Discomfort And Joy - Bill Joy and vision of the future

Ecologist, The, Oct, 2000 by Zac Goldsmith

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, is one of the world's leading computer gurus. But now he is warning that, if the pace of technological change is not slowed, we could be inventing the species that will replace us. Is he a prophet or a madman?

What do you get if you cross Bill Gates with Theodore Kaczynski, the man better known as the Unabomber? A maniac technophobe willing to kill to save us all? A reclusive computer nerd with nothing interesting to say? System error type 201?

Surprisingly, there is someone who represents the hypothetical love child of these apparently polar extremes -- but let's explore the 'parents' first.

Consider for example a few lines from Gates's book, The Road Ahead: 'I used to date a woman who lived in a different city. We spent a lot of time together on email. And we figured out a way we could sort of go to the movies together. We would find a film that was playing about the same time in both our cities. We would drive to our respective theatres, chatting on our cellular phones. We would watch the movie and on the way home we would use our cellular phones again to discuss the show. In the future this sort of virtual dating will be better because the movie watching will be combined with videoconference.' (I can't help but imagine how Gates might have ended his virtual evening.)

This simplistic techno-enthusiasm could not be further removed from the apocalyptic prophecies of Kaczynski, the man whose terror of technology led him to send home-made bombs to computer scientists and university professors, some of whom he killed, others of whom he maimed for life. 'If trends continue' he wrote in the public manifesto which ultimately led to his capture, 'and scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them, the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turn ing them off would amount to suicide. The fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.'

Maybe Gates's vision of the future seems more likely to you than Kaczynski's. But then, you may not have spent the majority of your adult life studying technological matters. Bill joy has, and he is beginning to wonder.

Bill Joy's credentials as one of the world's leading computer gurus are impeccable. Chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, one of America's leading computer firms, he was appointed three years ago as co-chairman of Clinton's Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee, set up to provide 'guidance and advice on all areas of high-performance computing; to accelerate development and adoption of information technologies that will be vital for American prosperity in the twenty-first century'. In other words, Bill Joy sits at the top of the American technological pecking order, and as such is partly responsible for major social experiment that is technotopia.

But then, last year, Joy changed his tune. He published a lengthy article in the technophile's bible, Wired magazine, in which he warned, in almost apocalyptic tones, of the dangers of going too far with computer technology. 'Its potential to destroy humanity,' he wrote -- 'even to supplant us as the planet's dominant species -- is far greater than that of nuclear weapons; yet we are blindly moving towards a world in which such a possibility becomes a reality.'

Kaczynski said much the same; but he was an eccentric, a loner and a killer, and no one wanted to listen. Joy, though, one of America's technological royal family, is another matter. Bill Joy is our Gates-Kaczynski hybrid, and his vision of the future is worth listening to, because he knows, better than almost anyone else, exactly what he is talking about.

TECHNOTOPIA

Talking to him now, he says that his principal fear is nanotechnology. 'The ability,' he explained to me, when I confessed ignorance, 'to manipulate structures at the atomic scale. The ultimate dream is to be able to build any structure you can design by assembling it atom by atom. This is not yet possible, but the field is advancing rapidly.'

'I think it is no exaggeration to say,' he wrote in Wired, 'that we are on the cusp of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today -- sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil.' Kurzweil is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, which details a utopian future in which humans achieve near-immortality by becoming one with robotic technology.