experiences with multilateralism and with regional international institutions are said to encourage cooperation. Transparency, reciprocity and habits of collaboration are seen as self-reinforcing. In order to achieve their own domestic needs for economic growth, countries find not only these experiences beneficial, but such cooperation spills over across related functions and issue areas. A generation ago, scholars writing and theorizing about regional integration in Western Europe defined this process as one of ‘spillover’. For liberal internationalists and globalists there is at least an implied analogy with that European experience despite the immense differences in geography, history and path dependence.5 That assumption has some basis in the areas of economics and trade, though the mercantilist and predatory behavior of China provides a serious contrary indicator. In the security realm, however, there is little reason for such an optimistic assumption. Cases in point include nuclear proliferation (North Korea, Iran), tensions in East Asia (China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, the East and South China Seas) and conflicts in the Middle East (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Lebanon, as well as Israel and the Palestinians). Nonetheless there are exceptions. Brazil has played a continuing role in UN Peacekeeping. It assigns nearly 2500 military and police personnel to those missions and has played a leading role in Haiti, where it has commanded the UN’s operation since 2004. It also has headed the maritime component of UNIFIL (Lebanon) since 2011. In addition, Turkey has participated actively in NATO-led peacekeeping missions in Bosnia (SFOR), Kosovo (KFOR), and Afghanistan (ISAF).

Skepticism about the BRICS and the momentum assumed by liberal internationalists has not been scarce.6 Realist scholars have understandably been critical of the assumptions underlying these approaches as well as of the foreign policy choices they imply. However, other scholars too have found increasing reason for criticism. For example, Barma et al (2013, p. 56) have recently observed that, ‘Instead of a gradual trend toward global problem solving punctuated by isolated failures, we have seen over the last several years essentially the opposite: stunningly few instances of international cooperation on significant issues’. Moreover, Patrick (2010, p. 44) of the Council on Foreign Relations has cautioned that, ‘The United States should be under no illusions about the ease of socializing rising nations. Emerging powers may be clamoring for greater global influence, but they often oppose the political and economic ground rules of the inherited Western liberal order, seek to transform existing multilateral arrangements, and shy away from assuming significant global responsibilities’. In this regard, Laidi has argued that despite their own heterogeneity, the BRICS actually share a common objective in opposing Western liberal internationalist narratives that run counter to traditional state sovereignty. Instead, they seek to protect their own prerogatives, independence of action and national autonomy in an increasingly interdependent world (Laidi, 2012, pp. 614–615).

This proposal rests on a fundamental confusion. The institutions and treaties Mr. Pompeo scourged were constructed, and are still maintained, by nation-states. International institutions do not abrogate national sovereignty, for the simple reason that dissatisfied states have the right to leave them. Whether sensible or misguided, Brexit represents a straightforward exercise of national self-determination, the legitimacy of which is acknowledged explicitly in the EU’s founding documents.

“Our mission is to reassert our sovereignty,” says Mr. Pompeo, as though anyone had ever denied it. But it is one thing to assert America’s right to act unilaterally, without permission from others, and quite another to coerce other sovereign states to go along with us. President George W. Bush went to war against Iraq with a coalition of the willing. President Trump wants to enforce sanctions on Iran with a coalition of the unwilling—European countries and companies bludgeoned into submission by the threat of losing access to the U.S.-dominated international financial system. This approach tacitly acknowledges the need for concerted international action, but denies other countries the right to make their own choices.

Yet reports of the death of international cooperation appear to be exaggerated, at least for now. US disengagement aside, the three most noteworthy features of multilateral diplomacy in the last few years have been slightly reassuring. Firstly, a majority of states have responded to the Trump administration’s attacks on international mechanisms by increasing their support for them. No other country has followed Washington out of the Paris agreement. Secondly, there is still some room for innovation in multilateral affairs: the UN’s members have just signed off on a new Global Compact on Migration (GCM) despite America’s decision not to participate in the process. Thirdly, operational arms of the multilateral system continue to function despite facing extreme levels of strain in crises, albeit highly imperfectly. UN peacekeeping forces have not been able to halt violence in Mali or South Sudan, but there has been no general collapse of blue helmet missions comparable to that which followed the Rwandan and Balkan disasters in the mid-1990s. The flow of refugees from Syria came close to overwhelming relief agencies completely in 2015, but they have managed to struggle on. There is no case for complacency. Keeping multilateral diplomacy and operations alive has involved enormous compromises. Recent major international agreements, from the Paris deal to the GCM, have been legally non-binding bargains rather than formal treaties. It is not clear that they have the heft to confront other immense challenges like global warming and mass movements of people. It is possible that future generations will conclude that the 2010s were a decade of international footling, with diplomats settling on lowest common denominator agreements that were insufficient to address worldwide threats. Similarly, the recent resilience of UN peacekeepers and agencies such as UNHCR will ultimately count for little if, as is quite possible, the years ahead see more and bigger wars and refugee crises. The historical record shows that international systems do not necessarily implode all at once. It is possible for states and institutions to pursue successful multilateral processes while the world is falling apart around them. As Zara Steiner notes in her monumental history of the 1930s, The Triumph of the Dark, the League of Nations remained busy and useful as war approached. The Health Organization (precursor to today’s World Health Organization) and International Labour Organization made serious contributions to spreading new standards in medicine and industrial legislation. The economic arm of the organization backed up international cooperation on navigating the depression. In doing so, the League laid the foundations for further progress by the UN in these fields and others after 1945. Yet, as Steiner notes, “during the later 1930s the League was perceived to be, and indeed simply was, a failure” because of its basic failure to manage the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Axis powers. Historical comparisons have their limits. Although bleak, the international security picture is still far less dire than it was in the 1930s. Today’s multilateral system is also vastly more developed than the nascent mechanisms of the inter-war period. Nonetheless, it is best to view the current multilateral scene with a 50/50 mix of optimism and pessimism. On the upside, the system is enduring the current period of disorder better than many analysts presume. On the downside, we know that even successful strands of cooperation can unravel if deeper geopolitical shifts render them irrelevant.

Many Western politicians have watched this authoritarian turn at home and search for influence abroad and concluded that China is engaged in a life-and-death attempt to defeat democracy—a struggle it may even be winning. In Washington, the pendulum has swung from a consensus supporting engagement with China to one calling for competition or even containment in a new Cold War, driven in part by concerns that an emboldened China is seeking to spread its own model of domestic and international order. Last October, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence decried China’s “whole-of-government” effort to influence U.S. domestic politics and policy. In February, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, went further: the danger from China, he said, was “not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat.” Such warnings reflect a mounting fear that China represents a threat not just to specific U.S. interests but also to the very survival of democracy and the U.S.-led international order. This fear gets the challenge from Beijing wrong. Not since the days of Mao Zedong has China sought to export revolution or topple democracy. Under Xi, the CCP has promoted “the Chinese dream,” a parochial vision of national rejuvenation that has little international appeal. China’s remarkable economic growth under previous leaders came from experimentation and flexibility, not a coherent “China model.” Since 2012, China’s growing authoritarianism and resurgent state dominance over the economy have dashed Western hopes that China would eventually embrace liberalism. And China’s actions abroad have offered alternatives to U.S.-led international institutions, made the world safer for other authoritarian governments, and undermined liberal values. But those developments reflect less a grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy than the Chinese leadership’s desire to secure its position at home and abroad. Its efforts to revise and work around international institutions are the result of pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests rather than a wholesale rejection of the U.S.-led international order. Beijing’s behavior suggests that China is a disgruntled and increasingly ambitious stakeholder in that order, not an implacable enemy of it. In seeking to make the world safer for the CCP, Beijing has rejected universal values and made it easier for authoritarian states to coexist alongside democracies. And within democracies, the CCP’s attempts to squelch overseas opposition to its rule have had a corrosive influence on free speech and free society, particularly among the Chinese diaspora. These are real challenges, but they do not yet amount to an existential threat to the international order or liberal democracy. Successfully competing with China will require more precisely understanding its motives and actions and developing tough but nuanced responses. Overreacting by framing competition with China in civilizational or ideological terms risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington fear it already is.