Stop Everything ... It's Techno-Horror!
Gilder, George & Vigilante, Richard
Stop everything... IT'S TECHNO-HORROR! From Silicon Valley via Aspen, Bill Joy wants to call the police. On science. On technology. On the industry that made him rich. The Left is Overjoyed. BY...
...What have the Arabs, the richest people in the world, done with their "refugees" in more than 50 years...
...Monopolist, you idiot...
...It is the bias toward collective benefit on the part of millions that accounts for the success of the race in overcoming all the previous crises it 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 has encountered and the crises that Joy rightly deems possible in the future...
...And then there is the gray goo...
...They have never contributed a penny to their maintenance...
...Under the influence of such alliances, Joy's concerns careen off to embrace the entire litany of environmental cata-strophism, from global warming to Faustian biofoods, that animates the anti-capitalist media...
...Its author is coming to a screen near you...
...Remarkably enough, Joy hangs out in Aspen, Colorado, 1,500 miles from the nearest major Sun facility...
...Comprising many hundreds of layers of elaborately deposited and etched materials in amounts and patterns of exquisite precision, the microchip is necessarily a top-down design...
...The ideas that guide its architects are its essence.This is precisely the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 47 opposite of the evolutionary notion that well-ordered, functioning organisms arise spontaneously as a function of interactions of the underlying material substrates...
...and enabled victory in the Cold War...
...Box 590359 ¦ San Francisco,CA 94159 FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501(c)(3) organization...
...As a result, the ecosystem is neither fragile nor stable...
...We will best meet the coming menace of demonic technology by opening it up to contributions from smart people everywhere rather than by relegating it to a small elite of government experts...
...But like logicians meeting the Cretan who declares all Cretans liars, few observers are inclined to take Joy's Law seriously at Sun Microsystems, where everyone knows that Joy is the worlds most ingenious engineer, most incandescent talker, and architect of some of the most significant technologies of the Internet...
...tions and created some of this doomsday gel...
...The domain of chance is our access to futurity and to providence...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 Joy, whose decades of unfettered research and entrepreneurship have made him what he is today, has fingered the real culprits: capitalism and freedom...
...About to publish a book entitled The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil had argued that computers exceeding human intelligence were no more than a few decades away...
...It is Joy's policy that is the threat...
...Joy published his alarm in the April 2000 issue of Wired as an eloquent and stirring ten-thousand word personal testament that evoked more mail and comment than any previous article in the magazine (or in any other magazine in recent memory...
...Opposition to these foods is almost totally devoid of empirical scientific grounding...
...nuclear and missile industries bogged down in bureaucracy and could not even keep pace with the Soviet Union...
...We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies...
...So Joy escaped the multibil-lionaire status of his Sun cofounders such as Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla...
...And "once an intelligent robot exists it is only a small step to a robot species—to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself...
...From Joy's Aspen office I gaze at the silvery vista of mountains, skies, and skiers that has attracted some of the world's richest and most illustrious hedonists to this once humble mining town in a remote valley of Colorado...
...You guessed it: Through UNWRA Relief, the United States contributes more than 60% of the total cost...
...If we try to battle all these threats at once, and non-threats like global warming and PCBs as well, we will end up wasting all our wealth on windmills, strewing them across the California environment, or tilting with them like Don Quixote...
...Last summer at Brookhaven National Labs, a similar panicky pother, also respectfully vented in Science, erupted over another projection of faulty physics...
...All those Berkeley brains and dissidents who did not come to work for Sun...
...But now he felt obliged to consider that he might be "working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species...
...is increasingly based on it...
...I am firmly on the side of nature...
...Bill's not stupid...
...But they say Reno and the feds will string him up...
...Joy has...
...Fortunately he has the answer, which he delicately phrases as "relinquishment" of key GNR technologies...
...Relinquishment—for the hard of hearing—means what it seems to mean: to give up...
...In the real world, Darwinian evolution is made plausible by the interaction of nearly infinite possibilities over nearly infinite time, entailing physical, chemical, and biological processes still little understood and vastly more challenging than anything in a nanotechie's computer model...
...abandon not only the use of such technologies but even the basic research that might enable them "to limit the development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain types of knowledge...
...resources, large nuclear plants, and huge laboratories to launch a new holocaust...
...In the past, "he" could mean only Bill Gates...
...No end is in sight...
...The Buddhist leader taught him the futility of wealth and the need for a spirit of "altruism" alien to what he found in Silicon Valley Perhaps the story of Siddhartha resonates with Joy...
...But surely, in accord with Joy's Law, they are the solution...
...The even more terrifying common thread is "self-replication...
...Now the number who wish to return has swollen to almost five million...
...Indeed, the curious fact about nanotechnologists is that they are relatively uninterested in real technologies, such as microchips and micro-electronic machines (MEMS) that actually work...
...For not only does Joy respectfully quote the Unabomber at length, in the end he adopts the Unabomber's stance toward technology...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail.s and magazines...
...Joy's nightmares do not stop with sentient machines...
...His name is Joy, William F., reared in rural Michigan, catechized in Berkeley computer science, ascendant in Silicon Valley, and now orbited in Aspen as an industry saint and global positioning satellite...
...Amazing...
...Happily married with two engaging children, he has every reason to be deeply satisfied with his life...
...But economic incentives, which Joy would amplify by insurance requirements, ensure that the technology will be understood by hundreds of thousands of people...
...We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistance...
...One of the sticking points in the off/on negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians is that of the so-called "refugees", the children and mostly grandchildren of those who left Israel during the 1948 War of Independence...
...Joy now joins Lovins in lamenting that biotech and other 21st-century technologies are being driven by "economic profit...
...Yet I am in Aspen this afternoon because of a strange and in some ways inspiring event...
...It is not easy for Joy to find any redeeming insight in the Unabomber's screed...
...It has been solemnly contemplated on both coasts of the media from Charlie Rose to CNN...
...To Wolfram, evolution is so easy it does not even require natural selection...
...But Joy's fear focuses not chiefly on the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (NBC) that terrified previous generations...
...They have been supported in camps since 1948...
...Another side of the "refugee" story...
...Joy is undaunted: "Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one...
...Imagine the Unabomber as a biotech wizard, contriving deadly infectious potions...
...We will be safest when as many people as possible understand the peril and address it with a wide range of approaches...
...As Stuart Kauffman himself concedes in his book, "The strange thing about evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it...
...A computer is one of the world's most manifestly designed and intelligently architected instruments...
...cons than by Bill Joy, the ripely rich co-founder of Sun Microsystems, now a $16 billion a year company that makes half of all Internet server computers...
...The first is what Joy calls the "dematerialization" of the industrial power...
...As Kauffmann argues, physical phenomena are not deterministic...
...It is that, and that alone, which is the real cause of the "Palestinian refugee problem...
...They is the real cause of the "Palestinian refugee problem", defenseless and unarmed men, could return after the expected quick victory in that "holy war", get their property back -and that of the Jews...
...Joy and Drexler imagine that, through deep understanding of the underlying rules of natural selection, we can hasten evolution.Then when this strategy fails, as it does, they fall back on an almost mystical belief that understanding how evolution works is irrelevant because the models can evolve without our intervention...
...In this case the fear was that the bombardment of gold nuclei in an ultrarelativistic two-way, two-mile-long subterranean tunnel would create matter of a mass and density tantamount to a black hole that could suck up the planet in a nano-nonce...
...In this age of triumphant commercialism...
...In 1948, on the day of the proclamation of the State of Israel, five Arab armies invaded the new country from all sides...
...Joy may regard them as a potential threat...
...Kurzweil s argument, and now Joy's, drastically compressed and simplified, is that Moore's Law, which for almost 40 years has predicted the doubling of computer power roughly every 18 months, is not going to expire later this decade as traditional chip manufacturing techniques hit the quantum barrier of near-atomic line- widths...
...But that is not acceptable to the Arabs...
...But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines...
...By some reports he scarcely works for Sun at all and sold most of his shares in the company during an unbecoming snit a decade ago...
...Assuming any citizen or company could be doing GNR in the basement implies "a verification regime...on an unprecedented scale.This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual privacy and desire for proprietary information and the need for verification to protect us all...
...Anyway, forget Reno and Gates, think Joy...
...Who pays for that...
...As one of us wrote in Wealth and Poverty twenty years ago, "modern civilization is hopelessly contingent and problematical, subject to destruction any day by possible climatic reversals, astrophysical mishaps, genetic plagues, nuclear explosions, geological convulsions, and atmospheric transformations—all conceivable catastrophes originating beyond the ken of plausible remedy or control...
...Where...
...Richard Preston of the New Yorker last year wrote a harrowing and prizewin-ning article on the subject...
...But idealism is pervasive in modern science...
...Effective for some specialized purposes (sorting algorithms, for example), genetic algorithms, cellular automata, and other self-organizing computer programs have spurred belief in a much swifter and surer form of evolution than is possible through a process of chance mutations...
...By launching Sun as the enabling Internet enterprise, Joy created a company that has expanded the knowledge of millions—that has saved millions or even billions of people from their immemorial fate as members of a barbarian mob, plunged in ignorance, and empowered them as participants in the human adventure on the frontiers of creation...
...But there are, to date, no nanobots...
...TCP-IP protocol stack, and the Java programming language...
...will have a good chance of meeting any threat from the underground...
...650,000 "refugees" swell to 5 million...
...The New Yorker should arrive soon...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...security of the nuclear industry, long draped in nearly impenetrable secrecy, and the computer industry, open to the world...
...Desert Storm was devoid of nuclear technology but replete with computer advances...
...It is impossible to prove a negative and some of his fears, like the possibility of a 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 genetically manufactured runaway plague, are not only plausible but present dangers...
...The interview indeed vanished in a "flash...
...The major task, he explains, will be to learn how to apply the techniques for verifying arms treaties (i.e., massive intelligence, inspection, and policing efforts) "to technologies that are naturally more commercial than military...
...If we ban bioengi-neering, only outlaws and rogue states will command the capability...
...He plunged into anguished rumination on his own role in this possible usurpation of his species by devices that he had done so much to advance...
...Nanotechnology wants to have it both ways...
...It is being kept alive and is being used as a "non-negotiable" bargaining chip, for the purpose of destroying the State of Israel -- a feat that the Arabs have attempted several times by military means, but which has always ended in disastrous failure...
...A radiant figure in many ways outshining any other in the industry, Joy should be an arresting experience for the media...
...When you are a computer nerd, the world looks like a computer...
...Over several decades, for example, the mathematician Stephen Wolfram, a father of chaos theory and titan of Virtualosophs, has worked out a set of simple rules which, set loose in a computer model, will replicate, he believes, all the basic patterns from which the physical world is constructed: Creation as computer game...
...But in the event of such an unplanned bio-catastrophe, we would be far better off with a powerful and multifarious biotech industry with long and diverse experience in handling such perils, constraining them, and inventing remedies than if we had "relinquished" these technologies to a small elite of government scientists, their work closely classified and shrouded in secrecy...
...tions, in which advocates of government-mandated conservation will trump the pioneers of creativity and enterprise...
...Any effort to reduce the world to the dimensions of our own present understanding will exclude novelty and progress...
...The Arab "refugees" who fled Israel left little wealth and little history, since most of them had not come to "Palestine" until Jewish settlers opened economic opportunities in what had been a desolate country for centuries...
...Joy seems to believe that some delusional maniac or evil enemy could press the erase button on his computer— perhaps even by mistake—and delete the American biosphere...
...Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the the biosphere with an inedible foliage...
...Hey, there he is...
...At any time in history, a projection of the dangers and impending scarcities would have shown the human enterprise untenable...
...Groping for a religion without firm moral codes, he turns attentively toward the East and the Dalai Lama...
...Seeing that science cannot assure safety, they believe that the endless restlessness and creativity of human beings is a threat rather than a solution...
...If Joy's policy prevails, his fears will reliably come true...
...As he points out, "We're lucky Kaczynski was a mathematician rather than a molecular biologist...
...Then they wake up screaming...
...And yet between the glitter and the gloaming lies a shadow of Aspen Angst...
...But though his new allies may not yet realize it, Joy is leading them, resetting their agendas...
...propose to match evolution, but actually fear exceeding it by accident and destroying the world...
...Apparently eradicated by a global effort thirty years ago, smallpox is still extant as a result of a Soviet bioweapons campaign...
...Theodore Kaczynski was one of them— a graduate student at Berkeley before Joy, studying some form of mathematics so abstruse as to be of no commercial interest, stalking away from Silicon Valley Joy has become the inadvertent vessel of the Unabomber's unexpected but sweeping triumph...
...Things turned out differently...
...Lovins then showed his real PC mettle by taking the Heinz, Lindbergh, World Technology, and Heroes for the Planet awards, before capping it off with the Mitchell, Nissan, Onassis, and Alternative Nobel prizes...
...New germs are self-replicating by definition...
...But the concept of a new element that outperforms the real chemicals of the biosphere and chokes off all life has intoxicated scientists and pseudo-scientists for decades...
...Bottom-up freedom and emergence flourish in an environment of top-down law and transcendent order, a monotheism that removes the arbitrary from science and denies the dominance of evil in the Universe...
...But this is a bipolar sect, and it also has a depressive phase in which its proponents are appalled at what they have persuaded themselves is their ail-but infinite power over the world...
...Instead, Joy now believes that "because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics—where 41 individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors—and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's Law rate of progress for another thirty years...
...If the Arab nations truly decided to make peace with Israel and to put an end to the century-long strife, they could easily accomplish it by accepting the "Palestinian refugees" in their countries and, just as Israel did with Jewish refugees from Arab countries, integrating them into their societies and making useful citizens of them...
...Nah, he rode in on a donkey...
...If the Arab nations were willing to solve the "refugee problem", the legitimacy of Israel could no longer be questioned...
...It is clear that the "Palestinian refugee problem" is a red herring, kept alive by the Arab nations for their political purposes, and with cynical disregard for the great number of impoverished people who live in these camps...
...Relinquishment" has a voluntary air...
...He was chairman of President Clinton's Science Advisory Committee and a friend and advisor of Al Gore, whom with his friend leading venture capitalist John Doerr, he endorsed for president during the campaign...
...Contrived for the Pentagon by chemist Felix Hoenikker in order to save Marines from the indignity of marching in mud, Ice-9 stiffened at room temperature...
...Population transfers are common, especially in the wake of wars...
...In Joy's mind government abuses of GNR are not the main threat...
...Contemplating this horrific prospect, Joy notes "it is most of all the destructive self-replication of...[GNR] that should give us pause...
...Biofoods will have to submit to what is termed the "cautionary principle," where small risks of huge catastrophes dictate relinquishment of "reckless schemes...
...Over there...
...Its molecules had somehow found a way to link up in a crystalline solid at temperatures where other water molecules were in liquid phase...
...Who's here...
...After eons of cosmic tempest and bombardment and tatonnement, the universe has seen and done it all: everything that chemistry and physics can offer...
...We will invest in problems rather than in opportunities and end up without either wealth or freedom, facing the ultimate problem of demoralization and sclerosis...
...They show scarcely an inkling of the cosmic multidimensional dynamics of mazes on exponential mazes, beyond all ken of conventional time and space, that they pretend to master with their "simple rules," state machines, and cellular automata...
...Only the wrong Pope kept him from beatification...
...You have heard about those "Palestinian refugees", who claim "right of return" to Israel...
...Kurzweil is one of the great intellects of the industry, a pioneer of computer voice recognition and vision...
...He is being noticed outside the industry...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...
...Ice-9, polywater, black holes, gray goos, nano-replicants, pico piranha, and many concoctions to come all seem catastrophic in callow computer models...
...Still, by all normal standards, Joy is rich, and his insights have been fully vindicated by the emergence of the Web...
...At the heart of the Virtualosophy is a vision of evolution that only a computer scientist could believe...
...They have kept them in misery, on the dole of the world, and have taught their hopeless there to leave, so that the The Arabs are committed not to allow any "non-believ- youth the "skills" of suicide invading armies could operate ers" to be in control of any part of the Middle East...
...They say he flew coach...
...The "Arab Nation", with its enormous wealth and vast underpopulated lands, has stubbornly refused to face facts...
...Joy offers a certain amount of mummery about "a new Hippocratic oath" placing merely self-imposed ethical limits on research...
...No real scientist, mad or malevolent, ever made any real Ice-9...
...In a capitalist democracy the mob is ultimately on the side of good...
...In their manic phase, Virtualosophers believe that the cyber world is capable of practically and predictively replicating the essential processes of the physical world, including creation and evolution...
...Glomming on to Joy's tract as if hugging a redwood is the collective green goo of the gonzo reaches of environmental movement...
...By promoting diverse and prosperous biotechnology and MEMS industries rather than creating a government-run monoculture in the field, the U.S...
...The computer industry has advanced literally thousands of times faster than the nuclear industry and the security of the U.S...
...The invading armies were defeated...
...If we outlaw encryption, encryption will be restricted to outlaws and a few scientists at the National Security Agency and FBI...
...The pullulating rivalry of technological enterprise, inimitable by any totalitarian state no matter how many secrets it steals, is the best guarantor of American security and safety in the face of the unique perils of the new century...
...In 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to the resettlement of 2 million Greeks and 800,000 Turks...
...In the 1950s the Soviets launched Sputnik, a world-leading submarine fleet, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, while the U.S...
...Both the dreams and nightmares of nanotechnology—from cancer cures to gray goo—spring from the computer science vision of evolution-lite...
...The spectacle of one of the world's leading techno-entrepreneurs offering himself as the prime witness for the prosecution against his own class is transforming Joy into a celebrity intellectual and political force...
...This] grey goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cial uses...
...Intimately related are the very "nanotechnologies" that may enable the extension of Moore's Law and genetic engineering...
...Nanotechnology envisages the ultimate creation of new machines and materials, proton by proton, electron by electron, atom by atom...
...Yet it powerfully shapes the conventional wisdom and ersatz worship of the emerging intelligentsia of the Web and hence of the ascendant new American culture...
...There never has been, and there certainly is not now, women, and children...
...What are the facts...
...Contemplating a similar scenario, nuclear physicist Edward Teller famously compared the contributions to U.S...
...The Manhattan Project was a brilliant exception, but it succeeded chiefly because of wartime suspension of the normal immigration and security rules (without immigrants from Europe, many of them Communists or Communist sympathizers, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and intercontinental missiles could not have been created in the U.S...
...Scientists today are very confident that they can do without God...
...In the face of the usual treaties, the Soviets produced reputed tons of the substance while the world was largely disposing of its vaccines...
...But the answer to Joy's fears, and his totalitarian temptation, is not to deny their possibility...
...Contemplating Hans Moravec's observation that "biological species rarely survive encounters with superior competitors," Joy began re-examining his life...
...Trusting to chance" seems terrifying, but it is the only way to be open to possibility...
...Quoting Green guru Amory Lovins, who has become a close advisor, Joy laments that commercialization of GNR "changes the goal of evolution from evolutionary success to economic profit—to survival not of the fittest but of the fattest...
...Those "Palestinian Refugees" Who are they, what is the real story...
...Returning home after the interview, I inadvertently press the erase button on my new Sony recorder, an elegant little shell-shaped device that uses silicon "flash memory" rather than tape...
...Lovins is the reigning Tiger Woods of political correctness...
...He was transfixed by the grim assessment of George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines:"ln the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines...
...Instead they prefer the science fiction of a godlike assemblage of a new creation, with new elements and energy synthesizers...
...Klein claims he's a monotheist...
...In a materialist era, the notion that a logical or mathematical idea of the world is more real than its physical manifestation seems so odd that most people who slip into idealism seem unaware of it...
...Joy would shroud advanced computers in the kind of secrecy currently afflicting nuclear weapons, or perhaps even forbid further research altogether, since every step forward would bring us closer to the sentient machine...
...They are firmly committed not to allow Israel or any "non-believers" to be in control of any part of the Middle East...
...The original Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was an eminent rich man who discovered the vanity of riches and devoted his subsequent life to the our time is far more relevant and compelling than his current siege of ideas...
...Joy enthuses about molecular level "assemblers" that "could make possible incredibly low cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold...
...The state must become concerned before the event occurs...
...They now make up almost 60% of the vibrant and productive population of Israel...
...It was chiefly the free and open computer industry that allowed MIRVing and miniaturization of warheads for lower power rockets...
...BY GEORGE GILDER AND RICHARD VIGILANTE For the last twenty years, whispering among the roseate wine glasses and murmuring amid the moist hors d'oeuvres at particularly palmy gatherings of the computer industry—mostly in palatial oases in the Southwest, sustained by sylvan waters from Colorado and silicon wafers from Taiwan—has soughed a high-voltage buzz of expectation...
...His great breakthrough in model building was to depart from two-dimensional computer models like "Life" and proceed, not to three dimensions as one might expect if the goal is to model the physical world, but back to one, because it made the models more coherent...
...Coming from Kurzweil, what had previously seemed science fiction now appeared to Joy as "a near-time possibility," and evoked an epiphany...
...Those who stayed, and their children, are full-fledged citizens of the state of Israel...
...In order to feed the planet it will be necessary to exploit this technology aggressively...
...But in Wired, Joy quotes Kaczynski as if he were more than a demonic scrivener, and now things of the spirit...
...Joy's anxieties have blossomed into a mid-life metamorphosis...
...Even well above the quantum level, the degrees of freedom in the universe are infinite, and it is impossible to shield our creations from the eternal bustle and commotion of numberless forces and energies...
...Meanwhile at Caltech, a student of the eminent Carver Mead followed direcAlthough the schemes claim to be "genetic" or "evolutionary," they fall short by many billion years of the pullulating astronomical ebullition and churn of real physical evolution...
...He moved much of his money into Microsoft...
...So far, close to $1.8 billion has been spent on their maintenance...
...Like Albert Einstein before him gazing into the Stygian inferno of nuclear portent, Joy has contemplated a vision of harrowing peril for the human race...
...Not only living biotic entities, but cultural forms, languages, memes, models, algorithms, ideas, software, philosophy are swept into the evolutionary swell with bacteria, bears, and humans...
...What do you mean...
...How did this exodus come about...
...The secret and essentially socialized U.S...
...Central to the belief that computer models may be better at evolution than the natural world are so-called cellular automata, conceived by John Von 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 Neumann, that simulate evolution and neural networks, and software programs that prove their fitness by surviving a contest among "genetic algorithms" in a computer matrix...
...For all their danger, these technologies are accessible only to elites commanding costly and complex industrial powers and rare and unstable materials...
...Toward the end of Joy's article, however, he abandons the tactics of terror and the intimidation used by the Unabomber to secure support and he appeals for an ethical foundation...
...It may even be that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder or even impossible to control...
...In frightful radio broadcasts, they urged the Arabs living a Jewish "refugee" camp in Israel or anywhere else...
...The key to the success of the project was Robert Oppenheimer's rejection of the advice of General Leslie Groves that the venture proceed in uncommunicating modules with no one knowing what others were doing...
...Like Einstein he longs to turn back the clock to more innocent Edenic days...
...As in the venerable and still expanding computer game of "Life"—now reborn in sophisticated form as Tom Ray's ingenious "Tierra"— evolution seems routine...
...The fear of a scientific concoction that escapes the laboratory, perhaps through a porous computer screen, emerged in literature in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which evoked the pandemic menace of Ice-9...
...Nanobots abound in nanotech computer models...
...Included in the Wired article was a Lovins sidebar issuing a grim warning on the dangers of bioengineered foods...
...With the advent of such machines, he argued, human beings would be faced with the stark choice of either being out-competed and driven to extinction by their own creations, or merging with them to produce the next evolutionary phase, a race of sentient robots...
...Socialism and secrecy do not outperform freedom, even in the military realm, even in otherwise capitalist countries...
...This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...
...If encryption is legal, the outlaw experts will be vastly outnumbered by scores of thousands of honest practitioners and code breakers...
...As Joy points out, punishing techno-crimes after the fact is not sufficient when the stakes are global destruction...
...The human race has prevailed against the plagues and scarcities of its past, not through regulation or "relinquishment" but through creativity and faith...
...In the future you will need only a computer and a few widely available materials...
...any form of life that is physically possible will emerge...
...The nanobots will not be designed, they will evolve, in effect designing themselves through interactions based on a few simple rules...
...That is of course the whole idea behind the demand for the "return of the refugees...
...By the phones...
...We can prevail over the danger when outnumbering the handful of psychotic or coerced and closeted hackers are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurially organized scientists...
...The atmosphere will be polluted, the environment despoiled, and good men will cower unarmed and helpless under their desks like the children of Columbine before the menace of a few madmen...
...A curmudgeonly debating foil of Gates in the late 1980s, Joy was the most confident prophet and protagonist of the new software regime that in the form of Internet browsers and Java applets broke through desktop Windows in the mid-1990s...
...Spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and restoration of extinct species...
...A few pertinent tests revealed that the strange element was merely a mixture of H2O with silica dissolved from the surface of the delicate quartz capillaries in which the substance was condensed...
...The Virtualosophistic world view renders human life accidental, unlikely, and sure of a bad end...
...For the last few years, the name most avidly anticipated at industry conclaves has been a man most readily summed up as the anti-Gates...
...But GNR technologies have "clear commerCombined with genetic materials, microscopic nanobots would be able to multiply themselves...
...What are they doing in their cramped garages and basement laboratories or remote rural cabins...
...It is an essentially religious faith that the world makes sense which underlies all scientific and technological progress...
...It is chiefly when we give up on chance and providence, and attempt to calculate and control our destinies through a demiurgic state, that disaster occurs...
...It is both more robust and less predictable than the Virtualosophy can grasp in its preoccupation with our puny mathematical black The nanotechies not only propose to match evolution, but actually fear exceeding it by accident and destroying the world...
...Was this a symbol of the devastating power of new technologies...
...forgo...
...Yet the nanotechies not only Loosed from the lab, Ice-9 would spread rampantly until all rivers, lakes, oceans, and ultimately biological creatures froze up...
...These same scientists often imagine themselves to be materialists...
...essentially complete cleanup of the environment...
...Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop...
...Joy, perhaps the worlds leading technologist, would have been an obvious target for the Unabomber after the crippling and near murder of Joy's friend,Yale writer, artist and computer pioneer David Gelernter...
...fell pathetically behind...
...When Albert Hirschman writes that "creativity always comes as a surprise to us," he is acknowledging this essential property of invention...
...When you live in Valhalla, the rest of the world—all those smart people who are not in your own company and who seethe with resentments and option envy, who have to inch their way to work down Route 101 in Silicon Valley or 90 in Boston or Seattle—may seem part of a potential mob...
...This pursuit rendered most theoretical physics incoherent and essentially useless for describing reality...
...Seeing that science cannot prove a negative—guarantee that some invention will not cause a catastrophe—they insist on a "cautionary principle" for new technology that would not have allowed a caveman to build a fire...
...They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable...
...When forced to flee, they left behind land, wealth, and a long history...
...Joy has a law—"Most of the smartest people are never in your own company"—that inclines firms to create systems open to the smart contributions of people outside the corporate firewalls...
...A heterosexual white male, he somehow made it through the intensely competitive opening rounds of the PC tournament (a putative elimination event run by the New York Times) by joining a gaggle of Native American potters and mud sculptors, lesbian "breath" poets and performance artists, and other planetary dismal scientists as a MacArthur Genius (a feat as amazing as Brent Barry winning the NBA dunking contest in 1996...
...After all, as the Cold War itself showed—though Joy nowhere concedes the point—deterrence is a robust defense...
...Of course, virtually none of them ever lived in Israel -- they are the children and mostly grandchildren of those who fled in 1948...
...Kaczynski could hardly have dreamt of a better outcome for his own campaign for relinquishment than its adoption by his most eminent Berkeley successor, who also left Technology Bay for a retreat in the mountains...
...Bill, stupid...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...In a computer model evolution looks easy, and fast...
...That missions and of slaughtering without interference...
...In a famous essay of the 1960s entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Eugene Wigner of Princeton expounds the same astonishment...
...Joy experienced a similar midlife revelation which informed his new vision of the world...
...Though we may have overthrown matter in the economy, we did so by unlocking its mysteries in a process deeply empirical and profoundly physical...
...Central to this GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, Robotics) trinity of techno-terror are two characteristics that could hardly be better calculated to inspire fear...
...some 60 percent of the packaged food in America is bioengineered in one way or another...
...The story of the Internet age is epitomized far less by any of the usual stars or dot...
...He is apparently proud of his role in the technology boom...
...They arrived in Israel, quite literally only "with their shirts on their backs...
...In the late 1960s, a Soviet physicist named Yuri Deriabin wrote an article describing his success in creating a new form of polymerized water—polywater—that could suffocate the biosphere under a gray goo if it escaped from the lab...
...in 1945, the resettlement of 3 million Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia was arranged...
...None of the stunning technological achievements of the computer age, however, have been the result of a retreat from the physical world...
...Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
...But the Jews of Arab lands have a history going back thousands of years...
...For wittingly or not, Joy has unveiled what will be the 21st century's leading rationale for anti-capitalist repression and the revival of statism, a tonic for beleaguered socialists, a program and raison d'etre for a new New Left...
...But Joy comes from a culture that is adamantly blind to the ethical and epistemological contributions of religion...
...Generating superior forms of pseudo life in hours not eons, cyber-Darwinian magic can overcome all the shortcomings of human designers...
...But there is another side to the "refugee" story...
...Al Gore has espoused many of these themes from time to time and invoked them in his book Earth in the Balance and in an interview in Wired...
...But we do not...
...We will resort to ever more stifling controls that will suppress the unexpected boons of creativity which have always been the source of our prosperity and success...
...The answer to Joy's dilemma comes in Joy's Law...
...In almost three decades of being one of the worlds leading designers of software and microprocessors Joy had never had "the feeling I was designing an intelligent machine...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 3A-1 You deserve a factual look at...
...But Joy seems convinced...
...On the wall of Joy's office (he dubs it Aspen Smallworks) is a poster identifying him as a founder of Sun...
...As terrifying as all this is, Joy's nightmare has one more twist, which makes the threat all the more real to him, and now makes Joy himself fascinating to a number of people who previously showed no interest in spending their evenings with one more centimillionaire computer nerd: "The nuclear, biological and chemical technologies used in 20th century weapons of mass destruction were...developed in government laboratories," Joy notes...
...Joy's program of comprehensive government intervention goes beyond the negligent or criminal use of technology to embrace an avowedly massive regime of surveillance and regulation of businesses that have, might have, or might someday develop GNR capabilities...
...The Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council—nearly the entire technophobic Green machine is poring through this document as a white paper flag of capitulation from the midst of the enemy camp...
...Counseling the new Joy is Amory Lovins, the conservationist, whom Joy first got to know well at an Esalen workshop...
...we are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures...
...But instead of fostering a resolute response, targeted on real threats, he disperses his fear indiscriminately among the politically correct targets and thus spreads panic and confusion...
...A biosphere or econosphere, self-consistently co-constructs itself according to principles that we do not yet fathom...
...Apart from the unsolvable social problems it would create, the introduction of, say, even one-half of the 5 million who claim to be "refugees" would, with one stroke, dramatically alter the demographic makeup of the country and would inevitably destroy the Jewish State...
...So too, Joy's "robot species...
...To the religious person, however, chance is not the realm of the anarchic and haphazard, dominated by the depreciations of the mob, but the arena of freedom and the crucial condition of creativity...
...The total number of those who fled in 1948 is estimated to have been about 650,000...
...Based on a few simple rules, computer enthusiasts create two dimensional cyber creatures that seem to evolve robustly Nanotech computer models similarly make the construction of nanobots look feasible if not easy...
...Strange as this notion seems, the Idealists were not fools or charlatans...
...R]eplicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass...
...Today the threat is far more insidious, elusive, and ominous...
...Seeing that history is a domain of chance, they wish to bring it to a halt...
...The Artificial Intelligence paradigm that set out to build a computer brain, not by modeling the brain but by presuming the brain must be a computer in a different medium, was at root an idealist notion...
...In charge of the effort to defend us from such plagues for much of the last decade—it may not reassure you to learn—has been Donna Shalala of the Department of Health and Human Services in Joy's favorite administration, which has kept its eye instead on the greater threat of sexism...
...The result would be machines a million times as fast and capacious as todays personal computers and thereby "sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec," intelligent robots by 2030...
...State planning killed close to a billion people in the 20th century...
...In due course, the alarmists were subdued, the experiment proceeded, and the universe yawned, having experienced innumerable events far more cataclysmic during its billions of happy years smashing things together...
...It is chiefly when we regard the masses as a mob of mouths, accidentally evolved in a random universe, that evil seems inevitable, good incomprehensible, and tyranny indispensable...
...Every one of those refugees was immediately accepted, resettled, taken care of, and given full citizenship by the fledgling, impoverished, and embattled Jewish State...
...But stultified by the PR and legal departments of Microsoft, Gates no longer says anything interesting, even in his emails where he was once a pithy master of all too litigenic prose...
...These so-called "Palestinian refugees" have not been allowed to settle in the "indivisible Arab nation...
...State control and tyranny block off the myriad emergent initiatives and feedback loops and acts of faith that have always enabled human beings to prevail under conditions of freedom...
...Looking for examples of mindless evolution, one would not readily adduce a computer, designed by industry demigods John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Bill Joy, executing programs authored by Tom Ray or Per Bak...
...His Wired article led to a $1.5 million book deal with Viking and purchase of a luxury $15 million apartment high in the new Perry Towers in Manhattan from which to contemplate more comfortably the emptiness of his riches...
...That is about to change...
...As enormous computing power is combined with "the manipulative advances of the physical sciences" and the revealed mysteries of genetics, "The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor...
...Those who had left became refugees - people without a country...
...When guns—or biotech and nanotechnology—are outlawed, they will be accessible only to outlaws and a few feckless agents of a police state...
...Artificial "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
...Joy's self-defeating scheme of creating a national security state to halt dangerous research would end up repressing the very efforts required to overcome the dangers...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 43 and information theory, the Virtual Philosophy is seriously taught or even understood in no major university Perhaps its leading source is an intellectual Esalen called the Santa Fe Institute, where Stuart Kauffman has recently expounded it in depth in a book called Investigations...
...It was the free and open electronics industry that gave ultimate superiority to the U.S...
...Through genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR), psychotic individuals, or merely negligent entrepreneurs, may have the power to devastate the globe with self-replicating plagues and "phages" that can devour the biosphere and end human life...
...Yasser Arafat insists that there can be no peace unless those "refugees" are allowed to "return" to Israel...
...Moore's Law prevails only because the silicon from which microchips are made is now the most profoundly studied manufacturing material in the history of the world, and most of what we know was gleaned from actual manufacturing experience...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...
...But this siren lure of bottom-up evolution contradicts all the experience of computer design...
...This might have seemed smart early in the 1990s, but Sun shares have appreciated roughly three times faster than Microsoft's since the emergence of Joy's own Internet technolo40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 gies in 1995...
...Pythagoras and Euclid, Zeno and Parmenides were on a natural high, enraptured by the discovery that so much of reality could indeed be described according to recurring mathematical rules...
...holes and gray goos...
...Just perhaps, if you have Bill in your company, it is the other guys who have to worry about Joy's Law...
...Following the collapse of its North African empire, France accepted close to 1.5 million people...
...Because GNR technologies, in some form, will engage most leading-edge commercial enterprises, such prior restraint would entail government powers unprecedented in the U.S...
...Led by the banning of DDT, the resurgence of malaria, the suppression of nuclear power, and the retardation of global growth, environmentalist excesses have already killed more people than environmental pollution ever did...
...The substantial need here is for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities" Just so, since Joy's fear arises in the first place from the belief that anyone—or any business—with access to a computer and a few "commonplace materials" can become a source of GNR terror...
...In ancient Greece, Idealist philosophers taught that the world of the senses was an illusion and that the highest realities were mathematical...
...The Virtualosophy is driven by a curiously powerful and seductive faith...
...They have been practiced throughout history...
...He was an architect of key Internet technologies, such as the Berkeley Unix operating system, its "They say he's here...
...Yet surely Joy's example as one of the supreme inventors and entrepreneurs of Kaczynski could hardly have dreamt of a better outcome for his own campaign than its adoption by his most eminent Berkeley successor, who also left Technology Bay for a retreat in the mountains...
...Joy is coded for bear...
...So is the complete takeover of theoretical physics by mathematics, a takeover that led quantum theory for decades into a surreal cul-de-sac occupied by multiple parallel universes...
...Joy could perform a vital role in attacking the world's curious insouciance toward the continuing bio-war preparation of Saddam Hussein...
...The Virtualosophers babble about "complexity" and "chaos" and purport to believe in material evolution, but they in fact believe in virtual evolution...
...They are being developed by "corporate enterprises" which will render them "phenomenally" profitable...
...The article began by ascribing his new vision to a meeting with computer inventor and prophet Ray Kurzweil at the Telecosm conference that Gilder Publishing runs with Forbes at Lake Tahoe every September...
...Little is heard of the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who fled those countries to settle in the newly formed Jewish State of Israel...
...Joy and his new allies should learn that in a capitalist democracy the mob—and God—are on your side...
...The ultimate answer is that if Joy's policies prevail, his fears will reliably come true...
...Nanotech offers no rationale for surrendering the principles of a free society and burking scientific inquiry for fear of its yield...
...Israel has recognized this historical necessity...
...Part of the "mysterious" realm that Einstein called "the cradle of all true art and true science," chance is beyond the ken of inductive reason...
...In fact, acceptance in their countries might also be offered to the Israeli Arabs, who, despite enjoying a higher standard of living, education, and health than Arabs in any of the surrounding countries and despite having the same civil rights as Israeli Jews, are not happy to live in a Jewish state...
...Now amid many assurances that he believes in market solutions, Joy is creating an atmosphere in which the environmental movement will be ceded the power to veto and regulate new technologies, in which small commissions of politicized scientists will govern the evolution of crucial invenwith a migrainous grudge...
...Ready or not, looming large in Joy's future one can imagine solemn meetings with Hillary, no doubt during which will be explored the most altruistic methods for preventing others from following his path...
...Wow...
...The nightmare is that combined with genetic materials and thereby self-replicating, these nanobots would be able to multiply themselves into a "gray goo" that could outperform photosynthesis and usurp the entire biosphere, including all edible plants and animals...
...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world.Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...But he is not so gullible as to believe evil can be combated with pleasantries...
...The canonical Science magazine published the alarm as a cover story and discussed it solemnly in several issues...
...Most remarkable for a man long immersed in the intricate arcana of computer software, Joy is a voluble and poly-mathic intellectual...
...Similarly, nanotechnology in Drexler's sense is more science fiction, or cyber-fic-tion, than science...
...But without God they panic about the future and like Joy can find no answer but brutal exertions of power to terminate the uncertain bounties of human creativity...
...More than 12 million (!) Muslims and Hindus were exchanged between India and Pakistan...
...In the past, you needed rare Joy's journey from his Silicon Valley throne to his current siege of Aspen Angst began in earnest when he encountered Eric Drexler's bipolar vision of nanotechnology, with its manic-depressive alternative futures of Utopia and dystopia...
...As Drexler writes: cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers...
...This awesome technology proceeds to erase hours of work trillions of times faster than it could have been removed from a normal tape cassette...
...If water molecules possessed a lower energy polymer form readily accessible to graduate students and a black hole could be concocted in galac-ticly feckless supercolliders, we would certainly not be here to tell the story...
...From the ecological wastelands of the USSR to the continuing "tragedies of the commons" where property rights are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 51 denied, the kind of regulation and repression that the Virtual Philosophy fosters poses the gravest threat of all...
...Would "he" really come...
...The Arab countries, among them some of the richest in the world who fritter away their enormous fortunes on undreamed luxuries, are satisfied to leave their Arab brethren in those miserable camps...
...With gilded curls, cerulean eyes, soulful lips, elegant carriage, high above the herd, he could readily pass for any me-minded Hollywood coif, easily qualify for billboard displays of fashionable jeans or pheromones...
...It has been mass distributed at tony wasp prep schools and earnest ivied campuses...
...Joy's concern, the democratization of terror, is with terrorists, psychopaths, or more or less innocent accidents by perhaps negligent entrepreneurs...
...At the same time, his serious intellectual attainments far exceed those on the short lists of recently newsworthy brains such as Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, David Boies, or Warren Buffett.Yet People, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and other keepers of the celebrity canon have almost entirely missed him...
...In the canonical texts of the Virtualosophers, evolution is a universal solvent in the tides of life, proceeding raptorially, altruistically, collaboratively, individually, incrementally, saltantly, emer-gently, symbiotically, with collective effects that transcend intention or sum of parts...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
