My Big Idea came to me on a soggy August day on Long Island Sound, captive in a lifeless O'Day Mariner, knee to sweaty knee with the houseguest I so wanted to please, sails slopping about uselessly, out of beer and potato chips, at the mercy of the small outboard which--of course--conked out. During the long embarrassing tow, my guest, who was a physicist, speculated that a "shear pin" in the motor failed, exactly as it was designed to do, to keep the aging and overheated putt-putt from cooking itself to death--a deliberately weak link that breaks the circuit before real damage happens. What if such a circuit breaker in my brain had stopped me from suggesting Let's go sailing! on a day clearly meant for an air-conditioned movie theater. Wouldn't it be great if automatic brakes in our heads shut us down before we shot off our mouths? Such purposeful failure is routinely engineered into just about everything--by engineers, or by evolution.

Some technological advances are so great that they create ruptures in our understanding of what is possible. Eighty years ago, such a rift took place via the invention of the atom bomb, transforming the way we conceive of warfare and global order. From artificial intelligence to synthetic biology, experts and policymakers are beginning to dissect the potential consequences of adding unfamiliar, highly advanced, and potentially devastating new additions to the toolboxes of adversarial powers. When referring to world order, we often operate within a'Great Power' discourse and assume that geopolitical disruptions require geopolitical might. The democratisation of destructive technologies, however, will likely create the conditions for smaller non-state actors, and even individuals, to have a greater impact on an international level.

In a provocative op-ed in the New York Times last week, PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel argued that artificial intelligence is "a military technology." So, he asks, why are companies like Google and Microsoft, which have opened research labs in China to recruit Chinese researchers for their cutting-edge AI research, "sharing it with a rival"? Thiel's op-ed caused a big splash in the AI community and frustrated experts in both AI and US-China relations. An outspoken Trump backer, Thiel has been a leading voice pushing for tech to be more aligned with what he sees as America's defense interests -- and his messages have been influential among conservative intellectuals. Critics pointed out that Thiel had failed to disclose that his company, Palantir, has defense contracts with the US government totaling more than $1 billion, and that he might benefit from portraying AI as a military technology (a characterization of AI that experts dispute).