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Why the future doesn't need us-

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering,
and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

By Bill Joy

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their
ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that
I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st
century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the
deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many
other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I
encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were
over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies
consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began,
the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on,
and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate
of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to
become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering
that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the
realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a
strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback,
especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already
knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were
giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for
intelligent robots surprised me.

It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost
every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no
ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his
then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he
foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with
robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure
he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad
outcome along this path.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things
better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized
systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might