Joy: why the future doesn't need us
In Wired's April 2000 issue Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, published «Why the future doesn't need us». He argued that genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, unlike nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, can replicate themselves and lie within reach of individuals, and named relinquishment as the only realistic answer: limiting the development of technologies that are too dangerous.
Why it matters
A warning that until then had come from mathematicians and philosophers was set out in a mass-circulation magazine by one of the people who built computing itself, and addressed to developers. This is an editorial assessment. The article also shows the path of one idea: the scenario in which people gradually hand decisions to machines and can no longer turn them off came to Joy from Kurzweil's book, and to that book from the Unabomber's manifesto of 1995.
How the article begins. Joy writes that in the autumn of 1998, at the Telecosm conference, he met Ray Kurzweil and the philosopher John Searle in the hotel bar: Kurzweil said people would become robots or fuse with them, Searle countered that robots could not be conscious. Kurzweil gave Joy a partial preprint of The Age of Spiritual Machines, and what troubled Joy most was a passage quoted in it. Only on the next page of the book, Joy writes, does one learn that its author is Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The passage. It is paragraphs 172-174 of «Industrial Society and Its Future», a text of 232 paragraphs and about 35,000 words. Paragraph 172 supposes that computer scientists develop intelligent machines that do everything better than humans. Paragraph 173: if machines are permitted to decide for themselves, humanity may drift into such dependence on them that turning them off would amount to suicide, with neither people handing over power deliberately nor machines seizing it. Paragraph 174: if control stays with people, it rests with a small elite and the masses become superfluous. Paragraph 175, which Joy does not quote, takes the case in which artificial intelligence is not achieved. The publication of 1995. The text was sent to The Washington Post and The New York Times in June 1995 with the threat of another bomb unless it was printed; the Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recommended publication. It appeared on 19 September 1995 as an eight-page supplement in The Washington Post; the papers split the cost. Joy's footnote says the two papers published it jointly; by the Post's editor's note and CNN's report of that day it appeared in the Post alone. Joy calls Kaczynski's actions murderous, writes that one of his bombs gravely injured his friend, the computer scientist David Gelernter, and says he sees merit only in this single passage. Later in the article. Joy quotes Hans Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, writes that by 2030 it will probably be possible to build machines in quantity a million times as powerful as the personal computers of the day, and gives as an example of relinquishment the unilateral US abandonment of biological weapons development and the conventions of 1972 and 1993. What the record does not claim. The manifesto is not an event of its own here: in September 1995 it was read as a text against industrial society, and it was Kurzweil and Joy who took it up as an argument about machines. Kurzweil's book was not read, so the record gives neither its date nor its page. The sources read do not give the year of the bomb that injured Gelernter. A Google Books search of Bostrom's 2014 book finds no reference to Joy.