"My satisfaction was perfect, though my danger was the same; and I was as happy in not knowing my danger, as if I had never really been expos'd to it." (Robinson Crusoe)
"We moderns can do lot of politicizing merely by the selection of our dangers." “What are Americans afraid of? Nothing much, really, except the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live on, and the energy they use.” (Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture)
As technology has come to be seen as inherently dangerous, its unbridled development is seen as potentially leading to war. For Norbert Wiener, "There is nothing more dangerous to contemplate than World War III. It is worth considering whether part of the danger may not be intrinsic in the unguarded use of learning machines"(p. 175). For Wiener, the new and real agencies of learning machines have a "literal-mindedness" whose dangers our prejudices may hide from us. "The mere fact that we have made a machine does not guarantee that we will have the proper information as to whether the danger point has come." Manuel De Landa's study of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines starts with the speculation that one day "robot historians" might study the technological lineages that had lead to generations of killer robots. (cf Terminator) In this point of view, humans would have served only as machines' surrogate reproductive organs, until robots acquired their own self-replication abilities. (see intro pp 1-11)