Sredzkistraße

Why the future doesn’t need us.

I finally managed to get around to reading Bill Joy’s article Why the future doesn’t need us the other day while waiting to board a plane. Bill Joy is a renowned computer scientist who co-founded Sun Microsystems and authored the popular UNIX text editor vi. The article is concerned with the ever increasing speed of “progress” in fields of new technology (primarily robotics, nanotechnology and genetic engineering) which Joy views with apprehension, arguing that the products of these fields will eventually render mankind obsolete and lead to our self-destruction.

There’s no point trying to quote it, so instead you can read the article here, read more about Bill Joy here, or read responses and criticism of the article here.