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21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 32 Results
Within every tech company's name there lurks a hilarious acronym.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[04/08/00]

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[04/06/00]

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[04/05/00]

Break up? Make up? Appeal?
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Salon Technology staff report
[04/04/00]

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Joy, who was the principal designer of the Berkeley version of Unix and one of the lead developers of Java, last made a big splash in the press in 1998, when he was all pumped up about Sun's new networking technology Jini. Having spent most of his life working on ways to make computer networks work better, he was preaching the gospel of a technology that Sun said would enable truly user-friendly, plug 'n' play computing.

But these days Joy is engaged in an altogether different kind of crusade: He wants us to slow down the technological race, and rein in technologies -- specifically nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics -- that he believes could ultimately endanger human life as we know it. Joy spelled out in a recent issue of Wired magazine his fear that modern technologists may unthinkingly be heading down the same path as the physicists who built the atomic bomb.

At a recent Stanford University forum entitled "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?" he squared off against optimists, including computer scientist Hans Moravec, who argued that the future's technological organisms -- even if they wipe out humanity -- represent a higher form of evolution that we should be proud to usher in. In the midst of such claims, Joy's call for limiting or regulating research in nanotech, genetic engineering and robotics, played well to the crowd of about 1,000 who fought for space in the auditorium, but his fellow scientists remained unconvinced. That's not stopping Joy, however, who is determined to get people to listen and take action.

Celera Genomics announced last week that it has finished sequencing the human genome, moving the debate about genetic engineering one step further from abstraction toward reality. Given your views on the potential dangers of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, how do you think this new discovery and others should be controlled?

We have to do something. Because otherwise -- within 20 or 30 years, probably sooner -- if we give everybody personal computers that are a million times as powerful, they'll have the ability to manufacture whatever they can design. We'll have an untenable situation, because crazy people can design new diseases and build them on their own computers. Somebody has to take responsibility for that and figure out a way to not let that happen.

I mean, the people doing genetic engineering are doing really good stuff. It's just that I don't believe they've dealt with the confluence of their field and Moore's Law. If the tools they had were just like the ones they always had, it wouldn't be a problem. But look at Celera, finishing the sequence. How long was it supposed to take? I haven't been keeping track, but they got it done ahead of schedule. And yet, I still don't see that we have adequate mechanisms or the psychological desire to put any restrictions in place.

Then how do you remedy that situation, with genetics and the other technologies? How do you set up a system that keeps companies like Celera in check?

I'm not worried about the commercial companies. Some people could worry that companies could do something bad. But I just don't want to get to the point where crazy people can do it. In the nuclear age we had two organizations with unlimited power, the Soviet government and the U.S. government. Others have nuclear weapons, but not at the level to destroy civilizations.

We may have many companies that have the technology in their labs to do very disastrous things. That's probably difficult to manage, but it's not inconceivable. But every person in the world? That's inconceivable. We can't ethically go there. That's not acceptable. We can't let ourselves get to that situation. There's this great quote from Woody Allen: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads: One path leads to despair and hopelessness, and the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

So in some sense people despair of having to go down a path where they would limit anything, and they feel hopeless to change it -- that's one of Woody's two paths. On the other hand, going out and giving everybody all the information, then letting any crazy person destroy things, is completely and morally unacceptable. But we have a choice, and this is a real choice. We don't face these very often.

Should we put Microsoft ... I mean, Microsoft? They're a bunch of people that don't have much personal ethics, and they break the law all the time, so we kind of futz around. We do this to them or we do that -- but it's not like society's going to crumble. Certainly if we continually fail to enforce the laws of reasonable conduct, our code of ethics in business will decline to the long-term detriment of our society, but the whole thing isn't going to collapse because we failed to enforce the clear law in this case.

But something like this seems much harder. We're talking about real consequences here. We're not talking winners and losers. In my mind, everyone's a loser on this path.

Next page | Nanotechnology -- it could be worse than nuclear war