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

need for verification to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong
resistance to this loss of privacy and freedom of action.

Verifying the relinquishment of certain GNR technologies will have to occur in
cyberspace as well as at physical facilities. The critical issue will be to make the
necessary transparency acceptable in a world of proprietary information,
presumably by providing new forms of protection for intellectual property.

Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong
code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the
courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would
answer the call - 50 years after Hiroshima - by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe,
one of the most senior of the surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that
all scientists "cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and
manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass
destruction."14 In the 21st century, this requires vigilance and personal
responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to
avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass
destruction.


Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which
we can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem
worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total
destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says
that there is a limit to our material needs - and that certain knowledge is too
dangerous and is best forgone.

Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without
considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality,
while perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream.

I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar
Jacques Attali, whose bookLignes d'horizons (Millennium, in the English
translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of
pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his new
bookFraternitщs, Attali describes how our dreams of utopia have changed over
time:

"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than
a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to
the company of gods and toEternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks,
some men dared free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal
City whereLiberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market
society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others,
and they soughtEquality."

Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in
tension in our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia,Fraternity,
whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness