Bill Joy, One of the Digital World's Leading Architects, Examines the Dangers of 21st Century Technologies in April's Wired Magazine.

Business Editors/Technology Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2000

In An Exclusive Article, Joy Candidly Asks,

"Are Future Technologies A Threat To Our Existence?"

One of the digital world's leading architects contends, in the April, 2000, issue of WIRED, that the new 21st-century technologies present us with dangers at least as ferocious as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, if not more so.

In a remarkably candid and surprising piece, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us," Bill Joy, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, argues that "the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction" is the responsibility of the men and women (including himself) who are shaping these new technologies -- and that they had better get to it quickly.

In the 20th century, Joy points out, "building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare -- indeed, effectively unavailable -- raw materials and highly protected information." But "the 21st-century technologies -- genetics, nanotechnology and robotics -- are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare, raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them." Key to their destructive capability, in Joy's view, is the ability of these new technologies to replicate themselves, without human help.

Joy writes that he had always relegated concepts such as rogue cyborgs and white plagues to the realm of science fiction, but recent developments, both practical and theoretical, led him to realize that similarly nightmarish scenarios are a growing and near-term reality. With his lifelong love of science and his opposition to Luddite thinking, he was horrified to see some merit in the writings of the "Unabomber," Theodore Kaczynski. Though Joy unequivocally condemns Kaczynski's murderous and violent actions -- and, indeed, was fearful at one point that the Unabomber might make him a target -- he notes that "Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology."

"By 2030," he writes, "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 those who imagine a world of robot servants, unlimited resources, and silicon-enhanced, two-hundred-year lifespans. But given the human race's poor track-record with creating safe, reliable technology, Joy thinks that the potential positive applications of these sciences are outweighed by the dangers: that robots could replace us as a species or that the planet could find itself drowning in a self-replicating "gray goo." He compares the hubris with which we are racing into the technological future to the arrogance and short-sightedness of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.

"The failsafe point" is rapidly approaching, in Joy's view; "the breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal." Using the struggle to limit nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as his inspiration, Joy concludes his article by proposing that we stop to consider where our technological progress is now leading before we reach the point where we enable our own extinction. "The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge," Joy writes. He recognizes that he may be accused of attempting to stifle scientific and technological progress, and that the difficulties of limiting commercial technologies are more profound, in some ways, than those of limiting military ones. Nonetheless, he argues, "the experiences of atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own."

Joy says he never felt, when he worked on UNIX, or Java, or Jini, that he was "designing an intelligent machine," but with the recent acceleration of scientific progress "a new idea suggests itself, that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species." "I have always believed," Joy writes, "that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day might come."

ABOUT BILL JOY

Bill Joy is the Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, which he helped found in 1982. Mr. Joy spearheaded Sun's open systems philosophy. Before starting Sun, Mr. Joy was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX, which became the standard in education and research nationwide. He received the ACM Grace Hopper Murray Award for his work on UNIX. Mr. Joy was also a key designer of the JAVA programming language. Recently, he developed the JINI project at Sun's Research and Development lab in Aspen, Colorado. In 1999, Mr. Joy received the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.