If you've been hearing the latest stuff about computers taking over the world, and you're worried your iMac might conspire with your Palm Pilot and murder you in the night, I suggest you take a vacation and do some reading.
You could buy the latest issue of Wired and read "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who claims the human race is threatened by advances in robotics, nanotechnology and genetic engineering.Or you could read something much better written and more prescient. Go online or, better, go to a real bookstore and find a short story by E.M. Forster called "The Machine Stops."
The author of "A Passage to India" and "A Room With a View" wrote this science fiction story in 1909, and it presents a much more interesting technological dystopia (a utopia you don't want) than the one nearly a hundred years later in Wired.
For one thing, you don't have to put up with Joy's self-absorption (he's lived in Aspen for the past decade, after all) and his name-dropping, as in "my friend David Gelernter" and "my friend Amory Lovins." One day there may be computers as intelligent as humans, but I doubt there ever will be computers as egocentric. Joy is selling us the idea that computers could self-replicate and take control of the world, or genetically engineered diseases could kill us. He begins his argument by dropping the most attention-getting name of all.
He quotes mad bomber Ted Kaczynski, who wrote in his manifesto that computer systems could become so powerful that human beings will be incapable of making the decisions to keep them running.
Some people survive Forster's dystopia, though those who rejected the Machine and were sentenced to live above ground. Intriguingly enough, those inheritors of the Earth are called the Homeless.
Joy's argument is that the human race can make itself obsolete through the combination of genetic engineering, robotics and the ability to engineer at the molecular level. To the threat of nuclear weapons, we can add the threat of self-replicating plagues or machines.
Joy calls these instruments of "knowledge-based mass destruction," or KMD. He advocates the voluntary "relinquishment" by scientists of dangerous genetic, nanotechnological and robotic (GNR) research, much as the United States unilaterally renounced the development of biological weapons.
This may be hard, as Joy recognizes, because most GNR research is done by highly competitive private companies who value stock more than the theoretical survival of our species.
Is the human race threatened by what goes on in the flat buildings of Silicon Valley? The human race is always thinking of some way to kill itself, so it's not a bad worry.
The fact is, we don't know where technology is going. All we know is that new technology is coming, and humans are wired to first fear it, then accept it, no matter how awful it is.
"The Machine develops but not on our lies," as Forster wrote. "The Machine proceeds but not to our good."
Still, I'm not shooting my balky iMac quite yet.
Scripps Howard News Service