Why the future doesn't need us. By Bill Joy
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 long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See "Test of Time,"Wired 8.03, page 78.)
So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer - directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.
As we build more and more computers that touch every aspect of our lives we will be creating a Matrix like environment. But unlike the Matrix in which humans and robots compete the reason for our enslavement will be our free will.
At the current rate we are going we are decimating the world and its creatures, but if we are given the choice of actually making ourselves a part of an abstraction removed from what is real we will choose it! In such a condition we will not be subjected to the pains of our bodies or our surrounding conditions, we will in effect become Gods creating our own paradise.
Heaven or hell, as the prophets of the past have described it, is there once we die and leave the body. What we are creating now is a system in which we the human body can perish as long as the mind survives. We are no longer creating a system in which we are subject to the whims of nature, but in which we can subdue nature and live in whatever conditions we may please. We might create a perfect abstraction, but even abstractions fail at a certain point.
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