Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

Human networks are the most vulnerable,”

It had been a long time since she’d worked on a drug project with people doing it for the thrill of discovery. Usually her lab teams were motivated by death or money, half-crazed with a desire to cure the former and bathe in giant tanks of the latter. She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

“I guess what I’m saying is that this place is no happy hunting ground for jobs right now. They tell you it’s easy to get rich here, but what that really means is that it’s not as hard to be poor.”

Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.

Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be useless. It would take centuries for even the most state-of-the-art machine to decrypt what she had seen and known for the months she’d been alive. At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences. A profound silence settled around the edges of her mind, more powerful than a defensive perimeter in battle. Nobody could find out what she was thinking, unless she allowed it. The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.