The other Bill (19 Sep 2002)

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The other Bill (19 Sep 2002)
The corollary to Mr Joy's quest for simplicity is that, as technology becomes ever more accessible to ever more people, those people become ever more reliant on it. This has begun to trouble him. He fears that the speed of technological development may exceed humanity's moral and mental capacity to control it. He first fretted about this in an article for Wired entitled 'Why the future doesn't need us'. In particular, he wrote of the dangers of the 'GNR (genetic nanotechnology robotics) revolution', saying that this putative technology could smother the human race into extinction.'This is a story that discovered me,' Mr Joy admits. 'I just happened to discover that what I saw as a problem no-one else seemed to be talking about.'

Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1324644

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