The Devil's Toy Box by Andrew Fox
The Devil’s Toy Box is a disturbing forecast of worst-case scenarios. Unsettling in his plausibility, author Andrew Fox worries that home gene-splicing kits will be used to make lethal new pathogens, commercial drones will deliver bombs as well as Amazon packages and 3D printers will be sophisticated enough to fashion homemade surface-to-air missiles. At the heart of his thinking is the Promethean reality of all technology. Anything humanmade can and will be misused.
Fox cites Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult whose members—including several credentialed scientists—unleashed a sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subways in 1995. With the internet and proliferating new technologies, crimes on Shinrikyo’s scale no longer require a tightly run organization. We’re in the age of the lone wolves and loose cyber associations such as Qanon. Fox is concerned that high-tech terrorists will emerge from the ranks of the “overeducated and underemployed,” college grads whose job prospects “stand to be further undermined by advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics.” Some of those terrorists will be inspired by ideology, some from resentment over personal failures and others from sheer malice.
The Devil’s Toy Box is a page turner, as expected from an author who pens, in his spare time, the Fat White Vampire series. However, he comes to his speculation credentialed as a program analyst for Homeland Security and a member of SIGMA, an association of science-fiction writers (most with Ph. D.s in science) that advises the Pentagon. As Fox stresses, the greatest threats to national security are a security bureaucracy unable to think imaginatively about the future and cyber utopians unable to comprehend the vulnerability of the Internet of Things.
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The Devil’s Toy Box is a call to action, but it’s entirely possible that a gridlocked political establishment, preoccupied with today’s red button topics, will fail to prepare for the scenarios Fox predicts. After all, the future has no constituency.
