What Kathleen Ann Goonan Said to the Pentagon's Joint Services Small Arms Project

Yes. That Pentagon. Because Goonan, author of This Shared Dream, is part of the SIGMA think tank.

Long, meaty, fascinating read. Click for the whole!

The more we believe that we are the same as others, the less  we are inclined to hurt them. Portraying others as subhuman gives permission to  harm them. The greater our capacity for imagining the lives of others and  relating them to our own, the more difficult it is to hurt them. The increasing  connectivity of the world is one element that may well widen our circle of  empathy as well as increase our information and knowledge in general. The less  centralized anything is, the more difficult it is to destroy it. That’s why the  suppression of terrorism is so difficult, and is also a good reason to equally  distribute as much information, power sources, and other resources as much as  possible. According to my father, who was in Germany at the time, when  Roosevelt died, Germans were sure that America would leave the war because  their leader was dead. Our government and country survived because our power is  distributed. Germany fell because everything was concentrated in one person.