I am typing these words into a metaphorical document in a metaphorical window on a metaphorical desktop; the document is contained in a metaphorical file folder represented by a miniature picture of a real file folder. I know the desktop is metaphorical because it is vertical; if it were a real desktop, everything would slide to the bottom.

All this is familiar to anyone whose computer employs a graphical user interface (GUI). We use that collection of layered metaphors for the same reason we call unauthorized access to a computer a break-in and a machine language program burned into a computer chip, unreadable by the human eye, a writing. The metaphor lets us transport a bundle of concepts from one thing, about which that bundle first collected, to something else to which we think most of the bundle is appropriate. Metaphors reduce the difficulty of learning to think about new things. Well-chosen metaphors do it at a minimal cost in wrong conclusions.

Consider the metaphor that underlies modern biology: evolution as intent. Evolution is not a person and does not have a purpose. Your genes are not people either and also do not have purposes. Yet the logic of Darwinian evolution implies that each organism tends to have those characteristics that it would have if it had been designed for reproductive success.

We all know that atoms are small. Avogadro's number describes just how small they are. Written out in full it is about 602,400,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is the ratio between grams, the units we use to measure the mass of small objects – a dime weighs slightly over two grams – and the units in which we measure the mass of atoms. An atom of hydrogen has an atomic weight of about one, so Avogadro's number is the number of atoms in a gram of hydrogen.

Looking at all those zeros, you can see that even very small objects have a lot of atoms in them. A human hair, for example, contains more than a million billion. The microscopic transistors in a computer chip are small compared to us but large compared to an atom. Everything humans construct, with the exception of some very recent experiments, is built out of enormous conglomerations of atoms.

We ourselves, on the other hand, like all living things, are engineered at the atomic scale.

Some years ago I gave a lecture in Italy over the telephone from my home office in San Jose. From my end it felt too much like talking into a void. A year or two later I repeated the experiment with better technology. This time I was sitting in a videoconferencing room. My audience in the Netherlands could see me and I could see them. Still not quite real, but a good deal closer.

The next time might be closer still. Not only do I save on the airfare, the audience does too. I am at home; so are they. Each of us is wearing earphones and goggles, facing a small video camera. The lenses of the goggles are video screens; what I see is not what is in front of me but what they draw. What they are drawing is a room filled with people. Each is seeing the same room from the other direction – watching me, standing at a virtual podium as I deliver my talk.

Virtual reality not only saves on airfares, but has other advantages as well. The image from my video camera is processed by my computer before being sent on to everyone in my audience. That gives me an opportunity to improve it a little first, to replace my bathrobe with a suit and tie, give me a badly needed shave, remove a decade or so of aging.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

At least since the discovery of alcohol, humans have used drugs to affect the mind. As we learn more about how the mind works and become more skilled at chemical synthesis, we can expect to get better at it. In many ways this will be a good thing; already drugs provide substantial benefits to some sufferers from mental disorders. But, like most new technologies, improved mind drugs are also likely to raise new legal, social, and personal problems.

For the purposes of this chapter, it will be useful to consider four different classes of mind drugs: pleasure, performance, personality, control. Some drugs will fit into more than one category, reflecting multiple reasons why they are used.

Consider the familiar case of alcohol. Some people drink it because they like how it makes them feel – pleasure. Some drink it because they believe that it improves their performance; one acquaintance, as a college student, routinely had half a can of beer before an exam. Some drink it because it provides a temporary change in their personality that they sometimes desire. And some people feed alcohol to others, sometimes without their knowledge, as a crude way of controlling them.

Pleasure and Happiness

You hire someone to fix your roof and (imprudently) pay him in advance. Two weeks later, you call to ask when he is going to get the job done. After three months of alternating promises and silence, you sue him, probably in small claims court.

Suing someone is a nuisance, which is why you waited three months. In cyberspace it will be even more of a nuisance. The law that applies to a dispute depends, in a complicated way, on where the parties live and where the events they are litigating over happened. A contract made online has no geographical location and the other party might live anywhere in the world. Suing someone in another state is bad enough; suing someone in another country is best left to professionals – who do not come cheap. If, as I suggested in an earlier chapter, the use of online encryption leads to a world of strong privacy, where many people do business without revealing their realspace identity, legal enforcement of contracts becomes not merely difficult but impossible. There is no way to sue someone if you do not know who he is.

Even in our realspace lives, however, there is another way of enforcing contracts, and one that is probably more important than litigation. The reason department stores make good on their “money back, no questions asked” promises, and the reason the people who mow my lawn keep doing it once a week even when I am out of town and so unable to pay them, is not the court system.

Authors expect to be paid for their work. So do programmers, musicians, film directors, and lots of other people. If they cannot be paid for their work, we are likely to have fewer books, movies, songs, programs. This creates a problem if what is produced can be inexpensively reproduced. Once it is out there, anyone who has a copy can make a copy, driving the price of copies down to the cost of reproducing them. Copyright law is an attempt to solve that problem by giving the creator of a work the legal right to control the making of copies. How well it works depends on how easily that right can be enforced.

COPYRIGHT IN DIGITAL MEDIA

To enforce his legal rights, the owner of a copyright has to be able to discover illegal copying and take legal action against those responsible. How easy that is depends in large part on the technology of copying.

Consider the old-fashioned printing press, circa 1910. It was large and expensive; printing a book required first setting hundreds of pages of type by hand. That made it much less expensive to print 10,000 copies of a book on one press than 100 copies each on a hundred different presses. Since nobody wanted 10,000 copies of a book for himself, a producer had to find customers – lots of customers.

There has been a lot of concern in recent years about the end of privacy. As we will see in the next two chapters, there is reason for such fears; the development of improved technologies for surveillance and data processing does indeed threaten our ability to restrict other people's access to information about us. But a third and less familiar technology is working in precisely the opposite direction. If the arguments of this chapter are correct we will soon be experiencing in part of our lives – an increasingly important part – a level of privacy that human beings have never known before. It is a level of privacy that not only scares the FBI and the National Security Agency, two organizations whose routine business involves prying into other people's secrets; it sometimes even scares me.

We start with an old problem: how to communicate with someone without letting other people know what you are saying. There are a number of familiar solutions. If you are worried about eavesdroppers, check under the eaves before saying things you do not want the neighbors to hear. To be safer still, hold your private conversation in the middle of a large, open field or a boat in the middle of a lake. The fish are not interested and nobody else can hear.

That approach no longer works. Even the middle of a lake is within range of a shotgun mike.

Some years ago I decided to set up my own web site. One question was how much of my life to include. Did I want someone looking at my academic work – perhaps a potential employer – to discover that I had put a good deal of time and energy into researching medieval recipes, a subject unrelated to either law or economics, thus (arguably) proving that I was a dilettante rather than a serious scholar? Did I want that same potential employer to discover that I held unfashionable political opinions, ranging from support for drug legalization to support for open immigration? And did I want someone who might be outraged at my political views to be able to find out what I and my family members looked like and where we lived?

I concluded that keeping my life in separate compartments was not a practical option. I could have set up separate sites for each part, with no links between them – but anyone with a little enterprise could have found them all with a search engine. And even without a web site, anyone who wanted to know about me could find vast amounts of information by a quick search of Usenet, where I have been an active poster for more than fifteen years. Keeping my virtual mouth shut was not a price I was willing to pay, and nothing much short of that would do the job.

In the early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, one of the oddest and most original of English thinkers, designed a prison where every prisoner could be watched at all times. He called it the Panopticon. Elements of his design were later implemented in real prisons in the hope of better controlling and reforming prisoners. If Brin is correct, it is now in the process of being implemented on a somewhat larger scale.

The previous chapter discussed computer crime but its subject was metaphor. This time it is crime.

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

In the early years, computers were large stand-alone machines; most belonged to governments, large firms, or universities. Frequently they were used by those organizations to control important real-world actions – writing checks, keeping track of orders, delivering goods. The obvious tactic for computer criminals was to get access to those machines and change the information they contained – creating fictitious orders and using them to have real goods delivered, arranging to have checks written in payment for nonexistent services, or, if the computer was used by a bank, transferring money from other people's accounts to their own.

As time passed, it became increasingly common for large machines to be accessible from offsite over telephone lines. That was an improvement from the standpoint of the criminal. Instead of having to gain admission to a computer facility – with the risk of being caught – he could access the machine from a distance, evading computer defenses rather than locked doors.

While accessing computers to steal money or stuff was the most obvious form of computer crime, there were other possibilities. One was vandalism. A discontented employee or ex-employee could crash the firm's computer or erase its data. But this was a less serious problem with computers than with other sorts of machines. If a vandal smashes your truck, you have to buy another truck.

Through most of the past century, improved reproductive technology has consisted in large part of better ways of not reproducing. Better contraception has been accompanied by striking changes in human mating patterns: a steep decline in traditional marriage, a corresponding increase in nonmarital sex, and, perhaps surprisingly, extraordinarily high rates of childbirth outside of marriage. While the long-term consequences of reliable contraception will continue to play out over the next few decades, they will not be discussed here. This chapter deals with more recent developments in the technology of human reproduction.

BUILDING BETTER BABIES

Eugenics, the idea of improving the human species by selective breeding, was supported by quite a lot of people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Currently it ranks, in the rhetoric of controversy, only a little above Nazism. Almost any reproductive technology capable of benefiting future generations is at risk of being attacked as “eugenics” by its opponents.

That argument confuses, sometimes deliberately, two quite different ways of achieving similar objectives. One is to treat human beings like show dogs or racehorses – have someone, presumably the state, decide which ones get to reproduce in order to improve the breed. Such a policy involves forcing people who want to have children not to do so and perhaps forcing people who do not want to have children to do so.

The previous chapter dealt with a narrow slice of biotechnology – its application to humans. This chapter deals with applications of the same technology to other living things.

DESIGNER CROPS

Agricultural biotechnology is one of the oldest forms of high tech, going back at least 8,000 years. That, by current estimates, is when the breeding program began that eventually produced maize – the cereal Americans call “corn” – possibly from teosinte, a plant most of us would describe as a weed. Similar programs of selective breeding are responsible for creating all of our major food plants.

Not only is the creation of genetically superior strains by random mutation and selective breeding an ancient technology, so is cloning. It has been known for a very long time that fruit trees do not breed true to seed. To prove it for yourself, remove the seeds from a golden delicious apple, plant them, wait ten or twenty years, and see what you get. The odds are overwhelmingly high that it will not be a golden delicious and moderately good that it will not be anything you would want to eat.

The solution is grafting. Once your little apple tree has its roots well grown, replace the top section of trunk with a piece of a branch cut from a golden delicious tree.