www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/03/13/MN108057.DTL
Joy was an original co-chairman of a presidential commission on the future of information technology. His warning, he said in a telephone interview, is meant to be reminiscent of Albert Einstein's famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility of an atomic bomb. In a 24-page article in the Wired magazine that will appear on the Web tomorrow, Joy says he finds himself essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski -- that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place,'' Joy wrote in the article, which he worked on for six months. If I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. Nobody is more phlegmatic than Bill,'' said Stewart Brand, an Internet pioneer. He views as credible the prediction that by 2030, computers will be a million times more powerful than they are today. He respects the possibility that robots may exceed humans in intelligence, while being able to replicate themselves. INEXPENSIVE SMART MACHINES He points to nanotechnology -- the emerging science that attempts to create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis -- and agrees that it has the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart machines so small they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic technology, meanwhile, is inexorably generating the power to create new forms of life that could reproduce. What deeply worries him is that these technologies collectively create the ability to unleash self-replicating, mutating, mechanical or biological plagues. These would be a replication attack in the physical world'' comparable to the replication attack in the virtual world that recently caused the shutdowns of major commercial Web sites. If you can let something loose that can make more copies of itself,'' Joy said in a telephone interview, it is very difficult to recall. It is as easy as eradicating all the mosquitoes: They are everywhere and make more of themselves. That creates the possibility of empowering individuals for extreme evil. It is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change,'' Joy wrote. By contrast, he says, these new technologies are not hard to come by. When asked how he personally would stop this progression, he stumbled. Sun has always struggled with being an ethical innovator,'' he said.
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