*** From the Archives ***
This article is from March 26, 2001, and is no longer current.
Notes from the Epicenter: Where Is the Future Taking Us?
Bill Joy, the cofounder, CEO, and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, is also something of a futurist. But despite Joy’s cheerful name, there is little to hope for in his visions of the years (and inventions) to come. As technology advances ever more quickly and affects our daily lives ever more substantially, what does the future hold for us? Will the technology revolution be one of ultimate promise or strife?
Innovate at Your Own Peril
In a now infamous (and prolific) article in "Wired" magazine last year entitled "Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us", Joy warned that technologies now under development — specifically genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics, or GNR in his acronym-heavy parlance — have the potential to destroy humanity as we know it. The main problem with GNR technologies, according to Joy, is that they will have the potential to self-replicate in the imminent future, and anything that can self-replicate will do so at the expense of other species. Like humans.
As he explains in "Wired," he came to this conclusion after a conversation with Ray Kurzweil, the author of "Age of Spiritual Machines." Apparently Kurzweil (who quotes Ted Kaczynski in the service of making this point) believes that we will eventually fuse with robots, sort of like Star Trek’s Borg, and that it will happen so slowly (and as we are even more desensitized to technological breakthroughs than we are today) that we will hardly notice it.
How Fast Will It All Get?
Well, Kurzweil and Joy may be right. It’s true that things that seemed plucked from science fiction just a decade ago are now commonplace. And the pace of innovation is only quickening. Joy posits that Moore’s Law will be met or exceeded through at least 2030, and as the co-designer of the SPARC microprocessor, he’s in as good a position as anyone to know for sure.
But the thing is, we don’t know the future for sure (wasn’t it Bill Gates who said 640K ought to be enough for anyone?). In the "Wired" article, Joy presents a lengthy bio, mostly, it seems, to prove that he’s no Luddite. We knew that. He’s responsible for the BSD version of UNIX, one of the first examples of open source software; he brought us Java; and he’s got eleven patents to his name. He’s clearly been right about the past and present of technology. But that doesn’t mean he’s right about the future.
Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don’t
Indeed, most of his arguments rely on positing unlikely possibilities. In discussing the pitfalls of genetic engineering, he says: "Technologies such as human cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy." Sure, equality is the cornerstone of democracy in theory, but in practice aren’t we already a world of separate but unequal peoples? But regardless of his ethics, Joy’s vision of a Matrix-like future may be the one we end up with. That is, if we manage not to wipe ourselves out with plain old guns, disease, epidemics, or nuclear technology (the evolution of which Joy holds up as an example of the kind of technology-run-amok scenario we are likely to see with GNR innovations).
Plenty of Other Possibilities
Myself, I’m choosing to be a little more hopeful. After all, for every Borg collective bent on assimilation and every Matrix of deception set up by sentient cyborgs, there are characters like Robin Williams’s Bicentennial Man and Star Trek’s Data — benevolent androids who long to be more human.
In my favorite Star Trek episode, there is a trial to determine whether Data should be treated as a sentient life form, with the attendant civil rights. In the climax, Captain Picard gestures to Data, thundering "We are on a mission to search for new life. Well, there it sits!" Perhaps we should look at technology the same way.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.
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Mr. Joy is a classic example of the scienist screaming “Wolf!” in order to justify his creation. In the U.S. there are people livingÑby circumstance and not by choiceÑwithout electricity (outside of CA), running water or indoor plumbing (I don’t refer to the homeless). How are these people going to be effected by the technology Mr. Joy describes? Will they be assimilated? Technology is an issue of economics, not evolution. Those who can afford it, have it. Less Hollywood science fantasy and more science reality.
I have a friend in the peace corps who told me a corps statistic: 60% of the population of Earth has yet to make a phone call. People in the Ukrane have no money, and work on the barter system, use sickles and wagons circa 1820, and in many other places on earth, technology is even simpler.
This will never happen. you can go ahead and hope it will, but it won’t.
This article reminds me of the free issue of Whole Earth Journal I received about ten years ago. The theme of the article was “Is the Body Obsolete?” The question was posed to a number of different people in a number of different occupations.
The basic premise of the question had a lot to do with the fears and possibilities deriving from some of the very same research Andrea describes in the article (esp. nanotechnology). The basic answer to the question, by the majority of respondents, was “Bunk!”
My (highly uneducated) guess on the subject is that people will choose to use these technologies if they are available, affordable, and appropriate (much like the World Wide Web right now)…unless government or some other all-powerful entity of an unknown future makes that choice for us.