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Interview: How much do we need to know?
To limit access to risky information and technologies by bioterrorists, we should price catastrophe into the cost of doing business, rather than regulate things, says Bill Joy. Things judged to be dangerous would be expensive, and the most expensive would be withdrawn.
Originally published in New
Scientist June 17, 2006. Reprinted with permission on KurzweilAI.net
July 10, 2006.
Interview by Gregory T. Huang
Technology doesn't make everyone happy. Just ask computer scientist
Bill Joy, who has pioneered everything from operating systems to
networking software. These days the Silicon Valley guru is best
known for preaching about the perils of technology with a gloom
that belies his name. Joy's message is simple: limit access to information
and technologies that could put unprecedented power into the hands
of malign individuals (what is sometimes called asymmetric warfare).
He is also translating that message into action: earlier this year,
his venture-capital firm announced a $200 million initiative to
fund projects in biodefence and preparation for pandemics. Gregory
T. Huang caught up with Joy at the recent Technology Entertainment
Design conference in Monterey, California.
Do you think your fears about technological abuse have been proven
right since your Wired essay?
When I wrote that essay in 2000, I was very concerned about the
potential for abuse. Throughout history, we dealt with individuals
through the Ten Commandments, cities through individual liberty,
and nation states through mutual non-aggression plus an international
bargain to keep the peace. Now we face an asymmetric situation where
technology is so powerful that it extends beyond nations to individuals
— some with revenge on their minds. On 11 September 2001 I was living
in New York City. Our company had a floor in a building that went
down. I had a friend on a plane that crashed. That was a huge warning
about asymmetric warfare and terrorism.
Did we learn the right lesson?
We can't give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat,
which is what we seem to be doing at the moment, because that is
to give up what makes us a civilisation. A million-dollar act causes
a billion dollars' damage and then a trillion-dollar response that
makes the problem worse. September 11 was essentially a collision
of early 20th-century technology: the aeroplane and the skyscraper.
We don't want to see a collision of 21st-century technology.
What would that sort of collision look like?
A recent article in Science said the 1918 flu is too dangerous to
FedEx: if you want to work on it in a lab, just reconstruct it yourself.
The reason we can do this is a consequence of the fact that new
technologies tend to be digital. You can download gene sequences
of pathogens from the internet. So individuals and small groups
super-empowered by access to self-replicating technologies are clearly
a danger. They can cause a pandemic.
Why do pandemics pose such a huge danger?
AIDS is a sort of pandemic, but it moves slowly. We don't have much
experience with the fast-moving varieties. We are not very good
as a society at adapting to things we don't have gut-level experience
with. People don't understand the magnitude of the problem: in terms
of the number of deaths, there's a factor of 1000 between a pandemic
and a normal flu season. Public policy has not been constructive,
and scientists continue to publish pathogen sequences, which is
really quite dangerous.
Why is it so dangerous?
If in turning AIDS into a chronic disease, or making cocktails of
antivirals for flu, or using systems biology to construct broad-spectrum
cures for many diseases, we make the tools universally available
to people of bad intent, I don't know how we will defend ourselves.
We have only a certain amount of time to come to our senses and
realise some information has to be handled in a different way. We
can reduce the risk greatly without losing much of our ability to
innovate. I understand why scientists are reluctant, but it's the
only ethically responsible thing to do.
So more technology is making the problem worse?
Unfortunately, yes. We need more policy.
What would that look like?
We could use the very strong force of markets. Rather than regulate
things, we could price catastrophe into the cost of doing business.
Right now, if you want approval for things, you go through a regulatory
system. If we used insurance and actuaries to manage risk, we might
have a more rational process. Things judged to be dangerous would
be expensive, and the most expensive would be withdrawn. Drugs would
make it to market on economic estimates of risk not regulatory evaluations
of safety. This process could also be used to make companies more
liable for the environmental consequences of their products. It's
both less regulation and more accountability.
How are you combating the threat of pandemics?
We recently raised $200 million for biodefence and pandemic preparedness.
We have started out focusing on bird flu. We need several antivirals,
better surveillance, rapid diagnostics and new kinds of vaccines
that can be manufactured quickly. If we fill these gaps, we can
reduce the risk of a pandemic.
Do other technological advances excite you?
I have great confidence that we will extend the limits of Moore's
law to give us another factor of 100 in what computer chips can
do. If a computer costs $1000 today, we can have that for $10 in
2020. The challenge is: will we develop educational tools to take
advantage of such devices? That's a great force for peace.
Another area that gives us hope is new materials. The world's urban
population is expected to more than double to 6 billion this century.
We need clean water, energy and transportation. Carbon nanotubes
have incredible properties, and can be applied to develop fuel cells,
make clean water, or make ethanol for electric-powered transport.
My company has dedicated $100 million to this.
How do you see the increasing connectedness of human societies
affecting innovation?
It's diffusing ideas at an incredible rate. You can use communications
and search tools and find out incredible things. You see companies
doing interesting things, and you can find out huge amounts very
quickly. We can write a worldwide research briefing paper in an
hour if we shut the door and unplug the telephone. That's something
you couldn't do before.
What's the downside?
It's like putting a stick in a hornet's nest. We have religious
and secular societies coming into contact, pre-Enlightenment values
conflicting with Enlightenment values. It will be a messy process
of change. Technology has brought western pop culture to the rest
of the world. I'm not a fan of it, but the values it has brought
to the world actually offend people in cultures that have been around
for longer than my particular set of world views.
Will the human race survive the next 100 years?
We have to make it through a pandemic to understand the nature of
that sort of threat. Whether we do that before we unleash the technology,
I'm not sure. Either way, I don't believe we will become extinct
this century, though we could make a pretty big mess. I hope we
can do some sensible things. It is not enough to do great science
and technology, we need sensible policy. We still think that if
we find true things and publish them, good things happen. We should
not be that naive.
If you could ask the god of technology one question, what would
it be?
It seems that a perfect immune system is a disadvantage. If you
are perfectly immune, you cannot evolve. A lot of evolution occurs
because of selective pressure that your perfect immune system would
prevent. This would leave the abusers of biotechnology with the
advantage over the defenders, because society needs to be vulnerable
so it can evolve. My question is, is that true, because it would
prove that we had better limit access to some information. It would
mean not only that we cannot make a perfect immune system, but that
it would be a bad idea.
© 2006 New Scientist
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