Bohr’s Theory of Secrecy and Insecurity Applied to New Challenges: AI, Quantum Computing and Climate Engineering

Can Niels Bohr’s conception of openness and an open world be helpful in confronting dangers today, like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and sensing, climate engineering and synthetic viruses, that arise from scientific and technological breakthroughs similar to those from the nuclear revolution in the 1940s? Irrespective of the degree to which Bohr’s ideas eventually assisted in the management of nuclear weapons, it is important to think systematically about the role that openness might play at the present stage. To do this, it is necessary first to clarify the relevant sense of openness and its suggested mechanisms, secondly to identify the main obstacles for global politics to efficiently handle new technology-driven collective dangers and thirdly to specify the criteria that condition what technologies are made less dangerous by openness and conversely when an open world will be unhelpful or even detrimental. The two previous contributions from Tomas Bohr and Christian Joas provide important foundations for my contribution, having outlined both the background for and key elements of Niels Bohr’s open letter. My task is now to build a bridge from a close reading of the open letter (and Bohr’s other efforts) to the question of how to apply these today, which in the future will hopefully be investigated with more detail and depth by experts in these different fields.