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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."
No boogedy-boogedy NYT registatrion required
here.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
"Another interesting tidbit : he has flirted with the idea of going to work for Google."
Really now, who these days hasn't thought about that? :D
Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server
Oh well never mind instead click here for a google cache of Bill's page on wikipedia
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!
Unfortunately Google did not share my same fantasy.
Even if time travel is acheived in 3000 years, it could be seen "in your lifetime."
i had to refresh almost 20 times to get that ad, but it was worth it.
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.
In fact, if time travel is ever to be achieved, it becomes a relevant question to ask why we don't see time travelers now.
One answer is, of course, that time travel isn't possible, which neatly explains why we see no travelers.
Another answer lands you in the middle of a subgroup of UFO enthusiasts. We do see the travelers; we just don't realize what they are.
Other answers allow you to generate your own SF story.
There you go, time travel to the future. Haven't you had your wisdom teeth pulled?
-I am an elective eunuch.
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
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
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.
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.
Oh how fun it'd be if he worked for google. Type in "Recipe for pasta salad" and you'd get 5 thousand pop ups going "THE WORLD IS GOING TO END! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!"
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
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.
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.
If it is going to be something like vi I would have no problems at all
Thanks Mr.Joy for the joy called vi
The ad:_ 728x9 0.jpg
http://spe.atdmt.com/b/AANYCVCSTVST/SAS04_P2
- 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!
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
Gotta get me one of these!
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 is the lesser known sibling of Kill Joy. You never hear people say, "you're such a bill joy."
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.
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).
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.
I'm not sure how much you know about such things, but here are two quick notes for you: a) The closer you re traveling at the speed of light, the slower time moves, this has been proven and b) iirc if you could take Jupiter's mass and crush it into a hollow sphere 8 feet in diameter( might be radius) and you sat in the sphere, the rest of the world would age significantly faster then you ( time would actually be moving much slower for you).
Well, I'm not sure how much I know about these things but in response to your examples:
a) Sure time is slowing down, but you are still traveling forward in time. Just as you are now, but slower.
b) Correct me if I'm wrong but if you sat on the mass of Jupiter compressed to 8 feet in diameter, your atoms would simply become a part of that little sphere. And if you could survive, once again you are still moving forward in time, just slower.
I have read many books on time travel, both pro and con. The pro side hasn't convinced me yet. Until actual proof is presented to me I'll keep it in the same category as UFO's and the Loch Ness Monster.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
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:
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.
I'm not. You think the tourists are annoying now? Just wait...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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