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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
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
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
... 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.