Article critiquing Bill Joy

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Jun 10 2000 - 11:18:32 MDT


http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue381/item9612.asp provides
a good summary of the criticisms of Bill Joy's call for "relinquishing"
technological advancement and economic growth. Nothing all that new
to readers here, but it is good to see more critical public responses.
Some excerpts:

   Because people in the technical and scientific community have been
   thinking about the problem, they also find Joy's prescriptions --
   which involve bans on research and international controls on science --
   somewhere between frightening and laughable. Such bans have no chance of
   success (look at our efforts in controlling nuclear research in, say,
   Iraq and North Korea for example) and would require the establishment
   of a global police state even to fail plausibly.
   
   Of course, to the extent that such efforts succeed, the cure may be
   worse than the disease. In 1875, Great Britain, then the world's sole
   superpower, was sufficiently concerned about the dangers of the new
   technology of high explosives that it passed an act barring all private
   experimentation in explosives and rocketry. The result was that German
   missiles bombarded London rather than the other way around.
   
   Because of these problems, most people who have thought seriously about
   the problem reject regulatory solutions such as Joy's. Those solutions
   are not only unworkable, but would produce major setbacks for freedom
   and prosperity. Instead, many tend to support what Dartmouth College
   professor Arthur Kantrowitz (in an essay on this topic published more
   than 10 years ago) called the weapon of openness.



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