Philip Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you’ve written a book on invisibility. After I read your book, I was wondering, how much would it be worth today to be . . . Wells’s The Invisible Man. Say you’re an able-bodied 30-year-old man in the United States or in the UK, and you could turn invisible at will and then be seen again. They don’t capture you or imprison you to be studied for science. How much is that worth? You can go around and steal things, or see people naked, or what is it? [laughs] What’s the equilibrium? Yes, exactly. Tyler, it’s so interesting that those are the two things you alight on. “Hey, you could do those things.” Because that really is the message of H.G. Wells’s book. It’s a message that he took from an ancient myth that first crops up in Plato’s Republic, a myth of a chap called Gyges, who is a shepherd who finds a ring of invisibility. He’s just going about his job as a shepherd, and then he comes across this ring, and what does he do? The first thing he does is, he gets to go on the expedition — I guess it’s taking the taxes or something to the king. And he uses the ring to kill the king, seduce the queen, and become a ruler, a tyrant, in fact, of the population. The message that Plato wanted us to get from that story, and that H.G. Wells wanted us to get when he rewrote it as The Invisible Man, is, invisibility corrupts. Invisibility there is a metaphor for lack of responsibility. When you can evade responsibility for your actions, which is exactly what you’re talking about we could do if we had this ring of invisibility — that is a corrupting capability to have. It seems almost inevitable that that is what happens. In fact, it’s what we see happening all the time now, particularly on the internet, where that anonymity — effectively, that invisibility — that the internet provides, that social media can provide to some people, or they think it provides anyway. We see that that encourages them to do things and to say things that they would never do to someone in person. Sometimes it’s even called the Gyges effect. These stories that we have told traditionally about invisibility seem to have this moral conclusion that, actually, invisibility sounds like it would be a wonderful superpower, but we have to really beware of that temptation because it’s a very strong corrupting influence. Of course, that’s what happened in The Lord of the Rings. That was entirely the metaphor of the Rings of Power there. I would say, in military terms, invisibility would probably be worth enormous amounts. The military, in particular, is investing in research that is trying to find materials and so forth that can confer some degree of invisibility, whether it’s to radar or to infrared or whatever. But I think the message from history and from mythology is that invisibility is a power to be very wary of. Do you think you could turn it into a hundred million dollars, or a billion dollars, or how much?…

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