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Freeman Dyson is the British mathematical physicist who famously drove cross-country from New York to California with Richard Feynman in the late 1950's and helped him work out the mathematics enabling him to formalize the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, for which Feynman shared the Nobel Prize with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger in 1965.
Freeman Dyson in 2005, by Wikipedia
This article is in two parts. To read the first part, click here. Both parts are based on Dyson's most recent popular book, A Many-Colored Glass. And both parts quote extensively from the book, published by the University of Virginia Press, copyright 2007. The title of the book is taken from two lines in the poem "Adonais" by Percy Bysshe Shelly:
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
The subject of the book, broadly, is conveyed by its subtitle: "Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe."
The second Chapter of the book is titled, "A Debate with Bill Joy," and except for some very small ("nano") changes, it follows in its entirety.
"Invitation to the Magic Mountain
Biotechnology is likely to be the main driving force of change in human affairs for the next hundred years. I am an unashamed optimist, and I see the promise of good arising from biotechnology greatly outweighing the dangers of evil. But I am well aware that everyone does not agree with me about this. I try to keep the discussion balanced, with the pessimists having their say. The subject of this chapter is a debate between Bill Joy and me. Bill Joy is a thoughtful entrepreneur who made a fortune in the computer industry and is now arguing that people like himself are too dangerous to be allowed. He makes a strong case for restraint of new technologies, and I try to refute him. Whether you agree with him or with me, I hope you will find our debate illuminating.
In 2001, I was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Most of the people there are captains of industry, presidents of foundations, or government officials. But in 2001 they decided to invite a few scientists and writers and artists to give the meeting a bit of an intellectual tone, and I was one of the lucky ones. I was particularly lucky to be invited in 2001 and not 2002, because the 2002 meeting was held in New York, and Davos is much more fun than New York. Davos is the Magic Mountain that Thomas Mann wrote about in his famous novel. In the novel, the characters are patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium, who sit up there on the mountain and talk about the state of their souls. That happened almost a hundred years ago, before the First World War. The joke is that almost nothing has changed. The sanatorium is still there, and my wife's nephew works there happily as a physician. He can go skiing every day after he is done with the patients. The patients are still there. They still talk about the state of their souls. The only thing that has changed is the disease. The fashionable disease for patients who can afford to stay at the sanatorium is not tuberculosis but asthma. Asthma has the advantage of being incurable, so the patients keep coming back.
For the week of the meeting, Davos is full of celebrities. It is a name-dropper's paradise. At lunch we talked with Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly. At dinner we talked with Reinhold Messner, the man who climbed Everest solo without oxygen and is now a member of the European Parliament. We did not talk with Bill Gates or Yasir Arafat or President Mbeki of South Africa, but we saw them and heard them speak.The entertainment that I was asked to provide was a public debate with Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, a large and successful computer company, on the question, Is our technology out of control? Bill was taking an extreme position on the yes side, and I was invited to take an extreme position on the no side, to make the debate interesting. Luckily I have reliable documentation of the debate to supplement my unreliable memory.
In addition to our debate, there was another debate at Davos, on the subject of genetically modified (GM) food that raised many of the same issues. I was a listener and not a speaker at the GM food debate, and I found it very illuminating. It was a debate between Europe and Africa. The Europeans oppose GM food with religious zeal. They say it is destroying the balance of nature, with unacceptable risks to human health and natural ecology. They talked a great deal about the rule called the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle says that if some course of action carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then you shouldn't do it, no matter how great the possible advantages of the action may be. You are not allowed to balance costs against benefits when deciding what to do. The Precautionary Principle gives the Europeans a firm philosophical basis for saying no to GM food.
In response, the Africans said that the Precautionary Principle can just as easily be used as a philosophical basis for saying yes. The growing population and general impoverishment of Africa are already causing irreparable damage to the ecology, and saying no to GM food will only make the irreparable damage worse. The European pretense of allowing no risk of irreparable damage makes no sense in the real world. In the real world there are risks of irreparable damage no matter what you do. There is no escape from balancing one risk against another. The Africans need GM crops to survive. In most of Africa, soils are poor, droughts are devastating, and many crops are lost to disease and pests. GM crops can make the difference between starvation and surviving for subsistence farmers, between prosperity and ruin for cash farmers. Africans need to sell products to Europe. The European ban on GM food protects European farmers and hurts the Africans. As the Africans see it, the European ban on GM food is motivated more by economic advantage than by philosophical purity.
Bill Joy Speaks
The day after the GM food debate, I had my debate with Bill Joy. Bill spoke first, following the line he had taken in an article he published in Wired magazine in April, 2000, with the title 'Why The Future Doesn't Need Us.' By 'us' he means people who develop and sell new technology. Since I do not remember his spoken words precisely, I quote passages from his writings which contain the gist of his argument. Here are some quotations from the Wired article:
First quotation:
