A colleague just sent me Bill Joy's dystopian vision of technology, The Future Doesn't Need Us, I assume because of his recently announced departure from Sun.
I must say I wasn't that impressed by it. I find dystopian visions as unconvincing as utopian visions. Typically, such visions paint technology as a general good or evil: Completely embrace technology X or absolutely denounce it.
Fortunately, the future is not a utopia or dystopia, which are both nowhere. (Utopia is a Greek neologism meaning nowhere, suggesting that Utopias are nowhere to be found.) The future is to be found elsewhere, in between these two extremes. Let's call it allotopia: allos (other) + topos (place). Allotopia is not better than the present or worse, just different (other). I find that the devil and god are in the details. At any given moment, I believe we should pursue particular uses of technology X into the future and not pursue other uses.
If all Bill is saying is "let's be careful out there," then I am in complete agreement. If he is saying that exploration of a given technology should never be pursued, then I respectfully disagree.
By the way Bill, allotopia doesn't need us; anymore than it needed the dinosaurs. The sooner humanity gives up its ethnocentric view of existence, the better off we will be. But I find this the most difficult Copernican revolution for people to accept.
6:18:39 AM 
