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

antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened
when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to
acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant
genes.2

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex,
involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to
such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially
true when human actions are involved.

I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote fromThe Age of Spiritual Machines;
I would hand them Kurzweil's book, let them read the quote, and then watch their
reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found
Hans Moravec's bookRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one
of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world's largest
robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University.Robot gave me more
material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's
argument. For example:

The Short Run (Early 2000s)

Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and
North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated
by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting
North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly
more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the
southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals
affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would
compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human
reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.

There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government
coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could
support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.

A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to
discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be "ensuring continued
cooperation from the robot industries" by passing laws decreeing that they be
"nice,"3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be "once
transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot." Moravec's view is that the
robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction.

I decided it was time to talk to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as
the cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful
parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun
Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect
Danny's knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of any
other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks