e2001 Your Digital Future - Bangkok Post Special Supplement

TRENDS

Sun's Bill Joy still not so sure about the future

Concerned about biological terror

Tony Waltham

Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy recently reiterated concerns about the coming threat to mankind that will be posed by the future ability to design a disease on a computer or to create self-replicating organisms which could be dangerous to humankind.

Calling technological advances in nanotechnology, genetics and robotics an "unstoppable force", and the inability to change our habits about sharing knowledge and the freedom of information concept "an immovable object", Mr Joy said that we would put ourselves in "extreme danger" if we did not take actions to limit the risks.

He suggested restrictions and controls on the dissemination of biological information in order to reduce the risks, and he urged that a consensus be reached on this by national institutions who should construct some policy-based solutions.

"I don't think that the answer's going to be that we are able to solve the problems with technology. We'd better start very soon because social institutions move very slowly compared to Moore's Law," he said in an interview during Sun's JavaOne developers conference in San Francisco in June this year.

Mr Joy, who developed the Berkeley version of Unix operating system and is the co-designer of three microprocessor architectures _ SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC _ along with Java and Jini Internet technologies, was commenting on the response to his eye-opening article published in the April 2000 Wired Magazine entitled "The Future Doesn't Need Us".

In that article, which created news headlines around the world, he wrote of his concern and alarm over possibilities that intelligent robots might take over from humankind or that a laboratory accident might release self-replicating engineered organisms, turning the world as we know it into a "grey goo", obliterating life on Earth.

He said that the 12,000-word article in Wired (read it online at <www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html>) had generated over 1,000 responses to the magazine and to him personally.

However, he said that while he had hoped that people might be able to convince him that his concerns had been unwarranted, this had not happened.

The biggest threat, he now believes, stems from biological breakthroughs, although he admitted that biology was not his field of specialisation.

"It's clear that the danger is much sooner in biology.

"I didn't appreciate how bad it was until I started looking at it. But the danger certainly predates the use of computers. It goes back to biological weapons done in the conventional way," he said in the interview.

"It's a big problem and I think we need to work through the institutions and that we have to construct some policy-based solutions because I don't think ... that we are able to solve the problems with technology."

He explained that there was no way that technology today could provide safety from the threat posed by nuclear weapons. But, whereas for a nuclear device you needed plutonium or uranium which was very hard to get, the difference with the 21st-century technologies of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics was that we may empower individuals, he explained.

"And that is extremely dangerous and that is what I am trying to warn people about," he explained.

"Then, all the traditional ways of controlling bad uses are gone. You can't track the equipment, and the thousands of people who are trained.

"So it's the dematerialisation of the sciences that are becoming pure information sciences. If you talk to people in biology, some people say, `Oh, that this is a long way away,' while a lot of people say, `It's here today,' so you get this wide spectrum of opinion."

How far off did Mr Joy think this scenario might be?

"My judgement is that it was maybe 20 years away to when you would know enough to make your own disease on the computer screen. That's a frightening thought," he said.