NATHAN MYHRVOLD PhD ORAL HISTORY - The Computerworld ...

DA: That’s something that you may worry about.
NM: Well there are a lot of concerns that one can have I think. There are some
huge societal concerns. Our country was based on a set of bets on human nature
encompassed in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Those were
radical bets at that time. The notion is that you should have freedom of speech, that
you shouldn’t be enforced to incriminate one’s self. It was better to have a legal
system that let some guilty people go free to avoid prosecuting the innocent. In the
latter part of the 18th century, the late 1700s when our country made those bets,
they were radical bets, which I think have been hugely successful. I think every
American would say they’re hugely successful. But cyberspace is taking all of those
same issues and they’re bringing it back up to us, and they’re bringing it back up in a
new twist. It’s just different enough that people don’t recognize it as the same bet.
So very well meaning people say, “Well my god, we’ve got to censor the Internet.
We’ve got to protect our children. We just can’t let anyone do this.” Yet if you
think about it, it’s the same bet on human nature. So I’m very afraid that in this
country, or in other countries around the world, very well meaning people will shy
away from renewing those bets. In many cases the stakes are very high because the
Internet represents the precursors for society that is far more open. We think we
live in an open society, and we do by analog standards. In practices freedom of
speech, not every individual is exposed to everything every other individual wants to
say, but in the Internet you certainly can. In principle there are rights that we have
as individuals. In practice, at a certain point they can knock down your door and
haul you off to court, and a variety of other things can happen. In cyberspace that
may not be so. There are encryption techniques that are so powerful that so far as
we know, millions of years of computers wouldn’t be enough to break them. So in
fact you can have more privacy in the digital world than you ever had, practically
speaking. Privacy is an important privilege in American society, but online you end
up getting more of it. So I think the biggest concern is whether our society or the
global society steps up to the plate again and makes those same bets on human
nature. Or whether in a well meaning but misguided way, we shy away from that
and create a less than open society in cyberspace, which ultimately would not just
affect personal freedoms or policies or politics, ultimately I think it will affect how
well this whole mechanism works, and whether we can have the digital renaissance
that this promises to have for our species.
DA: What a pleasure, just a genuine pleasure. Thank you.
Nathan Myhrvold
Oral History
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