Why the future doesn't need us short essay

He has two children, Hayden and Maddie.

Who is bill joy what authority does he have to write on technology

Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS , and csh. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion. According to a Salon. According to John Gage ,. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, 'How did you do this?

Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events. On September 9 , Sun announced that Bill Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans". In Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired Magazine , " Why the future doesn't need us ", in which he declared, in what some have described as a " neo-Luddite " position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity.

He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future.

Why the future doesn't need us by bill joy

He advocates a position of relinquishment of GNR Genetics , Nanotechnology , and Robotics technologies, rather than going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey Goo "bad" nano-machines. A bar-room discussion of these technologies with inventor and Technological Singularity thinker Ray Kurzweil started to set his thinking along this path.

He states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of considerations of the contingencies. After bringing the subject up with a few more acquaintances, he states that he was further alarmed by what he felt was the fact that although many people considered these futures possible or probable, that very few of them shared as serious a concern for the dangers as he seemed to.