Technology and Humanity Reach A Crossroads

by Bill Joy, Founder and Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems

The twenty-first-century information sciences will allow us to communicate information and compute at unprecedented speeds. By 2029, for example, we should be able to build computers, in quantity, that are a million times more powerful than the personal computers of today.

The information-processing capabilities of these computers are coming together with the ability, provided by the physical sciences, for direct atomic-level manipulation. We can imagine dissecting, manipulating and designing with great mastery at levels that were previously unavailable to us:

• We are cataloguing our own genes. We should be able to manipulate them to prevent and cure many diseases and reduce human suffering.
  
  
• We are learning to construct materials at the atomic level. This "nanotechnology"' should allow us to greatly reduce the cost of goods. We will likely see massive cost reductions for physical goods in the next century, similar to the reduction we have seen in the cost of transistors in the last thirty years.
  
  
• We are studying intelligence and consciousness. We may well create, within the next century, artificial intelligences that exceed our own.

The confluence of the physical sciences and the information sciences allows us to, in a very fundamental way, reshape ourselves and our world. This provides us with great hope

For example, hope of eliminating disease and poverty while achieving a sustainable relationship with our world, with the kind of "natural capitalism"' described by Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken. But these new technologies also come with great challenges and grave dangers.

We struggled, for much of the twentieth century, with controlling our capacity for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The great advantage we had with these technologies was that they often required large-scale activities (for example, uranium processing) or very specialized knowledge and facilities that were not widely available.

In the twenty-first century, the new technologies of great power are much more likely to be small, portable, and capable of being used by small groups of individuals. This makes them inherently much more difficult to control and, therefore, more dangerous. Examples of the possible dangers of misuse of, and ethical challenges from, these technologies exist in our twentieth-century artistic imagination. We've read about runaway nanotechnology in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the ethical issues of robot behavior in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. We've seen runaway robotics in the Borg of Star Trek, seen vengeful and destructive use of genetic technology in Twelve Monkeys, and read about it in Frank Herbert's The White Plague. And the description of the dangers of these technologies stands side-by-side with the description of their potential in the nonfiction works of both their leading scientific proponents and critics, including K. Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Jeremy Rifkin.

Because these twenty-first-century technologies are so transformatively powerful, they force us to confront the issue of what we are to become. This happens at a time when our connection to the spiritual and the sacred is relatively weak, having been undermined by the battle between religion and science and, especially in the West, by our focus on materialism.

Cosmology suggests to us that intelligent life is probably rare. We notice that our species appeared on the earth in the rough middle of the planet's expected existence. If intelligent life were very common, it would most likely have appeared much sooner. Further, the cosmological "doomsday argument" originated by Brandon Carter and extensively studied by the philosopher John Leslie, while controversial, supports the suspicion that we live at a uniquely dangerous time.

Its probable rarity alone should make us treat intelligent life as something precious. We should treat ourselves and our planet well. We are about to pass through the century in which the confluence of the information and physical sciences will allow us to determine the fate of our species.

We must have the discussion about what we want to become. We must think for the long term in an age with an incredibly short-term focus. I do not believe that science can tell us what we should become. Science is providing possibilities but no useful limits. Our choices should come from our spiritual, artistic, and ethical values. Organizations like the Academy can help bring together a diverse group of people to discuss the shape of our future. I would look forward to participating in such a discussion.

©1999 by Bill Joy.

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