Joy, to the World.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia

A techno-celebrity's childish manifesto

Since its earliest days, Wired magazine has always had a genius for publicity. It lost its edge somewhat when Cond[acute{e}] Nast took over two years ago and the new crew replaced Wired's Bay Area techno-exuberance with the New York publishing formulas that eschew ideas in favor of celebrities.

But the hype machine came roaring back with the April cover story--a long, long, long think piece by the hip software genius Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. (The article can be read at www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/ joy.html.) Joy was the key designer of Berkeley Unix and the man behind Sun's Java and Jini. He is a techno-celebrity of the first order.

But he's not a geeky geek. With his stylish all-black outfits and narrow eyeglass frames, Joy looks more Hollywood than Silicon Valley. (He actually lives in Aspen.) And he's as earnest and elitist as a Harvard professor. In short, he's the perfect authority to book on TV. And he had the perfect message: Technological research must be stopped.

Specifically, 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.

"The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined or refined, and they can be freely copied," he writes. "Once they are out, they are out." So we'd better keep them safely unknown.

Joy's article starts with the idea that highly intelligent robots might supercede human beings. This could happen because a) the robots are so great we become dependent on them and essentially bore ourselves to death (a scenario Joy snagged from the Unabomber manifesto) or b) the robots outcompete us for economic resources, so that we can't afford enough food, water, land, energy, etc., to survive, just as placental mammals wiped out competing marsupials in the Americas (an idea from robotics researcher Hans Moravec).

There's also the possibility, outlined by Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines, that we might gradually merge with our machines, enhancing our intelligence or downloading our consciousness, and thus change the nature of humanity. Kurzweil and his book inspired Joy's nightmares, but Joy doesn't really explore Kurzweil's scenario.

Instead, he moves quickly to a nearer-term...