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

From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had
a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of
great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial Revolution has
immeasurably improved everyone's life over the last couple hundred years, and I
always expected my career to involve the building of worthwhile solutions to real
problems, one problem at a time.

I have not been disappointed. My work has had more impact than I had ever
hoped for and has been more widely used than I could have reasonably expected.
I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as
reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make
them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite
some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting.

But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's
consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would
confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon.


Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a
change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in
the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists
and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know
that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to
newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.

I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not
from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers,
but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl
Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear
systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with
Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray
Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineer and
device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the incredible
possibilities of molecular electronics.

In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC,
picoJava, and MAJC - and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've
been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law. For decades,
Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential rate of improvement of
semiconductor technology. Until last year I believed that the rate of advances
predicted by Moore's law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some
physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not obvious to me that a new
technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly.

But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics -
where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors -
and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the
Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be