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From Internet Scientist, a Preview of Extinction

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/12/215l-031200-idx.html

>From Internet Scientist, a Preview of Extinction

By Joel Garreau Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 12, 2000; Page A15

A respected creator of the Information Age has written an extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in which he suggests that new technologies could cause "something like extinction" of humankind within the next two generations.

The alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking because it comes not from a critic of technology but rather from a man who invented much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., the leading Web technology manufacturer.

Joy was an original co-chairman of a presidential commission on the future of information technology. His warning, he said in a telephone interview, is meant to be reminiscent of Albert Einstein's famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility of an atomic bomb.

In a 24-page article in the Wired magazine that will appear on the Web Tuesday, Joy says he finds himself essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski--that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species. "I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place," Joy wrote in the article, which he worked on for six months. "If I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine that such a day may come."

Joy enjoys a level-headed reputation in the industry. "Nobody is more phlegmatic than Bill," said Stewart Brand, an Internet pioneer.

"He is the adult in the room."

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