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:
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off will amount to suicide.
Now the surprise. This quotation was not written by Bill Joy but by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who killed three people and wounded many others during a seventeen-year campaign of terror. Bill remarked that during those years he felt that he could easily have been the Unabomber's next victim. All the same, Bill said, the Unabomber had a valid point. Even if we are glad he is behind bars, we had better listen to what he is saying.
Second quotation. This is Bill himself writing:
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
