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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."
The invention of knife was very dangerous too, a lot of people are killed by knifes and similar weapons. And a lot are saved by them too (scalpels and al). And for sure our life will be entirely different if we must eat without cutting accesories. You can't condemn entire tools or technologies because it could have some bad uses.
In James Watson's recent book "DNA, The Secret of Life" he touches on this problem. He mentions that the likelyhood of a nano-disaster is unlikely. His discussion is too lengthy to mention here (and I don't have the book in my hands right now) but it is a convincing counterpoint against this possibility.
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. As it is, cells, and multi-cellular organisms have extremely sophisiticated (sp) means of defense. While will be possible to create a disease that kills millions or billions of humans, I worry far more about nuclear war.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
We've managed to survive the splitting of the atom in the last century, but have bred some very, very, very dangerous weapons while at the same itme developing some very, very important technologies. It's a wonder we've managed that so well (so far).
i understand his concern over these new branches of study and it is of *dire* importance that we tread lightly and remember our lessons in the areas of genetic modification and nanotechnology, yet all the while moving forward. i'm no luddite, but i am always wary and respectful of the power of the human mind.
Agree or disagree with the man, he may be right, he may be wrong..time will tell, but he is anything but stupid.
the civilization changing event will be smarter than human artificial intelligence, otherwise known as the singularity
Sun seems to be very confused lately-- witness their simultaneous PR trashing and selling of Linux, their confusing statements re free things and open source that just scream "we know we need to do something, but haven't decided what yet", and their de-emphazation of Solaris and Sparc without any indication what they're going to make money on if not Solaris and Sparc.
This might not be a bad thing for Sun, but it does indicate they're in a time of change.
McNealy's tenacity seems to be exactly what Sun needs right now to keep them from just giving up or acquiescing to a buyout by a company that isn't in Sun's exact market segment and wouldn't understand the nature of their assets. However I wonder if he has the vision to see where Sun needs to go from here.
Would Sun be better off with Joy still there at this point?
There is a great story in Vanity Fair recently about a famous arch's two towers in NYC. Joy bought a two floor duplex. This building is plauged with problems. The list of who lives in them is a who's who of current celebritydom. (martha, calvin etc al) and then there's this geek, Bill Joy :) It made me laugh.
Must be nice.
Hedley
He didn't praise the Unabomber, he said that as much as he hated to admit, the Unabomber raised some valid concerns. I seem to recall that he also called him criminally insane.
Worth noting that a friend of Bill Joy was maimed by one of the Unabombers bombs.
Just because a person is a nutcase doesn't mean that all their ideas are to be instantly dismissed.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
For me, the key difference is this: new technologies are giving individuals increasing destructive powers over more and more people, and it may be the equation we are all used to, about how tech can be used for good and bad, is changing.
The knife enables you to kill a person at a time.
A gun several.
Bombs - hundreds
Nukes are controlled by states, not individuals - but one fear behind the current war on terror is this will change.
Nano weapons...?
Weapons with gigantic destructive power might be very easy to synthesize in only 20 or 30 years - so imagine this: how do you run a world where every individual has the power to wipe out everyone else? There is no way around it - this is not like the right to bear arms - you simply have to ban the technology and pretty much wipe out everyone who seeks to acquire it, like an immune system killing viruses, while finding some way to lace the environment with 'antigens' of some kind that can automatically 'contain' any 'outbreaks'.
There has to be a point at which a hugely destructive technology becomes so cheap and widely available that it cannot be allowed to proliferate, no matter that it might have beneficial uses.
Many people mention that we have survived possible nuclear destruction and created hundreds of destructive weapons yet manage to live. You miss the point of those things beeing weapons, people weilding them were aware of extreme consequences their actions would bring. They had responsibility and while driven by their own agenda understood what they had on their hands. Great deal of effort was spent to keep it responsible, and less prone to get out due to single person/company/country mistakes/evil intent. What Bill argues is that there is a great possibility that now such responsiblities may fall on a limited group of people driven by money grabbing/get there fast/cheap mentality, or even a single person. No control as we have with nuclear technology, with consequences just as dire. He argues for responsible science. Just as there is a difference in responsible and secure code ( Linux/xBSD vs Microsoft). Its not a technology issie it is a people menatality issue, and is so much greatly illustrated by the quote given in the article from a book by Bertrand Russel: "I thought that people would not like the prospect of being fried with their families and their neighbors and every living person that they had heard of. I thought it would only be necessary to make the danger known and that, when this had been done, men of all parties would unite to restore previous safety. I found that this was a mistake. There is a motive which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow." This above is so true, and drives the market and human forces to get there fast, loosing a responsible approach in progress.
- Cells have been evolving against this possibility, however, the possibility has been evolving by the same mechanism. Lifeform immune systems are constrained in their ability to adapt by the evolutionary process. But so are viruses, so this isn't much of a problem. HOWEVER, nanotech works outside the evolutionary process. A nanotech virus developed in a lab could rise to a form such that no lifeform immune system has ever seen anything like it in a countable number of years, and from the perspective of "the wild" it would if released appear instantly. It might take lifeform immune systems thousands of years to adapt to the point where they could deal with this totally alien nanotech "thing". That might be in a worst-case scenario enough time for the nanotech to kill many of the lifeforms.
- Life is constrained to working with certain sorts of molecules; it needs carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc, because those are the elements it knows how to use as fundamental building blocks. It doesn't really need a whole lot of anything else. It needs certain amounts of certain metals and nutrients, but there's no lifeform on earth for whom it makes sense to just, for example, suck up as much iron as possible. A lifeform that attempts to go "gray goo" is mostly going to only be operating on the materials of life, and really is pretty much just going to be attacking lifeforms themselves (which, as you note, the world's current "gray goo" nanomachines-- i.e. infectious diseases-- have been doing). Nanotech doesn't have this constraint. It's possible to imagine, for example, some sort of self-replicating nanobots designed to mine iron ore, which isn't contained very well, gets picked up by the wind and carried to somewhere else, and starts ravaging the countryside.
I don't think these are serious enough concerns at the moment to give us any pause in nanotech research whatsoever, but they're nonzero. Interesting to think about, anyway.Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You guys, mod that up, i'm very, very interested to see what some of our psychologists and futurists in the crowd have to say about that. Living in a world where everyone has the power to destroy everyone...the implications are blowing my mind away right now. Mental illnesses would HAVE to be solved and understood. Anger management would become one of the most important human attributes overnight. Wow. My mind really is reeling thinking about this. Yow.
Let's have some thoughts folks!
Umm. Ok let's assume for a moment that you figure out how to instantly travel 1 second in time (forwards or backwards -- take your pick). Where will you end up?
First let's consider a few well-accepted values:
How fast is the Earth spinning? 0.5 km/sec
How fast is the Earth revolving around the Sun? 30 km/sec
How fast is the Solar System moving around the Milky Way Galaxy? 250 km/sec
How fast is our Milky Way Galaxy moving in the Local Group of galaxies? 300 km/sec
Alrighty then, now lets do some computations! You hop into your little time machine and set the dial to 1 second. *blink* You soon discover:
a) you are inside the Earth. You die instantly.
b) you are free-falling towards the Earth. You die upon impact.
c) you are somewhere in space; your lungs explode. You die instantly.
Choose your own adventure!
Agreed 100%, really. The main point of Joy's that does justify concern is the growing power of individual actors to commit acts of disproportionate destruction. The helplessness that many people felt (and still feel) after 9/11 is likely to become a very familiar feeling over the next century or two. After the Towers fell, one pundit said, "We are all Israelis now." Without taking a political side in the whole Israeli/Arab thing, I tend to agree.
That vulnerability is a natural consequence of an increasingly technological society, because, after all, the whole point of "technology" is leverage. Technology cannot benefit the individual without empowering the individual, for good or for ill.
Joy's suggestion that we return to a medieval guild system to limit the spread of hazardous technological ideas is as wacky as anything in the Unabomber Manifesto. He seems to be forgetting the basic fact that the guild system didn't last, thanks to (guess what?) the spread of technological know-how, driven by the individual political empowerment that accompanied the printing press. Any solution that relies on keeping secrets is just prima facie naive, and if Joy keeps making proposals along those lines, he's going to find it increasingly difficult to avoid that label.
Somehow, I don't think liability insurance is an adequate answer, either. Who's going to underwrite the risk that we'll turn our solar system into a black hole the next time we fire up the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider? Are we going to be in good hands with Allstate then?
We don't even know what the right questions are, much less the answers. Stopping the progress of science and civilization for an extended navel-gazing session doesn't sound very interesting, though. It would shift the custodianship of scientific power away from the scientists and towards the politicians, the philosophers, or, heaven forbid, the priests. Bad move for civilization, IMHO.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Time is an illusion employed by the consciousness in order to prevent having to deal with everything at once. Every instant in time is simply part of an already extant continuum. It's like a story in a book: the story is already there, but you haven't read the pages ahead yet. Some think this brings up the whole fate vs. free will debate, but actually it renders both points of view irrelevant as neither view "the future" as a static thing.
This is, of course, all just philosophy, suitable for discussion or spreading over the garden to promote growth.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Wikipedia is working again. BTW, does anyone know how to donate some equipment there, they are doing better job than almost all of the open source projects, they deserve it and they definitely need it.
Some people are seriously thinking of making 'backups' of civilization: "secure sanctuaries (think of the monasteries of the Middle Ages) that preserve and update copies of the vital records and articles needed for the conduct of our society". They would be placed all over Earth and eventually at locations in space. "In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth."
See Robert Shapiro and William E. Burrows