Discomfort And Joy - Bill Joy and vision of the future

Ecologist, The, Oct, 2000 by Zac Goldsmith

'One of the problems has been that industry has been able to profit enormously from consuming irreplaceable things, generating environmental problems, and without internalising the costs. At the moment, society, in other words the taxpayer, has to foot the bill when business messes up. In a sense, the fact that there is no requirement for business to take these things into account amounts to a massive indirect subsidy. These unpleasant consequences have to be internalised within the corporate economic model.'

A possible mechanism, he suggests, for ensuring corporations avoid taking unnecessary risks for quick profit is insurance. 'Companies should have to take catastrophic insurance when they are dealing with dangerous technologies. If the Canadian company which shipped over the GM seed had gone through that process and taken an insurance policy, they would have set up procedures to make sure that the stuff didn't get mixed in order to get a decent rate from the insurance company.'

INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF CAUTION

But Joy is talking about relatively short-term measures, which require full co-operation with the very businesses that are driving through the techno-revolution that he fears. In the long term, as he himself accepts, the process of technological change and the consequent risks need to be democratised. In any normal terms, and by any normal standards, a corporation should not be permitted to toy with fundamentals like genes, nanotechnology and the like without the full endorsement of those whose lives will be affected should anything misfire. 'If someone is doing biological, chemical, nuclear, genetic, robotic or nanotech weapons of mass destruction [for example], then that is of global interest. One thing is for sure -- we urgently need to set up a world regulatory body if only to protect us from ourselves.'

Joy likes the idea of international regulation of new technologies, and it features heavily in his thinking, such as it is, about tackling the problems of potential runaway technology. 'The situation in ancient Greece,' he says, 'was that the community was governed by people drawn by lot. Perhaps we could set up an international council on the same basis, continuously selecting new faces to avoid possible co-option. Obviously if it is business dominated and consequently biased, it won't accomplish the task.'

THE ROAD AHEAD

Perhaps, in the long-term, we could. But today in any case, most of the solutions presented are borderline lunatic -- abandoning planet earth for instance in search of further stars to 'develop'. And even marginally more serious proposals are far from convincing. First they rest on the assumption that there can be technical solutions to what are essentially systemic problems. Second, they assume that technocrats are willing and even able to provide protection, and third, they assume an understanding of the problem itself, which in many ways even Joy himself seems not to have grasped. Had he done so, he would surely accept that the economic path currently being pursued by most governments of the world today, coupled with an insatiable demand by an increasingly dissatisfied people for novelty, may well lead straight to the 'realistic outcome' that unnerves him. As Luis Alvarez, a leading physicist whom Joy cites in his Wired article, has said, those responsible for coming up with such techno-fixes, are 'very br ight guys with no common sense.