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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."
It's amazing to read an article about someone like Bill Joy, a truly creative thinker and someone who accomplished a lot, and then come to Slashdot and read the most simplistic rebuttal that you'll likely read anywhere, and then see that it has been modded up.
Now I understand why people just blog these days. You get away from this type of mediocrity.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
I completely agree; the reason I've also argued pro-cloning research, pro-nano tech research, etc, is to compare it to the invention of flight. Yeah, bad things have come from it, but compare that to what it's done for mankind as a whole...could we ever see it's invention as a bad thing?
I know nothing
After all, it may be that self-destruction is not only our destiny as human beings, but our purpose.
All facetiousness aside, his mention of Bertrand Russell's opposition to nuclear weapons raises a good point. Sure, we risked barbecuing ourselves during the Cold War. But, arguably, the same weapons also prevented World War III, and are continuing to do so. You could say that we traded an unimaginable amount of economic power -- strategic nuclear-weapons programs are, after all, the most expensive investment the human race has ever made -- for the very security that Joy says we're recklessly neglecting.
At the end of the day, he'll just have to finish his manifesto and submit it for review by civilization at large. Even Ted Kaczynski managed to get that far.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Yes, knife can be useful but also dangerous.
Explosives can be useful but very dangerous too. In the wrong hands they're definitely more dangerous than knives.
Nuclear power can be useful but in general it's more dangerous (in the bomb form) than knives or explosives. It is, in fact, the first technology with which the human race could have committed a suicide.
To me it seems like that to Joy genetic engineering and nanotechnology are one more order of magnitude more dangerous than atomic power or any other existing human technology. Why? Because of the potential for self-replication. Atomic bombs certainly kill lots of people, but they cannot self-replicate and run out of our control.
In the end it boils down to the risk = probability * consequences. Even if the probability of us becoming victims to all-conquering grey nanogoo is vanishingly small, are the consequences so disasterous that the risk is eventually too high for us even experiment with the idea?
Incidentally, developers of the hydrogen bomb had to wrestle with the same equation. What if we lit up a hydrogen bomb in our atmosphere and, against all our calculations and predictions, nitrogen-nitrogen fusion would begin and our entire atmosphere would be consumed in one huge fusion burn.
The owls are not what they seem
Hitler really liked the operas of Richard Wagner. Does that mean Richard Wagner is bad?
Time is simply one way of viewing entropy. It is thermodynamic and innately unidirectional. Time travel to the future is simple, it just takes a while to accomplish. It is generally claimed reversing time would violate cause and effect. This isn't really true, it would simply exchange causes for effects. What it would violate is the second law of thermodynamics. The result of this would be the setting up of a feedback cycle that increased energy in "the past" infinately. Not only do we not observe this, it would be a Bad Thing.
In terms of controling "dimensions" the fact of the matter is that we are, for all of our technological advances, still restrained to "control" things within the bounds of natural law. We can manipulate those laws in certain ways to achieve certain effects we desire, but we are, and always will be, constrained by them.
Thus pure research is not so much expanding our limits as it is determining what the absolute limits beyond which we cannot go actually are. The more we learn, the more we learn we are constrained. In fact, that was the whole point of the Theory of Relativity which is really the Theory of an Absolute Limit.
It would seem that travel in time is one of those absolute contraints, which, no matter how much you and I might like to go look at some dinosaurs, is probably a Good Thing.
The future, however, is simply awaiting our arrival.
KFG
Bush's program to go to Mars is a good example
Help fight continental drift.
I am no doctor but I would suggest that he seek some therapy on this and other issues in his life. I mean who buys movies based on three books. From what I read in the article, he bought three movie books, and took 600 of the titles that were in all three books and bought them.
I would just suggest that he not point his life in an analytical fashion and realize that fate and good ole advanced decision making can lead to wonderful marvels of life.
I don't want to come across as a troll here, but I really felt sad for the guy as I read that article because I got the feeling that he tries to lead life like he is writing a computer program, instead of going out on a whim every once in awhile. I hope his kids don't pick up on dads habits. Heaven forbid we watch a movie because we like the box art.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
The man is suggesting an end to the free flow of information that science is built upon. He talked about scientific "guilds" that would hold the sacred flame and hide it from everyone else in an effort to preserve the human race.
I'm sorry, but that would sound like the end of at least interdisciplinary science if not science itself. I think the rubuttal that you labeled "simplistic" is pretty accurate. Just because the results of science can be used for destructive aims is not a reason to return to the ages of hidden knowledge.
"I'm a loner Dottie, a rebel."
- Pee Wee Herman
This is Insightful? Does anyone other than one bitter crank who's pissed off about how his site gets indexed believe any of this is remotely true? Google searches "pure garbage," full of nothing but porn sites? Their support told him to "fuck off"? Oh, wait, that's what they "basically" told him. So, in other words, this guy just has an axe to grind and he's willing to make up whatever he wants so long as it fits his rant, and then other people will mod him up, "basically" because they're jealous of Google or something. Tell you what, pal -- why don't you start your own search engine? Then, when your engine gets really popular, you can throw huge parties and not invite anybody from Google, just to show 'em!
Breakfast served all day!
Bill Joy is perhaps the greatest programmer of our time. You are perhaps the most ignorant /. poster of our time.
He made large parts of BSD, created VI, and single-handedly implemented the TCP stack that started the internet revolution.
I think that there are real risks of technology. But I'm not convinced that a "go slow" prescription is a solution. This presupposes that we actually can forecast the risks and benefits of technology if we just slow down the pace a bit. But so often, modern technologies synergize in ways that are nearly impossible to predict. And hypothetical risks often loom much larger than benefits. It was easy to foresee, for example, the risks to privacy of widespread computer connectivity. But who foresaw the many benefits of computer networks for commerce, communication, grass-roots political organization, etc., etc? Over the years, I've seen many nightmare scenarios. In early '70's, many young people were convinced that nuclear or ecological catastrophe would overtake us in just a few years. Yet somehow, the forecasted disasters always managed to stay just a few years ahead. It is worth thinking about risks--occasionally, the dangers are sufficiently obvious that they actually can be avoided. But that is the exception rather than the rule. I think the greater danger is that we will be paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
"anywhere" includes slashdot, so i wrote it because noone wrote that already :)
And yes, is simplistic, but so still is condemning technologies because it could have a (ok, in this case very) bad uses, and closing the door on any kind of good uses, including avoiding or mitigating disasters even bigger than the worst that they could possibly make. If we go to the worst case scenario, when all the bad things will happen, then don't cheat and suppose that some bad things are "impossible" and some will happen for sure to support a point.
Even with my previous post about micro black holes (that look a bit more dangerous and global as technology than genetic engineering and nanotechnology, ok, too much Asimov and Simmons :) still didn't find a generic reason to ban knowledge and foment oscurantism that could end very wrong in a point or another.
That's one of the arguments put forth against any ETs visiting us, any race of creatures technologically advanced enough to produce faster than light travel would have already blown themselves to peices with weapons (assuming a human-like nature).
Each new tech advance is more powerful and more accessible than the last, but the minds that wield it are relatively stagnant and still saddled with millions of years of selfish evolutionary baggage which we won't be able to fix for quite a while yet.
Humankind is within ~30 years of reaching the vingean Singularity, and the only question is the odds on making it without sabotaging ourselves first. IMO, the odds are very low, but unlike Bill Joy, I don't think there's any point in attempting to STOP or even slow this progress -- all we can do is try to safely guide the tech and hope for the best.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Hyperbole content of the above aside, I think the problem stems from the very idea that someone should be deciding how the world is to be run.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There is an argument among 2nd amendment supporters that says "If you criminalize guns, only criminals will have guns". That applies here, only it is more powerful. Possibly the only way to counter a nano-plague is with your own nanotechnology. It is inevitable that someone will develop the technology if it is feasible and there is a desire to do so. Absolute control over the human race is impossible.
We didn't develop nuclear weapons because we wanted to incinerate thousands of people in a heartbeat, we did so because we knew the Germans and later the Soviets were trying to do the same. Had we said "we will refuse on principle to develop these things", what would have happened when Stalin developed his own nuclear weapons and became the sole nuclear power on the planet?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The answer is to develop social feedback loops and an environment in which people generally /do not want to blow each other up/.
/without/ massive nano or biological weapon proliferation.
Of course that sort of long term solution requires much more persistence, humility, dedication and sacrifice than packing lots of explosives into a bomb and just dropping it on people you don't like.
I think we are starting to see this, even
If you have enough "AK-47 proliferation" it doesn't matter how many bombs you drop.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
C'mon man. At BEST flight has boosted our economy by making travel from point A to point B faster. But has it really had a profound effect on the fabric of humanity in the same way Nano-tech and genetics research most likely will? If you're going to site a technology that is in the same duality in it's good and evil power, use something like microbiological culturing (advanced biowarfare/antibiotics), even chemical engineering (chemical weapons/chemical fertilizers that allow for precise application to maximize crop yeild and minimize groundwater pollution)! Compared to these, flight is just a vehicle for transmission. An alternative to bipedal motion. A fairly innocuous invention. Had it not been invented, other means of transportation would have come about - like sub-survace intra-space-time balooning.
Seriously, why do people get so up in arms when others present a word of caution? We've invented some pretty volitile shit in the past without thinking, and it's costed lives. Fortunately for those of us in the US, we've generally not been on the recieving end. One day we might be. So, why not step into these waters of nano tech and genetics with caution?
The more I think about it, the more I like the proposed idea of having insurance policies for disasters involving dangerous technologies. The insurance companies will of course be subject to market forces and will thus be far more effective 'regulators' than bureaucrats in Washington who may have read a book on the technology they are regulating.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
>In a nutshell, the problem with exponentially
>advancing technology [kurzweilai.net] is that it
>is increasingly outpacing our primitive human
>brain's ability to intelligently deal with it.
What level of advance are you willing to put me in
jail to protect? How do you decide on this level?
How do you decide at any one time what fits under
your arbitrary bar? Given the human nature
you are so afraid of, i think we all know what
direction this will go.
What makes you think progress will continue at
all if you remove its historical growth pattern?
A small linear growth goal is just as likely
to kill progress and send us back into the
dark ages. You have no evidence at all that
what he wants to do can or will work. None.
Perhaps we can engage in risk mitigation. If
we are worried about ending the world then how
about we make it a priority to settle new worlds
as a way of balancing our human portfolio?
If our primitive brain is the problem then
perhaps, like boosting our immune system,
improving our brains is a better choice.
Or we can just stick our vestigal tail
between our legs.
It's amazing to read an article about someone like Bill Joy, a truly creative thinker and someone who accomplished a lot
He accomplished a lot in *programming*, nothing else. See, that's the problem. Once someone gets famous for doing X, they think they can speak authoritatively on all subjects. But they can't -- they can just babble, just as Einstein did about socialism and pacifism, and Bill Joy is doing about science. While we can all hold opinions on everything, and even babble about them on Usenet and Slashdot (or indeed on blogs, the most self-indulgent waste of time possible), it would be considerably more productive if people limited their interactions with journalists to the subjects they have actually been educated in.
It only takes a handful of real loonies with access to total destruction weapons before we're all totally destroyed.
..
As a species, our technical intelligence far exceeds our common sense and mental stability. Evolutionary dead-end.
What exactly do you mean by "technical intelligence" of our species? Do you mean the combined achievements of the human race? We've created the atom bomb, but 99.999% of people have no idea how it works and likely never will
As far as common sense goes, the scenario is the excact opposite. The individual person has lots of common sense, but humans as a race have (almost) none. Which ties into your next and probably most important point about mental stability. This is something that's shaky on both the individual and entire-human-race levels. Humans can never be mentally stable, our emotions forbid it. Look at the guy that demolished half his town with a bulldozer the other day. He was a regular joe, just like everyone else, something came (in this poor guy's case it was a big developer that had pushed through a rezoning bill) just pushed him over the edge. The question is can we really blame him.. I mean, someone comes in and destroys everything you've worked your whole life for. What would you do? Jumping into an armored bulldozer and going on a rampage would start to sound like a pretty reasonable thing to do. (Disclaimer: I don't agree with what that man did. But lets be honest, everyone has thought of doing similar at one point or another, this guy just had the balls to go through with it).
I don't think it will be the "real loonies" that destroy humanity, but rather a few fundamentalists with nothing to loose (see: terrorist organizations).
We need to get off this Earth as fast as we can so our eggs are not all in one basket
Why? So we can then proceed to destroy other worlds in the same way as we have ours?
But when the most powerful nation on earth is so comfortable in its habits that Kyoto goes by it's wayside, what chance in hell is there of your leaders taking this scenario seriously?
I like that "your" leaders comment, nice way to shift responsibility. They're our leaders. We've set up the political systems that they've manipulated to get where they are today.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
"Now I understand why people just blog these days. You get away from this type of mediocrity."
Snigger. Yeah. Nothing will save the world quite like furiously pounding out endless blog entries.
That would be a good idea -- if it was even remotely possible. But of course it isn't, and banning the technology will only ensure that when the technology IS developed, it is only those who ignored your ban (i.e. your enemies) who have access to it. Good luck fighting that new plague when none of your scientists are allowed to research it!
A more workable (albeit still iffy) solution would be to figure out what makes people want to develop WMDs, and work on ways to keep them from wanting to do so. Put effort into reducing poverty, increase global co-operation, promote cross-cultural goodwill, stabilize population growth, etc. Basically do the opposite of everything Bush is doing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Back when cavemen still said "ooga booga", maybe somebody figured out how to sharpen obsidian into a knife, and the other neanderthals spread the love.
Thousands of years later we had guys like L. Da Vinci and then B. Franklin, renaissance men with who dabbled in science for the joy of their own genius.
Now science is industrial (and so is science education, IMO). Much of it is driven by the search for profit (biotech) or power (Manhattan Project). (And you can easily find examples of valid science with medical benefits which is not done because it can't be protected by patents.)
Every advance comes with unforseen consequences, and so the increasing pace of science comes with increasing danger.
By nature, the profit/power motive won't intentionally slow itself down. Joy seems to say that maybe we should put some checks in place. In his words:
Once someone gets famous for doing X, they think they can speak authoritatively on all subjects.
This problem exists, but is not valid in this case.
See, I'd agree if the interview was with Britney or Tiger - their opinion on the future counts for nothing. But you're talking about Bill Joy. When a deservedly prominent computer scientist - or, for that matter, biologist, economist, etc. - talks about the future, I'll listen.
Other people have stated this principle with different connotations than Russell chose to. There's Patrick Henry's extreme line "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." And if that's not far enough for you, Milton's Satan goes even further " "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven".
You might wonder how anyone can entertain such fanatical positions. I think what you have to understand is that Choice, Power, Control, Freedom, Liberty--whatever synonym you choose to use--is the essence of Humanity. If you have lost the ability to act in pursuit of your wishes, then you as a human being are essentially dead. (Actually achieving your wishes is optional and possibly detrimental). The purpose of the 3 pounds of meat on top of bodies that drives us to do anything we are driven to do is to make decisions and act upon them. To be denied that ability is a fate worse than death.
When we consider Bill Joy, we must consider what Bill Joy is asking us to surrender in order to avoid Grey Goo. To save the world, Bill Joy is not asking us to give up mere Science, Technology, or Geekdom. He is asking us to give up Democracy. Whether through a Science Guild, a government bureaucracy, or some strange all powerful insurance company, Bill Joy wants to put decisions over technology in the hands of some elite few--with the public completely uninformed that a decision has even been made--because public knowledge of the banned technology is dangerous.
It is strange that he looked to insurance companies and the supposed "free market" to solve this problem. Anyone who equates capitalism with freedom should see this as a counter-example--money is a very old and straightforward means of Power. It is a Power Bill Joy is comfortable with--he is more comfortable with the dominance of Money than with the dangers of democracy or freedom, because he has Money.
In any event, if bio and nano technology are going to be the driving forces of our economy in the future, what Bill Joy is suggesting is prohibiting the vast majority of people from participating in the that economic change. There will be an elite few, who posess the power of death over us, who are impervious to any threat we the people can offer them , and have will have the ability to deny us life saving or enriching technology as their whims so dictate.
Bill Joy is asking us to adopt the teachings of Thomas Hobbes. I should hope that our prior experiences with absolute totalitarian power in history should be enough to dissuade us from that--we are weighing the possibility of destruction against the certainty of submission.
generally
Key word. The problem is that, given that everyone can blow everyone else up, in a world of 6,000,000,000 people all it takes is 0.00000001% deviants and we're doomed. No social system can be so perfect that every one of that many people will be well adjusted.
Look at the present day; the number of terrorists in the world are statistically insignificant but there's still enough to cause all sorts of grief.
That's not to say we shouldn't do everything we can to create a better world. It's just that it can never be perfect.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
how do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out everyone else?
:)
Very, very politely
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
It did. Once all the easy pickings were gone and the world was covered with grey ooze, the ooze started to compete with itself. A few billion years later, the descendents of the ooze are wonderfully diverse and complex creatures. Some of them turn milk into yoghurt, others push balls of dung around the desert or argue on Slashdot. Maybe we'll accidentally create nanotechnological grey ooze that out-competes every existing life form, but give it a couple of billion years and it'll sort itself out. And what a great story it'll be for the ooze's descendents - they'll probably make a religion out of it!
... they can just babble, just as Einstein did about [...] pacifism
... they can just babble, just as Einstein did about socialism [...]
... it would be considerably more productive if people limited their interactions with journalists to the subjects they have actually been educated in.
How did he babble? Remember that Einstein grew up between the world wars. An American WWI veteran said: "The Germans didn't win that war but neither did we. Only the war won that war." It was a house of cards that fell over, countries declared war because of their treaties and rarely because their own direct interests were at stake. And even the interests that were at stake, were more those of the elite than of the people. In the end, the war was not even succesful to put down Germany. The treaty of Versailles paved the way for WWII (with unbearable reparations). It's not surprising that many people became pacifists after WWI. Furthermore, in Germany at that time, militarists were the Nazi's and the believers in Great Germany. There is a big difference in being a pacifist opposing war against the Nazi's or being a pacifist opposing their war drive. Furthermore, when Einstein moved to the US, he did come to believe that the Nazi's had to be stopped and he became a strong supporter of the development of the atomic bomb. After WWII, he did become a pacifist again, because he didn't want war with the USSR. His goal of mutual disarmament became reality when Reagan sign INF and START I. IMHO, the improvement of the US-USSR relationship which resulted from these treaties was an important aspect in ending the cold war (without a big boom).
So how was Einstein wrong?
I just read his essay Why Socialism? and it struck me how well-written it is. His criticism of 'pure' capitalism is valid and while he calls for a planned economy, he correctly identifies two major problems that would have to be solved first (he forgets the problem of how demand should guide production, but two out of three ain't bad). Those are exactly the problems that the USSR and China were not able to solve in their planned economies.
All in all, a very well written essay worthy of reading. While we now know that no one has succeeded in creating a succesful economy, that wasn't at all clear in 1949, when the Soviet economy was still booming and this must have been one of the more reasonable voices among the communists and the communist-haters. And because the essay is so reasoned, it's still worthy of reading after over 50 years, which is often a sign of quality.
Unfortunately, many of the 'experts' are extremely biased and worse, they can't even offer good arguments to support their position. Then I'd rather listen to an intelligent person who knows the scientific method and the limits of what he can claim. Those people can often talk very interestingly about subjects and even if they are wrong, there is still plenty to learn from their arguments.