Angels and demons of the Internet
For every misuse, there are equivalent occasions of good use and benefits that help societies advance.”
It is now three decades since the invention of the Internet, and while we have not met many great inventors who shared with us the fruits of their genius, one of the main inventors of the Internet as we know it today, is still among us, Tim Berners-Lee.
Remembering these three decades, Mr Berners-Lee was interviewed, and I happened to listen to the part where he was concerned about the misuse of Internet! For every misuse there are equivalent occasions of good use and benefits that help societies advance.
Unfortunately, acts of evil overshadow the good deeds. This leaves every inventor with the risk that his/her invention may be used in the wrong direction. I have always read about how sorry Mikhail Kalashnikov became for constructing the automatic machine gun, and it happens that we are now watching a trigger-happy shooter spraying dozens of people in two mosques in Christ Church with bullets from his automatic machine gun, and its aggravated by the fact that it was video recorded live and broadcast on the Internet for millions to watch.
When Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik bombed a building in Oslo killing eight people, and then shooting dead dozens of others who were on an island attending a youth camp, no one could imagine that some years later, another terrorist would do the same and brag that he was inspired by Anders.
One inventor I do not envy is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who used Albert Einstein’s theory on harnessing nuclear energy to build the atomic bomb. There is no part of history that does not cover the events that lead to using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the vilest man-made wars that killed thousands of civilians in minutes and left its mark with poisonous air and polluted earth for decades.
And because we seem not to learn from history, today, millions are spent on inventing new killing machines, while millions are suffering from illnesses that could be cured if we invested in medical research. We are such a hopeless humanity that with all the greatness we pretend to have, we still cannot fight a small mosquito that is putting down thousands of people with a simple prick of its venom. Back to the Internet, let us say, it is only the beginning. God have mercy, how it will progress!
