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- A creator of the Information Age has turned prophet of
doom with a warning that humanity could be extinct within two generations.
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- Bill Joy, the American co-founder and chief scientist
of the software maker Sun Microsystems, says: "The 21st century technologies
- genetics, nanotechnology and robotics - are so powerful that they can
spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.
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- "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."
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- In a 20,000-word article in Wired magazine, Mr Joy says
that the menace comes from imminent advances in three fields of technology:
genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics. "We have yet to
come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st century technologies
pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before,"
he writes.
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- "Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and
nanobots [microscopic robots] share a dangerous amplifying factor: they
can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become
many, and quickly get out of control."
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- One of Mr Joy's fears is genetically engineered viruses
against which people have no defence. Another is nanotechnology, which
enables scientists to use individual molecules as circuit elements. It
could create smart machines small enough to fit inside a blood vessel and
able to reproduce themselves like computer viruses, he says.
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- In robotics, a generation of superintelligent machines
could make humans superfluous. "Once an intelligent robot exists,
it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that
can make evolved copies of itself.
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- "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."
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- His article, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, is being
compared to Einstein's 1939 letter to President Roosevelt alerting him
to the possibility of a nuclear bomb.
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- A former co-chairman of a presidential commission on
the future of technology and one of the original designers of the Unix
operating system, Mr Joy insists that he is "no Luddite". But
he agrees with key sections of the rambling manifesto written by the anti-technology
terrorist known as the Unabomber, now in jail.
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- "I am no apologist for Theodore Kaczynski,"
Mr Joy writes - one of his scientist friends was seriously injured by the
reclusive former mathematician during his 17-year bombing campaign. "Kaczynski's
actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly
a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument."
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- Mr Joy foresees a "rerun" of the nuclear arms
race, but this time, unlike the original Manhattan Project that developed
the atom bomb, it will be driven "by our habits, our desires, our
economic system, and our competitive need to know".
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- A Berkeley graduate, he moved out of California's Silicon
Valley a decade ago to establish a small laboratory in Aspen, Colorado.
But he has continued to be involved in the development of such powerful
software as the Java programming language and Jini, a system for linking
household appliances and other devices over the Internet.
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- "I have always believed that making software more
reliable will make the world a safer and better place," he writes.
"If I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally
obligated to stop this work.
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- "I can now imagine that such a day may come."
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