"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

engineering is narrower: that it gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally,
or in a deliberate terrorist act - to create a White Plague.

The many wonders of nanotechnology were first imagined by the Nobel-laureate
physicist Richard Feynman in a speech he gave in 1959, subsequently published
under the title "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." The book that made a big
impression on me, in the mid-'80s, was Eric Drexler'sEngines of Creation, in which
he described beautifully how manipulation of matter at the atomic level could
create a utopian future of abundance, where just about everything could be made
cheaply, and almost any imaginable disease or physical problem could be solved
using nanotechnology and artificial intelligences.

A subsequent book,Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, which
Drexler cowrote, imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world
where we had molecular-level "assemblers." Assemblers could make possible
incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by
augmentation of the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the
environment, incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers - in fact, any product
would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that of wood -
spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and restoration of
extinct species.

I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after readingEngines of Creation.
As a technologist, it gave me a sense of calm - that is, nanotechnology showed
us that incredible progress was possible, and indeed perhaps inevitable. If
nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many
problems in the present. I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time; I
might as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn't make sense, given his
vision, to stay up all night, all the time.

Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe
the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing
them with all the things Drexler described I would give a homework assignment of
my own: "Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for extra credit create an
antidote."

With these wonders came clear dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said
at a nanotechnology conference in 1989, "We can't simply do our science and not
worry about these ethical issues."5 But my subsequent conversations with
physicists convinced me that nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it
wouldn't work anytime soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to Colorado, to a skunk
works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet,
specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini.

Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics
was now practical. This wasnew news, at least to me, and I think to many people
- and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back
toEngines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was
dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called
"Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become