by Sam Kean
Even more nutty, what if an android committed a crime of its own volition? In ye olde days, computers could do only what they were programmed to. But with AI, computers can learn new behaviors and act in unforeseeable ways. Imagine that a programming team wanted to maximize the amount of time their robot spent with its human. Knowing that all humans are different, the team might tell the robot to vary its behavior and try new things. This all seems pretty reasonable—unless the robot deduced, quite logically, that it could best monopolize the owner’s time by eliminating competition and murdering the family dog. Do you go after the programmers? They didn’t order the sexbot to do that. Do you throw the robot itself in jail? You get into Blade Runner territory pretty quickly.
If sex robots repulse you, get ready for worse. No operating system in history has ever withstood all attempts to crack it. There’s always a vulnerability—and that’s no less true of the operating system that runs our bodies. Infiltrating DNA would be the ultimate hack.
In the late 1970s, detectives near Sacramento realized they had a serial killer on their hands. DNA evidence eventually linked a single man—the so-called Golden State Killer—to a dozen murders, plus 50 rapes and 120 burglaries. But for four decades, his identity remained elusive.
In 2018, the cops turned to an unusual source for help—online genealogies. Pop genetic testing companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe allow people to download their raw genetic data as text files. People can then upload the data to third-party genealogy sites, which give them tools to analyze their DNA in more sophisticated ways. But these third-party sites don’t always have the privacy restrictions that mainstream companies do, which means that outside parties can access the data. Including the police.
Starting in 2018, detectives in Sacramento began trawling these databases for the Golden State Killer. Perhaps he’d been dumb enough, or brazen enough, to upload his DNA into one of them. Alas, no matches turned up; it seemed like another dead end. But after digging deeper, the detectives did find some near matches. And it dawned on them that they were looking at the killer’s relatives, a huge clue.
With this information, the police built a family tree using birth certificates and other public records. Then they looked for a male on the tree who’d lived in Sacramento in the 1970s. They finally zeroed in on a former police officer named Joseph James DeAngelo, and over the next few months they secretly collected two DNA samples from him. One came from his car door, since touching an object often leaves skin cells behind. The other came from a discarded tissue taken from his curbside trash. The DNA was reportedly a perfect match with the killer’s. All in all, it was brilliant detective work.
Still, it did raise concerns about genetic privacy. The police probably took DeAngelo’s DNA without a warrant. Moreover, DeAngelo’s relatives never gave law enforcement permission to use their genetic data. Now, it’s hard to have sympathy for alleged serial killers, but the consequences here go far beyond one case. Imagine your mother or sibling or long-lost cousin—someone you’ve never met—posting their DNA online. Genetic sleuths could now snoop on you and your family, exposing adoptions and affairs in your past and spying on your susceptibility to diseases. Harassment, blackmail, and discrimination are real possibilities. As genetic testing becomes more common, expect to see laws governing who can access such data. Someday, using DNA to expose secrets could be grounds for jail time.
Even for detectives, the ubiquity of genetic technology could end up causing as many problems as it solves. Per the Golden State Killer case, your garbage is full of DNA, mostly from skin cells. In theory, a rogue scientist could harvest, culture, and deprogram those skin cells, turning them back into stem cells. Stem cells can then be converted into any other type of cell in the body, including blood and sperm cells. With a little biological black magic, you’d suddenly have the ability to plant anyone’s bodily fluids at any crime scene, either to frame that person or to sow so much doubt that the real killer goes free.
Genetic engineering could also enable dastardly new forms of murder. Aside from identical twins, we all have unique DNA, including unique flaws and vulnerabilities. A clever scientist could therefore design a silver-bullet virus that, even if released in a public place, would target and kill just one person.
We could also bring extinct life forms back from the dead, a morally fraught idea. Consider woolly mammoths. Mammoth bones and pelts abound in Siberia, and the cold climate there preserves mammoth DNA quite well. Imagine splicing that mammoth DNA into the embryo of an elephant, and implanting that embryo into an elephant womb. The resulting calf wouldn’t be a pure woolly mammoth. But it would be close, with shaggy fur and curly tusks and several key physiological traits. In a functional sense, then, we could easily resurrect the mammoth from extinction.
But should we? Pachyderms are pack animals—highly smart, highly social. They need companions or they suffer. Eventually, of course, we could raise a whole herd of mammoths for company. But that first mammoth would be intensely lonely, a hell of an awful life. That’s assuming the DNA splicing and editing goes smoothly, too, which it probably won’t. What if severe birth defects arise? How far are we willing to push things for an experiment?
The moral recoil would be even stronger with Neanderthals. Although they have a reputation in popular culture as brutes, the best archaeological evidence suggests that Neanderthals were every bit as smart as humans. Based on their skull size, they had bigger brains than us. They also made art, played music, crafted tools, buried their dead, and possibly had language. Humans and Neanderthals even interbred in the recent past, so we’re quite similar genetically. Just like with mammoths and elephants, then, scientists could splice Neanderthal DNA into a human embryo and implant it in a human womb. Nine months later you’d have, in effect, the first Neanderthal to walk the Earth in 40,000 years.
But even more so than mammoths, Neanderthals were probably highly social, as much so as human beings. We could try raising a Neanderthal child in human society, but would she ever truly fit in? Perhaps she’d always be an “other.” Calling this resurrection a crime doesn’t quite seem right; and philosophically, perhaps it’s better to exist than not exist. But it’s ethically dubious at best, and if done wrong could be needlessly cruel.
This litany of future crimes isn’t meant to be dystopian: None of these potential misdeeds is inevitable. It’s important to recognize that we’ll of course benefit from future technologies, too, often mightily—we’ll eliminate diseases, free ourselves from drudgery, open our minds to new horizons, and so on. Moreover, science and technology can also solve and prevent crimes. DNA technology cracks open cold cases. Satellites help archaeologists monitor remote dig sites to cut down on looting, and help aid groups expose human trafficking and modern slavery.3
Some of the crimes mentioned above seem farfetched, to be honest. (Homicidal sexbots?) But the future probably always seems outlandish from a distance. If you’d told someone in 1900 that people today would be using boxes of electrons to steal cash from banks or graft their ex-girlfriends’ faces into revenge porn, that would have seemed pretty crazy. Yet here we are. Perhaps the worst crimes will be ones we can’t even envision. Imagine all the havoc you could wreak with time travel, or cyborg brains that tapped into supercomputers.
Overall, I hope you found this sketch of future crimes to be thought-provoking—and useful. It’s always valuable to think through how people might abuse technologies: we can’t safeguard against all evils, but those who unleash new powers into the world have a moral duty, I’d argue, to mitigate what risks they can. I’m sure there are potential dastardly deeds I’ve overlooked as well. If you can think of any more, please get in touch at samkean.com/contact. Above all, thanks for reading …
Footnotes
1 Another icy no-man’s-land, Antarctica, has already seen a surprising number of crimes. In 1959, two Soviet staffers at a research base there got into a brawl over chess, which ended when one killed the other with an axe. (Soviet bases
reportedly banned chess after that.) In 1983, a stir-crazy Argentine doctor burned down his research station in order to force an evacuation and return home ahead of schedule. In 1996, an American cook maimed another cook with the claw end of a hammer after a dispute. Most recently, at a Russian base in 2018, an engineer stabbed a welder in the chest with a knife—either because, depending on the report, the welder insulted the engineer’s manhood by offering him money to dance on top of a table, or the welder kept spoiling the ending of books the engineer was reading, and he finally snapped. (If it’s the latter, I have to say I’m on the engineer’s side.)
In some ways, though, Antarctica isn’t a great analogy for an ice island. All the crimes so far have involved the citizens of one country alone (e.g., one Russian attacking another Russian), and bases down there are essentially treated as sovereign territory. Legally, though, the wrongdoers probably could have challenged their arrest and confinement, since Antarctica technically has no laws.
2 In early 2020, astronauts on the International Space Station achieved a milestone by baking the first food in outer space, chocolate-chip cookies. (Astronauts do normally heat up their food, but they’d never actually baked something before.) There was speculation prior to the experiment that, due to the oddities of convection and heat exchange in zero gravity, the cookies would come out spherical. Sadly, this was not the case; they were flat. But there was one surprise. The astronauts cranked their special Zero G oven to 300°F, which on Earth would bake the cookies in twenty minutes. In space, the bake took two hours. And disappointingly, given how overly cautious NASA is nowadays, the agency wouldn’t even let the astronauts nibble them. Instead, the cookies were sealed up and returned to Earth for further study, to determine whether they’re safe to consume. Imagine being restricted to space food for months on end, and finally smelling something rich and fresh—only to have it snatched away! It’s inhumane.
3 An astounding 40 million people around the world are currently enslaved, mostly in the fishing, mining, and brickmaking industries in developing countries. While slave camps can easily elude detection on the ground, they can’t hide from satellites. AI algorithms can then learn the distinguishing features of slave camps and swiftly sort through satellite images to pinpoint their locations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
However fascinating the stories in this book are, this was not always a fun book to write: There was a lot of misery to chronicle, too. I’d therefore like to take a moment to remember all the men and women who suffered for the sake of—and at the hands of—science over the centuries. Science has given us a lot, no question, and scientists should be proud of their record overall. But science can and should do better, and the stories of its victims deserve to be more widely known.
Many more people contribute to the writing of a book than the author, and I couldn’t have completed this one without the help of a whole host. There was my steadfast agent Rick Broadhead, who was always there with advice. There was my editor Phil Marino, whose deft suggestions shaped the manuscripts and make it sparkle. There were dozens of other people in and around Little, Brown as well, including Liz Gassman, Deri Reed, and Michael Noon. This book wouldn’t be in your hands now without them.
I also owe a big thanks to my friends and family: My parents Jean and Gene, who continue to be my biggest fans and best sales reps. My brother Ben and his partner Nicole in Washington, D.C., who kept me sane during the pandemic with rooftop beers. My sister Becca and her husband John back in South Dakota, whose boat pictures make me jealous, but whose pictures of Penny and Harry always lift my spirits. (Go Flyers!) And to my new and longtime friends in Washington, D.C., and all around the world—I can’t wait to see you all again soon.
As I’ve said before, a few lines on a page aren’t sufficient to express all my gratitude, and if I’ve left anyone off this list, I remain thankful, if embarrassed …
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SAM KEAN is the New York Times bestselling author of The Bastard Brigade, Caesar’s Last Breath (the Guardian’s Science Book of the Year), The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, The Violinist’s Thumb, and The Disappearing Spoon. He is also a two-time finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and he has been featured on NPR’s Radiolab, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air. His podcast, The Disappearing Spoon, debuted at #1 on the iTunes science charts. Kean lives in Washington, D.C.
WORKS CITED
Prologue: Cleopatra’s Legacy
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Introduction
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Chapter 1: Piracy: The Buccaneer Biologist
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Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Deirdre Coleman, Liverpool University Press, 2018
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Chapter 2: Slavery: The Corruption of the Flycatcher
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Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Deirdre Coleman, Liverpool University Press, 2018
Interviews with Kathleen Murphy, March and April 2019, conducted by Sam Kean
“The making of scientific knowledge in an age of slavery: Henry Smeathman, Sierra Leone and natural history,” in Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History, by Starr Douglas, volume 9, issue 3, Winter 2008
“Natural History, Improvement, and Colonisation: Henry Smeathman and Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth Century,” by Starr Douglas, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, available at https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.409707