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conflux

MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to �knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.� His medicine: �relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.� I don�t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we�ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we�ll follow our feelings, or we�ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we�ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let�s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried�20,000 words and five months of writing worried�that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I�ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people�s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If�then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here�s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous�then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

redux [03.12.00]
Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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