boggling. If it was intelligent, watch out! So many
possibilities to consider.
--- Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Why the future doesn't need us is an article by Bill
> Joy, Chief
> Scientist at Sun Microsystems. In this article, he
> argues (quoting
> the sub title) that "Our most powerful 21st-century
> technologies -
> robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are
> threatening to make
> humans an endangered species." The article was
> published in the April
> 2000 issue of Wired Magazine. Joy warns:
>
> "The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly
> show the need to
> take personal responsibility, the danger that things
> will move too
> fast, and the way in which a process can take on a
> life of its own.
> We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems
> in almost no time
> flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are
> not to be similarly
> surprised and shocked by the consequences of our
> inventions."
> The essay has been compared by The Times to Albert
> Einstein's 1939
> letter to then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
> warning him of the
> possibility of the Nazis inventing the atomic bomb.
>
> http://www.primitivism.com/future.htm
>
> Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
>
>
> Bill Joy
>
> From the moment I became involved in the creation
> of new
> technologies, their ethical dimensions have
> concerned me, but it was
> only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously
> aware of how great
> are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can
> date the onset
> of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the
> deservedly famous
> inventor of the first reading machine for the blind
> and many other
> amazing things.
>
> Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's
> Telecosm conference,
> and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the
> hotel after both
> our sessions were over. I was sitting with John
> Searle, a Berkeley
> philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were
> talking, Ray
> approached and a conversation began, the subject of
> which haunts me
> to this day.
>
> I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel
> that Ray and John
> had been on, and they now picked right up where
> they'd left off, with
> Ray saying that the rate of improvement of
> technology was going to
> accelerate and that we were going to become robots
> or fuse with
> robots or something like that, and John countering
> that this couldn't
> happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.
>
> While I had heard such talk before, I had always
> felt sentient robots
> were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from
> someone I
> respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they
> were a near-term
> possibility. I was taken aback, especially given
> Ray's proven ability
> to imagine and create the future. I already knew
> that new
> technologies like genetic engineering and
> nanotechnology were giving
> us the power to remake the world, but a realistic
> and imminent
> scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.
>
> It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We
> hear in the news
> almost every day of some kind of technological or
> scientific advance.
> Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel
> bar, Ray gave me a
> partial preprint of his then-forthcoming book The
> Age of Spiritual
> Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one
> in which humans
> gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic
> technology. On
> reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I
> felt sure he had
> to be understating the dangers, understating the
> probability of a bad
> outcome along this path.
>
> I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing
> a dystopian
> scenario:
>
>
> The New Luddite Challenge
> First let us postulate that the computer scientists
> succeed in
> developing intelligent machines that can do all
> things better than
> human beings can do them. In that case presumably
> all work will be
> done by vast, highly organized systems of machines
> and no human
> effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might
> occur. The
> machines might be permitted to make all of their own
> decisions
> without human oversight, or else human control over
> the machines
> might be retained.
>
> If the machines are permitted to make all their own
> decisions, we
> can't make any conjectures as to the results,
> because it is
> impossible to guess how such machines might behave.
> We only point out
> that the fate of the human race would be at the
> mercy of the
> machines. It might be argued that the human race
> would never be
> foolish enough to hand over all the power to the
> machines. But we are
> suggesting neither that the human race would
> voluntarily turn power
> over to the machines nor that the machines would
> willfully seize
> power. What we do suggest is that the human race
> might easily permit
> itself to drift into a position of such dependence
> on the machines
> that it would have no practical choice but to accept
> all of the
> machines' decisions. 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 would amount to
> suicide.
>
> On the other hand it is possible that human control
> over the machines
> may be retained. In that case the average man may
> have control over
> certain private machines of his own, such as his car
> or his personal
> computer, but control over large systems of machines
> will be in the
> hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but
> with two
> differences. Due to improved techniques the elite
> will have greater
> control over the masses; and because human work will
> no longer be
> necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless
> burden on the
> system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply
> decide to
> exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane
> they may use
> propaganda or other psychological or biological
> techniques to reduce
> the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes
> extinct, leaving
> the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of
> soft-hearted
> liberals, they may decide to play the role of good
> shepherds
=== message truncated ===
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