It is worthwhile to look at biology’s solution to problems of this nature, and there are reasons to believe that any other kind of solution cannot survive in the long term. Unfortunately for all our intellectual schemes, biology’s solution seems to be a free-for-all at every level.

In is not known how we ever evolved to survive as long as we often do under attack by other organisms whose way of life can cause our destruction. Clearly any such successful arrangement is temporary on both short and long time scales. More specifically, we have immune systems that sometimes protect us from tiny organisms, and nervous systems that sometimes protect us from anything big enough to see. We also have technological extensions that sometimes protect us, and also sometimes allow us to defeat the protective schemes of other biological entities, large or small.

I cannot see how any of our cogitation (Doctorow is one of the wisest cogitators) can ever change the effective status quo in all these matters, which, as I suggested above, consists of a free-for-all development of the latest attack versus the latest defense.