Bill Joy On His Own Future, And The World's

geeber writes "There is an interesting interview with Bill Joy in the current edition of the Magazine in the New York Times. He is still obssesed with what he calls a 'civilization-changing event' brought on by the fast pace of research into dangerous technologies such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Another interesting tidbit: he has flirted with the idea of going to work for Google."

Comments

Get your tin foil hats here

[The-Bus]

No boogedy-boogedy NYT registatrion required
here.

Re:James Watson on Gray Ooze...

[ThisIsFred]

Also, one forgets that cells have been evolving against this possiblity for billions of years. If a "Gray Ooze" were possible it would very likely have appeared on its own.

I agree that the possibility of accidentally creating something dangerous is probably low (e.g. a genetically engineered mushroom that suddenly mutates into a human-killing fungus). However, I don't think the evolutionary argument has sway in all possible examples, because the danger involves creating something with specific functions not guided by evolution, an entirely custom-built microorganism for example.

There are two ways were I can possibly see that genetic engineering is potentially dangerous. The first is the chance that a genetically engineered microorganism that isn't dangerous to life on earth produces a byproduct that we didn't expect, which is dangerous to life. I highly doubt this would turn into catastrophe, since it's likely to be caught in the lab early on.

The other possible danger is that some lab is contracted to produce an intentially harmful microorganism or virus. Just because it hasn't evolved yet doesn't mean it isn't possible to piece together something incredibly dangerous and nearly impossible counter. Evolution doesn't appear to cover all possible avenues, it only appears to cover those possible in the amount of time allowed before there is a major change to the environment. That said, the geological record appears to show lots of "false starts" that were cut short by earth-wide catastrophes. IAANB (biologist) so perhaps I'm missing the big picture.

Anyway, my point is thus: We're far from the utopian promise of the future, and it will remain so because there is no single idea of perfection. War exists because one people want to force their political and social ideals on another people, even if there is no direct benefit for doing so. Against that backdrop, we've got biological weapons that look like the perfect WMD in a lab (chemical weapons and nukes don't reproduce when deployed, so they're less efficient), but turn out to be duds (luckily) when deployed. Imagine a virus which is airborne like the flu, destroys the immune system like HIV AIDS, can be spread by contact like a rhinovirus, but can be manufactured and stored almost indefinitely - unlike bacterial biological weapons. Assuming those traits aren't mutually exclusive, some agency, at some point, is likely to fund the research.

Interesting links...

[Lank]

One of my professors this semester assigned a project comparing and contrasting the views of Joy, Dertouzos, and Kurzweil. The following articles shed some light about each one's perspective, respectively.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
http://www.lcs.mit.edu/about/reason.html
http://www.lcs.mit.edu/about/kurzweil.html