Martin Hellman helped create public-key cryptography, one of the foundations on which the modern digital economy was built. Secure communications, digital banking and electronic commerce all owe something to that breakthrough.
Hellman kept returning to one idea: many of the risks we face today are not simply technological problems. They are problems of how we think about power, deterrence, trust and cooperation.
As AI becomes more autonomous, cybersecurity more complex and geopolitical tensions harder to separate from technology, the question is no longer simply whether we can build more powerful systems. It is whether our institutions, governments and leaders are thinking differently enough to manage what those systems make possible.
Hellman’s career began with a breakthrough in cryptography. But what stayed with me from this conversation was not a technical answer. It was the insistence that some of the hardest problems we face cannot be solved with more technology alone.
Sometimes the real breakthrough is a different way of thinking.
