Excerpt from The Sovereign Individual

~ The Mathematics of Protection ~

Now the dagger of violence could soon be blunted. Information technology promises to alter dramatically the balance between protection and extortion, making protection of assets in many cases much easier, and extortion more difficult. The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics. It is easier to multiply than to divide. As basic as this truth is, however, its far-reaching consequences were disguised prior to the advent of microprocessors. High-speed computers have facilitated many billions of times more computations in the past decade than were undertaken in all the previous history of the world. This leap in computation has allowed us for the first time to fathom some of the universal characteristics of complexity. What the computers show is that complex systems can be built and understood only from the bottom up. Multiplying prime numbers is simple. But disaggregating complexity by trying to decompose the product of large prime numbers is all but impossible. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, puts it this way: “To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world’s supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes.”