Business : Sunday, March 19, 2000

An iceberg ahead - but what will we do?

As chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy has long-held computer-industry-guru status.

Joy's work on Berkeley Unix in the late 1970s helped make the Bell Labs operating system the standard way to network computers in academic, scientific and institutional settings. Later, Joy's stewardship rescued and guided a Sun "skunk works" project that became Java, a simplified programming language that helped popularize the World Wide Web.

Joy has been awarded 11 patents, with 12 under consideration, and in 1997 he was named co-chairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Joy, 44, who in 1992 set up Smallworks, a network-security and information-systems software developer in Aspen, Colo., has consistently chided the computer industry for failing to make devices easier to use and more relevant to human needs. Last week, he stepped into a larger arena with his call to action in Wired.

Joy was asked about reaction to his essay; his edited response follows:

So far, the response (to the Wired article) divides into two groups:

1. People responding without reading the article.

2. People who have read the article.

A large number of people in (1) do knee-jerk anti-Luddite arguments. Most people in (2) have been sobered by the piece, as I was in discovering the material. . . .

My point of departure is optimism about these technologies, and I believe they will all succeed. They will get large investment. This investment is in the private sector, more efficient, very diffuse.

Because they will succeed, the knowledge of how to use them will be increasingly widespread and accessible. The tools can be used for good or ill by small groups. The difference is essentially the designs they use, which is software.

Bad uses are effectively "offense," which is easier than defense. Defense is very problematic because of auto-immunity dangers with shields.

The self-replication is what makes these dangerous, causing individuals and small groups to be able to do large-scale destruction for the first time.

Clearly, open access to information, freedom of association, etc., is the root of our liberties and our modern system, yet now we have clear evidence that, over this century, this openness will enable even a tiny fraction of people to do great harm.

While it may be unthinkable to our current system and experience to restrict things, it's equally immoral to not act, and thereby cause humanity to have a large chance of great harm.

The only solutions aren't necessarily government, for example. We have at least:

A Hippocratic oath for scientists.

The possibility of requiring insurance for consequences, letting the insurance industry competitively manage the risks, with some less-than-government-level management of the process.

An international agency to hold some of the more dangerous but very valuable knowledge and resultant technologies.

International decisions to not pursue certain technology at all, as in our renunciation of biological weapons.

Stuart Brand (a technology pundit) . . . has likened the problem to an iceberg ahead. Will we miss it, bounce off, run in and sink, or slow down to look at it for a while?

This is the debate we should, indeed must, have.

A link to this article - http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=bjoy&date=20000319&query=Wired

A link to the Seattle Times archives on this issue http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/search?source=search&skip=0&maxReturn=10&section=*&period=weekly&query=Wired&searchType=date

A link to the Joy article… http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html