In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of the computer company Sun Microsystems, sounded an alarm about technology. In an article in Wired titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Joy wrote that we should ‘limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.’ He feared a future in which our inventions casually wipe us from the face of the planet.
The concerns expressed in Joy’s article, which prompted accusations of Luddism from tech advocates, sound remarkably similar to those now being voiced by some leaders in Silicon Valley that artificial intelligence might soon surpass us in intelligence and decide we humans are expendable. However, while ‘sentient robots’ were a part of what had spooked Joy, his main worry was about another technology that he figured might make that prospect imminently possible. He was troubled by nanotechnology: the engineering of matter at the scale of nanometres, comparable to the size of molecules.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say Joy was troubled by the version of nanotechnology that he had read about in the book Engines of Creation (1986) by the engineer K Eric Drexler, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the close of the 20th century, it was nanotechnology, not AI (which didn’t seem to be getting very far), that loomed large as the enabler of utopias and dystopias. Drexler’s book described a vision of nanotech that could work wonders, promising, in Joy’s words, ‘incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold’ as well as ‘[low-cost] spaceflight … and restoration of extinct species.’
Dismissing it because tech bros championed it is silly, but believing them when they are serial liars and have given no reason to believe them is more silly. Why should i consider a thing they say until there is proof they’re not full of shit again?
Watch the peer reviewed research papers and you’ll find a better baseline of truth.
Avoid the peer reviewed articles that turned out to be fake.
Of course. You can always find counterexamples. What matters is that you understand that certain sources of information have higher trustworthiness than others.
Have you ever actually sat down and read through a journal paper in enough depth to understand it enough to understand the direction the research is going and of it’s making progress? It takes like 2 hours to go through one when you’re already well-versed in the field. It’s basically impossible for a laymen to do that legwork. It’s a lot of work for someone in an adjacent field.
We really, really need to have honest, trustworthy science journalism instead of freaking out whenever tech bros tweet or lie to investors, and telling laymen to read journals so they know what’s going on is asking the impossible.
I mean I have, but I know I’m an anomaly. Still, even reading abstracts is a pretty good way to figure out what’s going on.
A good flow I think a lot of people could do is:
More often than not, the clickbait headline is directly refuted by the abstract and you don’t need to dive in deeper.
You can’t even trust abstracts without looking at details of the methods these days unless it’s in one of the more reputable journals.