Think for a moment of the enduring legacy of African slavery in America. Think of the way it tainted this country's culture and politics; think of the bloody Civil War, the ghettos and race riots after emancipation, the distorted interpersonal relations, the segregated housing patterns. What if we could roll back the clock and ensure that our society was “designed” so that slavery was never permitted?
Would you give me 20 million dollars to conduct research on that possibility? Would you think I was an honest man if I implied that my research would “fix” racism? Probably not.
But what if I told you that my computer science lab was working on a “new Internet” that would solve all the security and privacy problems of the existing one? Would you find this claim more credible than a proposed retroactive solution to the problem of slavery?