Bill Joy: nanobots

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The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

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A nanotechnology immune system would work similarly both in the human body and in the environment and would include nanobot sentinels that could detect rogue self-replicating nanobots. When a threat was detected, defensive nanobots capable of destroying the intruders would rapidly be created (eventually with self-replication) to provide an effective defensive force. Bill Joy and other observers have pointed out that such an immune system would itself be a danger because of the potential of "autoimmune" reactions (that is, the immune-system nanobots attacking the world they are supposed to defend).42 However this possibility is not a compelling reason to avoid the creation of an immune system.

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There have been discussions and proposals to guide AI development toward what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls "friendly AI"30 (see the section "Protection from 'Unfriendly' Strong AI," p. 420). These are useful for discussion, but it is infeasible today to devise strategies that will absolutely ensure that future AI embodies human ethics and values. Returning to the Past? In his essay and presentations Bill Joy eloquently describes the plagues of centuries past and how new self-replicating technologies, such as mutant bioengineered pathogens and nanobots run amok, may bring back long-forgotten pestilence. Joy acknowledges that technological advances, such as antibiotics and improved sanitation, have freed us from the prevalence of such plagues, and such constructive applications, therefore, need to continue.

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·Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as "respirocytes" (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering). ·Nanobots will interact with biological neurons to vastly extend human experience by creating virtual reality from within the nervous system. ·Billions of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain will also vastly extend human intelligence.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, the leaders pushing for the proposal gave every sign of believing that APM-level fabrication technologies meant nanobugs, false promises, and nonsensical threats, and they seemed to think that these ideas were all of a piece and nothing more than a pernicious error. My name had already been tarred by the mythology, and now Bill Joy had inadvertently set me up for attack. Public documents offer a glimpse of the state of mind in the leadership’s inner circle. In a report from a September workshop, their de facto scientific spokesman, Richard Smalley,* indicated what they saw as the threat: The principal fear is that it may be possible to create a new life form, a self-replicating nanoscale robot, a “nanobot”. . . . These nanobots are both enabling fantasy and dark nightmare in the popularized conception of nanotechnology. . . .

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., Amendments to Definitions, National Nanotechnology Initiative Amendments Act of 2008, 110th Congress, 2007–2009. 206the 2004 National Nanotechnology Initiative Strategic Plan: National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology Subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (December 2004) (www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/nano/reports/sp_report_nset_final.pdf). 207published an article on future technologies in Wired magazine: Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Issue 8.04 (April 2000): 238–262. 208The principal fear is that it may be possible to create: R. E. Smalley, “Nanotechnology, Education, and the Fear of Nanobots,” in Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, a report from a National Science Foundation workshop on September 28–29, 2000 (www.wtec.org/nanoreports/nanosi.pdf). Here and in Scientific American, Smalley repeated, elaborated, and reinforced misconceptions that came out of popular fiction. 208equated APM . . . with swarms of dangerous nanobots: R. E. Smalley, “Of Chemistry, Love and Nanobots,” Scientific American 285, no. 3 (September 2001): 76–77 (cohesion.rice.edu/naturalsciences/smalley/emplibrary/sa285-76.pdf).

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In other words, the clamor was all about nanorobotic bugs, funding, fear, and politics, far from anything reality based; in 2001, in the pages of Scientific American, Smalley explicitly equated APM, in the most general sense, with swarms of dangerous nanobots (potentially intelligent and conspiratorial, no less). Around that time, in his congressional testimony and other statements, atomically precise fabrication swung back and forth between being essential and impossible while my role in the field, in his view, swung from my being the man he acknowledged as inspiring his enthusiasm for nanotechnology, to my being an ignorant fellow, beyond reach of reason, and guilty of scaring “our children” with tales of monster nanobots that he claimed were my invention. (Smalley subsequently spoke out against Darwin.)

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

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By late in this century, when the techniques of self-assembly are finally mastered, we can think about commercial applications of replicators. GRAY GOO? Some people, including Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, have expressed reservations about nanotechnology, writing that it’s only a matter of time before the technology runs wild, devours all the minerals of the earth, and spits out useless “gray goo” instead. Even Prince Charles of England has spoken out against nanotechnology and the gray-goo scenario. The danger lies in the key property of these nanobots: they can reproduce themselves. Like a virus, they cannot be recalled once they are let loose into the environment.

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But one way to overcome this problem is to create a nanobot, a still- hypothetical molecular robot. These nanobots have several key properties. First, they can reproduce themselves. If they can reproduce once, then they can, in principle, create an unlimited number of copies of themselves. So the trick is to create just the first nanobot. Second, they are capable of identifying molecules and cutting them up at precise points. Third, by following a master code, they are capable of reassembling these atoms into different arrangements. So the task of rearranging 1026 atoms is reduced to making a similar number of nanobots, each one designed to manipulate individual atoms.

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As the decades pass, there will be plenty of time to design safeguards against nanobots that run amok. For example, one can design a fail-safe system so that, by pressing a panic button, all the nanobots are rendered useless. Or one could design “killer bots,” specifically designed to seek out and destroy nanobots that have run out of control. Another way to deal with this is to study Mother Nature, who has had billions of years of experience with this problem. Our world is full of self-replicating molecular life-forms, called viruses and bacteria, that can proliferate out of control and mutate as well. However, our body has also created “nanobots” of its own, antibodies and white blood cells in our immune system that seek out and destroy alien life-forms.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

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Just like coal blackened the skies when humans first started burning it, there are concerns that the earth could become littered with nanodust. Some even see a day when tiny and intelligent nano robots, or “nano-bots,” would be able to self-replicate and pose a danger to all life on earth. This leads us then to an important question: is nanotech the coal of the second industrial revolution, and could its use lead to greater destruction than we have ever seen before? PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE VERSUS INNOVATION Perhaps the most famous critic of nanotechnology is Bill Joy, a cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. In a Wired magazine article in 2000, Joy worried that “we are being propelled into a new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.”

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Harris (New York: Springer, 2010), pp. 685–805. 60 Prachi Patel, “Nano Sponge for Oil Spills,” MIT Technology Review, June 2, 2008, www.technologyreview.com/nanotech/20846/. 61 “First Generation Prototype,” SeaSwarm, 2010, http://senseable.mit.edu/seaswarm/ss_prototype.html. 62 Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000, www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html. The idea that nanobots will get out of control and consume all of the earth’s biomass is often referred to as the “gray goo” problem. 63 The Charlie Rose Show, November 26, 2002, www.michaelcrichton.net/video-charlierose-11-26-02.html. 64 See Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). 65 For more on issue self-replicating technology, or the “gray goo” problem, see Robert A.

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In a Wired magazine article in 2000, Joy worried that “we are being propelled into a new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.” Specifically, he worried about robots, engineered organisms, and nano-bots that can self-replicate. “A bomb is blown up only once,” he wrote, “but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.”62 Such a scenario was scary enough for fiction writer Michael Crichton to seize upon as the main theme for his 2002 book Prey, in which a cloud of predator-programmed nano-bots escape from the lab where they were made. When television interviewer Charlie Rose asked Crichton why he chose self-replicating technology as his subject, Crichton replied that he wanted to write about the “Frankenstein” of today.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The siren calls for broad relinquishment are effective because they paint a picture of future dangers as if they were released on today’s unprepared world. The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with the dangers. When we have “gray goo” (unrestrained nanobot replication), we will also have “blue goo” (“police” nanobots that combat the “bad” nanobots). The story of the twenty-first century has not yet been written, so we cannot say with assurance that we will successfully avoid all misuse. But the surest way to prevent the development of the defensive technologies would be to relinquish the pursuit of knowledge in broad areas.

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Nanoengineered fuel cells and solar cells will provide clean energy. Nanobots in our physical bodies will destroy pathogens, remove debris such as misformed proteins and protofibrils, repair DNA, and reverse aging. We will be able to redesign all of the systems in our bodies and brains to be far more capable and durable. And that’s only the beginning. There are also salient dangers. The means and knowledge exist in a routine college bioengineering lab to create unfriendly pathogens more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Unrestrained nanobot replication (“unrestrained” being the operative word here) would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise.

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Your lecture had a very high idea density, so I may have misheard some details. With regard to cryonics reanimation, I fully agree with you that preserving structure (i.e., information) is the key requirement, that it is not necessary to preserve cellular functionality. I have every confidence that nanobots will be able to go in and fix every cell, indeed every little machine in every cell. The key is to preserve the information. And I’ll also grant that we could lose some of the information; after all, we lose some information every day of our lives anyway. But the primary information needs to be preserved.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

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Drexler worried that such a situation could, however, grow quickly out of control as assemblers began to convert all organic matter around them into the next generation of nanomachines in a process he famously called the “gray goo scenario,” one in which the earth might be reduced to a lifeless mass overrun by nanomachines. How might such a doomsday scenario play out? Let’s say in the future billions of nano-bots were released to clean up an oil spill disaster in an ocean. Sounds great, except that a minor programming error might lead the nano-bots to consume all carbon-based objects (fish, plants, plankton, coral reefs) instead of just the hydrocarbons in the oil. The nano-bots might consume everything in their path, “turning the planet to dust.” To understand just how quickly this might happen, consider the example Drexler provides in his book: Imagine such a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself …[T]he first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight.

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Bridges and airplanes might be made from the material one day, and it will likely have a profound impact on the world of electronics. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, nanotechnology “will leave virtually no aspect of life untouched and is expected to be in widespread use by 2020.” Perhaps nanotech’s greatest contributions may come in the field of medicine, where a therapeutic nano-bot, a thousand times smaller than a cancer cell, could enter the bloodstream with nanoscale gold particles enlaced with anticancer drugs, bringing them directly to the precise location of a tumor. Moreover, nanotechnology, like synthetic biology, can be a form of programmable matter—matter that can change its physical properties such as shape, density, and conductivity based on user input or autonomous sensing.

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Though largely at the research-and-development stage today, nanoscale machines will make it possible to create nano-robots—further accelerating the already exponential changes going on in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, someday creating robots a thousand times smaller than our own cells. These nano-bots will have huge implications for the field of robotics, able to build anything from rocket ships to injectable medical devices. Nanotechnology will also be immensely impactful in the world of computer processing, allowing us to build computers that are mindblowingly powerful—a nano-computer the size of a sugar cube could have more processing power than exists in the entire world today.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

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(Presumably alongside Oscar, Max More’s goldendoodle, who also has a storage flask awaiting him.) Ray Kurzweil is an Alcor customer, but it’s clearly a fallback position; his real hope is not to die at all and instead to live long enough to reach the point where his failing cells can be repaired by nanobots in the blood. In fact, he says, those nanobot blood cells could perhaps power their own movement, dispensing with the need for a heart, which is after all just a large pump prone to failure. And Kurzweil’s pretty sure we’ll someday be able to connect our brains directly to the cloud. By the time we can implant a hundred thousand electrodes per square inch of scalp, there will be “no need to read a book—the computer just squirts its contents into your head.”14 Remember, this is the chief scientist at what is by some measures the biggest company in the planet’s history.

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That’s worth knowing, but it doesn’t answer the question of whether we should proceed. To figure that out, we need to think through other, even deeper, practical problems that come with change at this scale and at this speed. For instance, the end of the world. * * * Long ago—way back in 2000—Bill Joy, then chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, wrote a remarkable essay for Wired magazine called “The Future Does Not Need Us.” Joy, the father of the UNIX operating system, argued that the new technologies starting to emerge might go very badly wrong: fatal plagues from genetically engineered life forms, for instance, or robots that would take over and push us aside.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

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In Engines of Creation, Drexler called it the “gray goo” scenario and noted ominously that it “makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.”19 Joy thought that something of an understatement, writing that “[g]ray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.”20 Yet more fuel was thrown on the fire in 2002 when Michael Crichton published his best-selling novel Prey—which portrayed swarming clouds of predatory nanobots and opened with an introduction that, once again, quoted passages from Drexler’s book. Public concern over gray goo and feasting nanobots was only part of the problem. Other scientists were beginning to question whether molecular assembly was feasible at all. Most prominent among the skeptics was the late (and aptly named) Richard Smalley, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on nano-scale materials.

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But if they say it’s impossible, they’re probably wrong.” The debate intensified and became more personal, culminating with Smalley accusing Drexler of having “scared our children” and then concluding that “while our future in the real world will be challenging and there are real risks, there will be no such monster as the self-replicating mechanical nanobot of your dreams.”21 The nature and magnitude of nanotechnology’s future impact will depend in large measure on whether Drexler or Smalley ultimately prove to be correct in their assessment of the feasibility of molecular assembly. If Smalley’s pessimism prevails, then nanotechnology will continue to be a field focused primarily on the development of new materials and substances.

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Under the purview of the NNI, virtually all the nanotechnology funding went to research based on relatively traditional techniques in chemistry and materials science; the science of molecular assembly and manufacturing ended up with little or nothing. A number of factors were behind the sudden shift away from molecular manufacturing. In 2000, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy wrote an article for Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” In his article, Joy highlighted the possibly existential dangers associated with genetics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Drexler himself had discussed the possibility of out-of-control, self-replicating molecular assemblers that might use us—and just about everything else—as a kind of feedstock.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Development and use of molecular manufacturing appears to pose no risk of creating free-range replicators by accident at any point. Deliberately designing a functional self-replicating free-range nanobot would be no small task. In addition to making copies of itself, the robot also would have to survive in the environment, move around (either actively or by drifting - if it were small enough) , find usable raw materials, and convert what it finds into feedstock and power, which entails sophisticated chemistry. The robot also would require a relatively large computer to store and process the full blueprint of such a complex device. A nanobot or nanomachine missing any part of this functionality could not function as a free-range replicator ( Phoenix and Drexler, 2004).

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The range of structures that could be built with such technology greatly exceeds that accessible to the biological molecular assemblers (such as ribosome) that exist in nature. Among the things that a nanofactory could build: another nanofactory. A sample of potential applications : • microscopic nanobots for medical use • vastly faster computers • very light and strong diamondoid materials • new processes for removing pollutants from the environment • desktop manufacturing plants which can automatically produce a wide range of atomically precise structures from downloadable blueprints • inexpensive solar collectors • greatly improved space technology Introduction 25 • mass-produced sensors o f many kinds • weapons, both inexpensively mass-produced and improved conventional weapons, and new kinds of weapons that cannot be built without molecular nanotechnology.

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Phoenix and Treder review a number of global catastrophic risks that could arise with such an advanced manufacturing technology, including war, social and economic disruption, destructive forms of global governance, radical intelligence enhancement, environmental degradation, and 'ecophagy' (small nanobots replicating uncontrollably in the natural environment, consuming or destroying the Earth's biosphere) . In conclusion, they offer the following rather alarming assessment: In the absence of some type of preventive or protective force, the power of molecular manufacturing products could allow a large number of actors of varying types including individuals, groups, corporations, and nations - to obtain sufficient capability to destroy all unprotected humans.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Boston College researchers have already built a chemically powered nanomotor that is just seventy-eight atoms in size, while those at a university in the Netherlands have made a solar-powered engine just fifty-eight atoms in size. Tiny engines allow tiny machines. And tiny machines may mean teeny-tiny robots, or “nanobots.” A major advancement in these happened in 2007, when David Leigh, a professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, revealed that he had built a “nanomachine,” whose parts consisted of single molecules. When asked to describe to a normal person the significance of his discovery, Leigh said it would be difficult to predict.

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Such machines are still fairly limited in military applications; early models can only do things like copy a plant’s photosynthesis or move a molecule of water around. But military analysts see the potential of these prototypes’ one day becoming weapons that work at the molecular level, such as tiny missiles that could truly hit with pinpoint precision or nanobots designed to deconstruct a target from the inside out. Such minuscule designs actually mandate that the systems will have to have high autonomy, carrying out their missions without human controllers. First, to be useful, the robots will have to be “organic” to the team. That is, they will have to be relatively easy to use, not require special training, and if the goal is to saturate the battlefield, not require each and every small robot to have a soldier somewhere having to stop his mission and fly it.

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Mims, Norman Ministry of Trade and Industry, Japanese Minority Report (film) Minsky, Marvin Mirsad (drone) Mitchell, Billy MITRE company Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS) Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS) Moffett, William Moltke, Helmut von (the elder) Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Lewis) Monroe, Marilyn Montecito (computer) Moore, Gordon Moore’s law Moravec, Hans Mori, Masahiro mothership concept MQ-8 Fire Scout (robot) mud battery MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment Vehicle) Mullen, Michael Multi-Function Agile Remote-Controlled Robot (MARCBOT) Murphy, Eddie (actor) Murphy, Edward (researcher) Murphy’s law Murray, Scott Musharraf, Pervez Myers, Mike My Lai massacre MySpace Nagl, John Nagle, Matthew Nahikian, Edward nanobots Napoleon I, emperor of France National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) National Center for Defense Robotics National Defense National Defense Authorization Act of 2001, National Institutes of Health National Missile Defense National Science Board National Science Foundation National Security Council Naval Academy, U.S.

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Workers (consumers) in the West—supported by their lucrative online collaboration and piecemeal work—will be eager purchasers of these imports for decades to come. Ultimately, it is possible that advanced nanotechnology may begin to be deployed in the manufacturing sector. Nano-manufacturing will involve manipulating matter at the molecular and perhaps even atomic level. Self-replicating “nano-bots” may be designed to build products from the ground up. Nonetheless, all those millions of low wage workers will remain indispensable to the production process. Does this view of the future really seem more likely—more down to earth—than what I have presented? Can we expect this forecast to hold true decade after decade as technology continues advancing at its geometric pace?

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If it broadens to the degree that machines begin to encroach on a substantial fraction of the jobs that support consumers, the viability of capitalism will ultimately be threatened—unless, of course, our economic rules are adapted to reflect the new reality. *[ These issues are beyond the scope of this book. For a good introduction to this area, I’d recommend reading “Why the future doesn’t need us,” an article written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy for the April, 2000 issue of Wired Magazine. Web: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html ] About / Contacting the Author Martin Ford is the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. He has over 25 years experience in the fields of computer design and software development.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

In fact, a lot of the benefits that are attributed to the Singularity are due to nanotechnology, not artificial intelligence. Engineering at an atomic scale may provide, among other things: immortality, by eliminating on the cellular level the effects of aging; immersive virtual reality, because it’ll come from nanobots that take over the body’s sensory inputs; and neural scanning and uploading of minds to computers. However, say skeptics, out-of-control nano robots might endlessly reproduce themselves, turning the planet into a mass of “gray goo.” The “gray goo” problem is nanotechnology’s most well-known Frankenstein face.

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I’ve read almost every word Kurzweil has published, and listened to every available audio recording, podcast, and video. In 1999 I interviewed him at length for a documentary film that was in part about AI. I know what he’s written and said about the dangers of AI, and it isn’t much. Surprisingly, however, he was indirectly responsible for the subject’s most cogent cautionary essay—Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” In it, Joy, a programmer, computer architect, and the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, urges a slowdown and even a halt to the development of three technologies he believes are too deadly to pursue at the current pace: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

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Kurzweil’s book does underline the dangers of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, but it gives only a couple of anemic pages to strong AI, the old name for AGI. And in that chapter he also argues that relinquishment, or turning our backs on some technologies because they’re too dangerous, as advocated by Bill Joy and others, isn’t just a bad idea, but an immoral one. I agree relinquishment is unworkable. But immoral? “Relinquishment is immoral because it would deprive us of profound benefits. We’d still have a lot of suffering that we can overcome and therefore have a moral imperative to do that. Secondly, relinquishment would require a totalitarian system to ban the technology.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

In April 2000, there was a lengthy opinion piece in Wired titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” by Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. He warned: Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology—pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. . . . [O]ne bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

The future of robotics can be inclusive and democratic, reflecting the efforts and hopes of all citizens. And the new laws of robotics can guide us on this journey. 2 Healing Humans There are two AI dreams in medicine. The first is utopian, straight out of science fiction novels. Care robots will spot and treat any disease, instantly. Nanobots will patrol our veins and arteries, busting clots and repairing damaged tissues. Three-dimensional printed organs, bone, and skin will keep us all looking and feeling young well into our eighties and nineties. With enough luck, even brains can be uploaded for perpetual safekeeping, with robotic bodies sleeving indestructible minds.1 Whatever its long-term merits, that sci-fi vision is far, far off—if it ever arrives at all.

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.… I suggested it as a thought experiment at a DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects] workshop a few years ago, and one of the military brass present said matter-of-factly, ‘That’s feasible’ ”; The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 121. 10. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 1, 2000, https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/. 11. Brad Turner, “Cooking Protestors Alive: The Excessive-Force Implications of the Active Denial System,” Duke Law & Technology Review 11 (2012): 332–356. 12. Michael Schmitt, “Regulating Autonomous Weapons Might Be Smarter than Banning Them,” Just Security, August 10, 2015, https://www.justsecurity.org/25333/regulating-autonomous-weapons-smarter-banning/. 13.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Now it costs a few thousand dollars.48 Companies like 23andMe, Navigenics, and deCODE offer commercial testing services from $99.49 In the field of ‘genome editing’, scientists search for problematic genes and actively intervene to change or remove them. Nanomedicine, the use of nanotechnology in a medical setting, is another field. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s seventy-year-old prediction that we might one day ‘swallow the surgeon’50 has come true—there are already small nanobots that are able to swim through our bodies, relaying images, delivering targeted drugs, and attacking particular cells with a precision that makes even the finest of surgeons’ blades look blunt. (At Google X, one of Google’s research facilities, they are said to be developing a version of this.51) Non-humans are also playing a role.

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See Michael Spence, ‘Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets’, Nobel Prize Lecture, 8 Dec. 2001. 25 Jonathan Koomey et al., ‘Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing’, Annals of the History of Computing, 33: 3 (2011), 46–54. 26 See ongoing discussions on Kurzweil’s website <www.kurzweilai.net>. Also see Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Wired (Apr. 2000). Kurzweil checks his own homework in ‘How My Predictions are Faring’, Oct. 2010 <http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Faring.pdf> (accessed 27 March 2015). 27 See e.g. Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution (2005), and ‘Coming To an Office Near You’, Economist, 18 Jan. 2014. 28 See e.g. the work of Singularity University at <http://singularityu.org> (accessed 23 March 2015). 29 For a clear introduction to the cloud and cloud computing, and a clear indication of its mounting signifiance, see Kuan Hon and Christopher Millard, ‘Cloud Technologies and Services’, in Cloud Computing Law, ed.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The fusion of human with the latest technology doesn’t stop there. Already there are people trying to embed new senses—and make no mistake of it, GPS is already an addition to the human sensorium, albeit still in an external device—directly into our minds and bodies. Might we one day be able to fill the blood with nanobots—tiny machines—that repair our cells, relegating the organ and hip replacements of today, marvelous as they are, to a museum of antiquated technology? Or will we achieve that not through a perfection of the machinist’s art but through the next steps in the path trod by Luther Burbank? Amazing work is happening today in synthetic biology and gene engineering.

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You inspire me and are a testament to the fact that a corporation too is a human augmentation, enabling us to do things that we could never accomplish on our own. Over my years in the technology industry, I’d like to single out as mentors and sources of inspiration, directly or indirectly, Stewart Brand, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Bill Joy, Bob Scheifler, Larry Wall, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Brian Behlendorf, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Pierre Omidyar, Ev Williams, Mark Zuckerberg, Saul Griffith, and Bill Janeway. I have drawn my map by studying the world you have helped to create.