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

individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and,
concomitantly, great danger.

What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) -
were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear
weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively
unavailable - raw materials and highly protected information; biological and
chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.

The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) -
are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.
Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within
the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or
rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of
knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified
by the power of self-replication.

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of
extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of
mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible
empowerment of extreme individuals.


Nothing about the way I got involved with computers suggested to me that I was
going to be facing these kinds of issues.

My life has been driven by a deep need to ask questions and find answers. When
I was 3, I was already reading, so my father took me to the elementary school,
where I sat on the principal's lap and read him a story. I started school early,
later skipped a grade, and escaped into books - I was incredibly motivated to
learn. I asked lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction.

As a teenager I was very interested in science and technology. I wanted to be a
ham radio operator but didn't have the money to buy the equipment. Ham radio
was the Internet of its time: very addictive, and quite solitary. Money issues
aside, my mother put her foot down - I was not to be a ham; I was antisocial
enough already.

I may not have had many close friends, but I was awash in ideas. By high school,
I had discovered the great science fiction writers. I remember especially
Heinlein'sHave Spacesuit Will Travel and Asimov's I, Robot, with its Three Laws of
Robotics. I was enchanted by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to
have a telescope to look at the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I
checked books on telescope-making out of the library and read about making
them instead. I soared in my imagination.

Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was