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Are we in danger of knowing too much?

NO ONE ever tells you how dangerous this stuff can be: they just go on pumping it out, hour after hour, day after day. You're consuming it right now, without a clue about the possible consequences. The worst thing is, evolution has predisposed your brain to crave it as much as your body craves fat and sugar. And these days - as with fat and sugar - you can get it everywhere.
That's because we live in the information age - and the stuff that risks doing the damage is information itself. As certain scientists and philosophers see it, the discovery and dissemination of knowledge is far from being an unqualified boon. We might be in danger of knowing too much. "Information can potentially be extremely dangerous," says philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. "The effects arising from knowledge can be momentous."
Humans are uniquely at risk because we have always craved information. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar and his colleagues at the University of Oxford suggest that this trait has almost certainly been bred into us during our evolutionary history. Evidence for this idea comes from the observation that in birds and primates, brain size is correlated with the ability to reason, to develop new feeding strategies and to survive extinction. "Clearly, the capacity to discover novel facts about the environment has a very ancient basis," Dunbar says.
For humans, new information has in the past brought a clear evolutionary advantage. The invention of spiked clubs, triremes, longbows, gunpowder and all the other military technologies can be traced to the discovery of new information. Each one enabled its inventors to steal a march on the competition. The information embodied in the laws of thermodynamics led to the development of efficient steam engines and, in short order, all the prosperity and exploitation of the British empire.
The question now rearing its head is whether we now know too much. Does the recent explosion in available information, primarily thanks to the internet (see graphs), bring dangers we have not anticipated? Bostrom fears that it might. "Research and education have become like motherhood and apple pie: harmless, wholesome and completely unobjectionable," he says. "It behoves us to develop a more reflective and qualified view about the value of knowledge."
Statements like this come as a bit of a shock. After all, most of us take it as a given that the more we know - the more information we have at our disposal about the world around us - the better off we will be. As the philosopher Francis Bacon pointed out back in the 17th century, knowledge is power. The thing is, power can be put to bad uses as well as good. "Right now, for example, we're thinking about how to prevent the growing knowledge and power arising from biotechnology from being put to evil ends," Bostrom says.
Bostrom has coined a term for the danger that arises from knowledge: he calls it "information hazard". A case in point relates to the influenza virus that spread around the world in 1918, killing more than 50 million people. Now its genome has been made publicly available in the online GenBank database, and anyone with the right tools and skills can reconstruct it.
In an article in The New York Times in 2005, futurologist Ray Kurzweil and computer scientist Bill Joy, the former chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, condemned the publication of the genome as "extremely foolish". Recreating the virus from this information would be easier than building an atomic bomb, they claimed. And once that was done, releasing it could cause far greater devastation.
Not everyone takes this pessimistic view. Geoffrey Smith, a virologist at Imperial College London, opposes censorship of the kind Kurzweil and Joy appear to be advocating. Risks from biotechnology have been exaggerated, he says, pointing out that the security threat posed by biotechnology research is reviewed at numerous stages, from funding onwards. Data should always be published, Smith reckons. "That removes the feeling that there's something secret going on."
The human craving for information makes censorship a particularly problematic response to any perceived information hazard, and openness is often the preferred option. As swine flu started to spread last year, for example, governments and bodies such as the World Health Organization were quick to make the public aware of the risks. Bitter experience has taught us the dangers of allowing the suspicion to take hold that the authorities are withholding information. People's appetite for facts goes into overdrive and it gets easier for false notions to gain credence. "This happened in the UK with the MMR vaccine," says Ian Pearson, a futurologist at the Futurizon consultancy in Switzerland. "The government created a situation where one lone scientist was able to cause mass panic, which has resulted in many kids catching measles - and, of course, a few have died."
Out of control
The fear that information is being kept secret causes havoc in other areas too. A run on a bank can be caused if people feel they can no longer trust those who control the information about the bank's ability to meet its debts, and here, too, gauging the appropriate response is tricky. If governments guarantee deposits - something that the UK government did in 2008 after a rush of savers withdrawing their money threatened to bring down the Northern Rock bank - that can create a further information hazard. "Sometimes banks refuse government assistance as it could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, leading to a further loss of public confidence," Bostrom says.
An information hazard is also confronting the health insurance industry. The advent of companies that offer genome scans has allowed individuals to assess their likelihood of succumbing to various ailments over the course of their lifetime. This threatens to upset the risk-sharing that is the cornerstone of insurance. "The insurance market only functions where neither the individuals nor the company can tell for certain who will actually need the insurance," Bostrom says.
Pearson sees problems like this as unavoidable. Secrecy, censorship and curtailing of scientific research are dangerous options, fuelling distrust of the censors, and depriving society of potentially beneficial discoveries: such "cures" are likely to turn out to be worse than the disease, he reckons. And if external censorship is bad, expecting self-censorship from people who are naturally inclined to satisfy their every craving is just unrealistic. "I don't think there is much scope for people self-regulating their information consumption effectively," Pearson says. "There is no evidence that they can limit their consumption in other areas."
That leaves us with a problem - and the search for a solution is under way. "Information hazards will become an increasingly critical area of inquiry," says George Dvorsky, a director of the US-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
A little knowledge is a said to be a dangerous thing, but a little knowledge about the power and importance of knowledge itself might be more dangerous still. "This is an area we neglect at our peril," Pearson says.

Paul Parsons is a writer based in the UK, and the author of The Science of Doctor Who (Icon Books)

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