It's Worth Two Bills
Introduction by Rob Argento
February 2008
The two Bills disagree. Bill Gates talks like technology can take us only higher. Bill Joy begs to differ. Both are Silicon Valley icons. I'd pay two bills to hear that debate, wouldn't you?
Among his many other accolades Bill Joy was a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems. Bill Gates, of course, is the co-founder of Microsoft.
I think I'll never forget how I met Bill Gates. It was year 2000 and we were getting ready for Y2K. I had been consulting for one of his companies in Mountain View, California -- Microsoft TV. Microsoft had bought the old Web TV, an early interactive TV provider: hence "Microsoft TV." There was TV Server and TV Client. The server was a technology for sale that a cable provider, such as Charter, could buy and use to provide interactive TV services for their customers. The client was a set-top box like you'd buy at Best Buy to receive interactive TV services, including Internet access.
Now, I had been asked by the TV Server Program Manager to write a whitepaper for technical decisionmakers explaining the basic functionality of TV Server. Of course, the whitepaper would have a marketing edge to it. You don't just explain what TV Server does, you sell it. You hype it up. You tell readers why only TV Server is the next interactive TV technology provider and why every cable provider must buy TV Server. This is one of the main features about sillyConValley(); The insuperable hype.
So, anyway. I had completed the TV Server whitepaper and Bill Gates had come down to Silicon Valley, a rare event, to give an address at his rather spartan Mountain View campus and to check out the latest and greatest with his new baby, Microsoft TV. Being extremely busy that day -- meaning it was just another day in the Valley -- I had missed Gates's earlier appearance in the auditorium. But, I did not miss Microsoft's chief that day. Because later that afternoon he made his way over to our building where engineering development takes place, and was said to be shuffling the halls accompanied by his very own Praetorian Guard.
So, not to be deterred, I shuffled the halls too, searching for our elusive leader. And I found him. There he was, down the hall from where I worked, in the southwest corner of the building, in an engineering director's office. It was quite a sight: Bill Gates, casually dressed in what could have passed for K-Mart attire and looking more like a fastfood restaurant manager than Microsoft's leader. He was comfortably seated behind a PC, driving the latest interactive TV services, surrounded by a bevy of geeks peering over his shoulder. But something is wrong with this picture, I thought.
Nobody is grinning or making eyes. It all looks like a completely ordinary day. I've seen the guys look more animated over an earlier-than-usual appearance of the cleaning crew, for Pete's sake. This is weird, I am thinking. But I did catch his eye! I, for one, was so excited -- though you would never know it from my mock placid demeanor.
Moments later I managed to slip Bill's security dorks -- they were everywhere -- and strolled on down the hall to Mike's office to discuss some technical details of our server applications (like e-mail, for example) that the two of us were working on. Then suddenly, unannounced, completely unceremoniously, in walks the god himself, his stature and heft impressing you -- no longer that skinny geek who had launched Microsoft two decades earlier.
His extraterrestrial gaze seemingly focuses nowhere. We, on the other hand, are staring intently at him. The silence was deafening. It was a Kodak moment.
But ultimately a disappointing one. Whereas William Irwin Thompson -- author of the brilliant At the Edge of History -- had once written of Joan Baez, "The dimensions of the room visibly altered and light warped as it passed anywhere near her," no such epiphany or drama accompanied the appearance of Bill Gates, the jewel in the crown of Her Highness Technology. And you could only wonder...
Why?
In Why the Future Doesn't Need Us (see below) Bill Joy provides us with a clue. Bill Joy's troubled conscience over the veering information age is reminiscent of Albert Einstein's belated ruminations after crossing the threshold into the nuclear age. Einstein's much earlier work in his earth-shaking Theory of Relativity had unwittingly paved the way to development of the first atom bomb. But it was his letter to FDR in 1939, more than his theoretical work, that was to haunt him once he had witnessed the terror unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The world, of course, has not been the same since.
And though Einstein surely had justification for his letter to the President -- the grave concern that the Nazis would beat the allies to The Bomb -- he nevertheless came to regret it. He was to write, "I made one great mistake in my life...when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made...." Einstein was also to write, "our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the power to make great decisions for good and evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
Bill Joy's apprehensions over the exploding high tech scene come as a shot across the bow of Silicon Valley, in hopes that we might never become sillyConValley();
So why was Bill Gates's grand appearance so conspicuous by its total insipidness, so shamefully lacking in any of Ms. Baez's charisma, so completely joyless and heralding nothing that one might celebrate? Could it be, I wonder, that underneath Mr. Gates's "placid demeanor" skulks a deep angst over what he and Joy both know they are unleashing on the world -- but, as with Einstein, they don't know if there is anything they or anybody else can do about it?
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wired.com
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
By Bill Joy
From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of |read more|
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