Social Implications of the New Technologies

Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems)

The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - 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.

- Bill Joy, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired Magazine, April 8, 2000, p. 23.

Fellow Bill Joy's (Sun Microsystems) article in Wired this spring expanded on a topic he addressed at his 1999 induction into the Academy: how to respond to the risks and benefits of rapid innovation in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. With his help, the Academy convened three meetings during the spring and summer of 2000 to reflect on the Social Implications of the New Technologies. More than thirty Fellows and other scholars -- specialists in molecular biology, computational and information sciences, business, and the humanities -- participated in the discussion of how society can best evaluate the risks and benefits of revolutionary advances in these 21st-century technologies.

In his address to the Academy, Joy spoke as a representative of the newly inducted members in the mathematical and physical sciences (Class I). He warned that the development of powerful computers, a million times more powerful than today's personal computers, coupled with the technology to catalogue human genes and to construct material at the atomic level, will allow us to determine the fate of our species. "Science is providing possibilities but no useful limits," Joy said, so "our choices should come from spiritual, artistic, and ethical values."

Several participants in the Academy seminars questioned Joy's assertion that current risks were greater than those associated with earlier technologies such as nuclear arms and genetic engineering. They felt that the Academy should also address growing public misinformation about the benefits of the new technologies and reflected on what lessons for the future could be drawn from previous efforts to grapple with the consequences of technological advances. A volume to explore risks and benefits from an ethical, historical, and technological perspective is now being planned.

For more information, contact CISS Director Martin Malin at 617-576-5002.

Back to the November 2000 Newsletter