Not a new scenario. Just read the Greeks. But we have killed
our eyes and ears by shutting down the memory that the great
works of art teach us. Reduced to a profession for the purpose
of "making" a living, a job, we have lost our souls. That is the
root of the evil. Some will say, REH's at it again. And I am,
these people are by and large Americans who have overcome their
fear of security with huge salaries and now worry about losing it.
None of them have the courage to do much more than whine.
Religion has failed, science is a gun but the soul comes from
true sight, connection through love, an intelligent heart and knowing
the great gifts of the past well enough to project forward to the
seventh generation. The only thing I can see that Europe has
given us is their great art, otherwise its genocide and funeral
industries.
REH
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" wrote:
> This may be a straw in the wind, a growing reaction/questioning of just what
> is being created.....
>
> ----------
> From: Sid Shniad
> Subject: New technologies threaten human extinction - Web entrepreneur
> (Vancouver Sun)
> Date: Monday, March 13, 2000 2:04PM
>
> THE VANCOUVER SUN MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2000
>
> WEB ENTREPRENEUR OFFERS GRIM VIEW OF HUMANITY+S EXTINCTION
>
> Sun Microsystem's top scientist writes in a
> provocative new article that technological advances
> could eventually threaten our existence.
>
> By Joel Garreau, Washington Post
>
> A respected creator of the Information Age has written an
> extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in which
> he suggests that new technologies could cause -something like
> extinction- for humankind within the next two generations.
>
> The alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking
> because it comes not from a critic of technology, but rather from a
> man who invented much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and
> co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., the leading Web technology
> manufacturer.
>
> Joy was an original co-chairman of a presidential commission
> on the future of information technology. His warning, he said in a
> telephone interview, is meant to be reminiscent of Albert Einstein's
> famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting
> him to the possibility of an atomic bomb.
>
> In a 24-page article in Wired magazine that will appear on the
> Web Tuesday, Joy says he finds himself essentially agreeing, to his
> horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore
> Kaczynski+that advanced technology poses a threat to the human
> species. -I have always believed that making software more reliable,
> given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place,-
> Joy wrote in the article, which he worked on for six months. -If I
> were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally
> obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine that such a day may
> come.-
>
> Joy enjoys a level-headed reputation in the industry. -Nobody is
> more phlegmatic than Bill,- said Stewart Brand, an Internet
> pioneer. -He is the adult in the room.-
>
> Joy is disturbed by a suite of advances. He views as credible the
> prediction that by 2030, computers will be a million times more
> powerful than they are today. He respects the possibility that robots
> may exceed humans in intelligence, while being able to replicate
> themselves.
>
> He points to nanotechnology +the emerging science that seeks
> to create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis +and agrees
> that it has the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart
> machines so small they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic
> technology, meanwhile, is inexorably generating the power to
> create new forms of life that could reproduce.
>
> What deeply worries him is that these technologies collectively
> create the ability to unleash self-replicating, mutating, mechanical or
> biological plagues. These would be -a replication attack in the
> physical world- comparable to the replication attack in the virtual
> world that recently caused the shutdowns of major commercial
> Web sites.
>
> -If you can let something loose that can make more copies of
> itself,- Joy said in a telephone interview, -it is very difficult to
> recall. It is as easy as eradicating all the mosquitoes: They are
> everywhere and make more of themselves. If attacked, they mutate
> and become immune.... That creates the possibility of empowering
> individuals for extreme evil. If we don't do anything, the risk is very
> high of one crazy person doing something very bad.-
>
> What further concerns him is the huge profits from any single
> advance that may seem beneficial in itself. -It is always hard to see
> the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change,- Joy
> wrote. -We have long been driven by the overarching desire to
> know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice
> that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can
> take on a life of its own.-
>
> Finally, he argues, this threat to humanity is much greater than
> that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build. By
> contrast, he says, these new technologies are not hard to come by.
> Therefore, he reasons, the problem will not be -rogue states, but
> rogue individuals.-
>
> Joy acknowledges that to some people, this may all sound like
> science fiction. 'After Y2K didn't happen,- he said, -some people
> will feel free to dismiss this, saying everything will work out.-
>
> Joy is less clear on how such a scenario could be prevented.
> When asked how he personally would stop this progression, he
> stumbled. -Sun has always struggled with being an ethical
> innovator,- he said. -We are tool builders. I'm trailing off here.-
>
> =======================================
