Dr. Wilfred G. Alava Jr.

Summary of Bill Joy’s, “Why the future doesn’t need us,”

Joy traces his concern to a discussion he had with Ray Kurzweil at a conference in 1998. He had read an early draft of
Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and found it deeply disturbing.
Subsequently, he encountered arguments by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski argued that if machines do all of
society’s work, as they inevitably will, then we can: a) let the machines make all the decisions; or b) maintain human
control over the machines.

If we choose “a” then we are at the mercy of our machines. It is not that we would give them control or that they would
take control, rather, we might become so dependent on them that we would have to accept their commands. Needless to
say, Joy doesn’t like this scenario. If we choose “b” then control would be in the hands of an elite, and the masses would
be unnecessary. In that case, the tiny elite: 1) would exterminate the masses; 2) reduce their birthrate so they slowly
became extinct; or 3) become benevolent shepherds to the masses. The first two scenarios entail our extinction, but even
the third option is bad. In this last scenario, the elite would see to it that all physical and psychological needs of the masses
are met, while at the same time engineering the masses to sublimate their drive for power. In this case, the masses might
be happy, but they would not be free.

Joy finds these arguments both convincing and troubling. About this time Joy read Hans Moravec’s book Robot: Mere
Machine to Transcendent Mind  where he found predictions similar to Kurzweil’s. Joy found himself especially concerned
by Moravec’s claim that technological superiors always defeat technological inferiors, as well as his claim that humans
will become extinct as they merge with the robots. Disturbed, Joy consulted other computer scientists who basically
agreed with these predictions.

Joy’s worries focus on the transforming technologies of the 21 st century—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR).
What is particularly problematic about them is that they have the potential to self-replicate. This makes them inherently
more dangerous than 20th-century technologies—nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—which were expensive to
build and require rare raw materials. By contrast, 21st-century technologies allow for small groups or individuals to bring
about massive destruction. Joy accepts that we will soon achieve the computing power necessary to implement some of
the scenarios envisioned by Kurzweil and Moravec, but worries that we overestimate our design abilities. Such hubris
may lead to disaster.

For example, robotics is primarily motivated by the desire to be immortal—by downloading ourselves into them. But Joy
doesn’t believe that we will be human after the download or that the robots would be our children. As for genetic
engineering, it will create new crops, plants, and eventually new species including many variations of human species, but
Joy fears that we do not know enough to conduct such experiments. And nanotechnology confronts the so-called “gray
goo” problem—self-replicating nanobots out of control. In short, we may be on the verge of killing ourselves! Is it not
arrogant, he wonders, to design a robot replacement species when we so often make design mistakes?

Joy concludes that we ought to relinquish these technologies before it’s too late. Yes, GNR may bring happiness and
immortality, but should we risk the survival or the species for such goals? Joy thinks not.
When the stunning article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” by Bill Joy, chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, made the
cover of Wired Magazine in April 2000, it created quite a rumble in high-tech circles. Its argument was that “our most
powerful 21st century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an
endangered species.”

Bill Joy was writing about out of control, self-replicating technologies that, once the stuff of science fiction,
were now on the way in decades if not years. Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and
systems analysts are working in countries all over the world churning out theories and specialized applications
without much consideration of their overall impacts.

The funding has been coming from various governments’ military budgets, heavily contracted out to industrial
corporations and, now increasingly, from the commercial pursuits of global corporations. The rate of knowledge
production has been exponential as computers become faster and are programmed to become more self-reliant.

Seventy percent of the volume of stock trading in the U.S. is now driven by computers and their algorithms—a
mere glimmer of the future pictured by Mr. Joy.

The worries among sensitive futurists are both the intended and unintended consequences. Autonomous
weaponry, for example, may be intended for certain purposes by government militaries, but then emerge as
more dreaded unintended consequences where, for example, these weapons decide themselves when and whom
to strike.

Last month, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors
were some of many specialists who signed an open letter that called for a ban on autonomous weapons. The
letter says, “If any major military power pushes ahead with artificial intelligence weapons, a global arms race is
virtually inevitable,” adding that “unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw
materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) or “thinking machines” are worrying far more of the serious scientists/technologists
than those few who speak out publically.

Last December, in an interview with the BBC, Stephen Hawking, through his computer-generated voice,
warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would
take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.” Hawking, a big thinker, noted that “humans,
who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Self-restraint is not a characteristic of the companies developing robotics for businesses that want to replace
tens of millions of both white collar and blue collar jobs. Look at the latest factories, refineries and warehouses
to illustrate what is coming fast. Even the work of lawyers is being automated.

But the warnings coming from people like Nassim Taleb, author of the runaway best-seller Black Swan and
Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, co-author of the textbook on
artificial intelligence who writes about “risks that could lead to human extinction,” need to reach wider
audiences.

Complex systems can be very fragile in ways not foreseen until they happen! That is why Bill Joy saw all three
of these technologies—nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence—as interwoven systems
expanding over the globe beyond human control.

In a recent interview (July 17, 2015) by Science magazine, Professor Russell was asked “what do you see as a
likely path from artificial intelligence (AI) to disaster?” He replied: “the routes could be varied and complex—
corporations seeking a super-technological advantage, countries trying to build AI systems before their enemies,
or a slow-boiled frog kind of evolution leading to dependence and enfeeblement not unlike E.M. Forster’s The
Machine Stops.”

He told Science that he “is not aware of any large movement calling for regulation either inside or outside AI,
because we don’t know how to write such regulation.” Such, he noted, is the “bewildering variety of software.”
In the meantime, Congress is oblivious to these grim scenarios. The Republicans in charge have no interest in
holding educational public hearings, because the corporations who own them have no such interest. Meanwhile,
the myopic Democrats are too busy dialing for commercial campaign dollars to grease their campaigns so as to
retake the Congress in 2016.

Some of these Democrats know better. They championed the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an arm
of Congress established to research and advise members of Congress about such matters. When Congressman
Newt Gingrich toppled the Democrats in 1994, one of his first acts was to defund and shut down OTA.

Congress has played ostrich ever since. The American people will surely pay the price unless a tiny few,
including leaders of the scientific community, organize and demand that Congress reinstate this technical
warning system that OTA provided. With a tiny annual budget of $22 million, OTA saved far more in prevented
boondoggles that were circulating on Capitol Hill.

None of this domestic inaction should preclude international efforts to expand the Geneva Conventions against
chemical and biological warfare to cover these latest mass destruction weapons against humanity. This initiative
would constitute an updated declaration of profound human rights.

Bill Joy’s article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” provides an extensive analysis of the new technologies’
development in terms of their ethical dimensions. Examining the nature of NGR technologies, the author
defines their destructive power as self-replication, which complicates or even makes impossible keeping them
under control. This power creates the weapon of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), which is
dangerous enough to assume the extinction of humanity in the coming years.

Joy suggests the new ethics establishment as the possible prevention of this threat. However, his belief in this is
not convincing. As NGR technologies have mostly commercial uses (Joy, 2009, p.294), they would be
developed with lucrative purposes even if the scientific community accepts the common ethical rules regarding
these researches. Their extreme destructive power makes me rather pessimistic regarding the future of the Earth.

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