Bill Joy

[upbeat music] This is The Big Story from Wired.

You're listening to Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, written by Bill Joy, originally published on April first, two thousand.

Our most powerful twenty-first century technologies, robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech, are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

AI can make businesses faster.

Um, and I'll just say, when I lived in s- in, in, in San Francisco, it was the time The Matrix came out while I lived there.

Um, and, and, and at around that same time, a friend of mine, um, named Bill Joy, who was the guy who wrote Berkeley Unix and was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, um, wrote a piece for a magazine that I was working for among other... that, that where I'd worked for, for a long time in various capacities, which was Wired.

And, and Bill wrote this story kind of in reaction to Ray Kurzweil's book, [clears throat]

Hmm

Singularity is still a concept that we grapple with largely because of him, but, you know, time passed.

And, and those were grim scenarios, you know? Uh, Keanu Reeves in a pod with a thing in the back of his neck.

Bill Joy's The Future Doesn't Need Us.

I mean, boy, that was dark, dark stuff.

Well, that's what we need to worry about with AI, actually.

You know, what happens when it can do anything? I think I quoted this last week, I mean, that Bill Joy, the former CTO of Sun Microsystems, you know, had a very famous quote.

You know, "The question isn't whether they're going to be intelligent, it's whether they're going to be friendly." So, um, it's what we've gotta consider.

And a bacteria isn't friendly or evil.

that.

It's like there's an old saying that Bill Joy, who was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, which was monster back in the day, And he has this quotation where he said, no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work somewhere else.

Which I think is so good.

We think, oh, get them all in the office.

There's one great story when I was at Integral.

Bill Joy was a partner at Kleiner Perkins for several years.

Previously

at Sun.