2003–11–19

Bill Joy interview at Wired

Back in April, 2000 Wired published Bill Joy’s article: Why the future doesn’t need us. If you never got around to reading it I’d strongly suggest you do.

Just this month Wired has an interview with Joy which is also worth reading. Wired 11.12: ‘Hope Is a Lousy Defense.’

And yet you’ve been famously cool about Linux. Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux…

You did once say that we shouldn’t “let the future just happen.” Haven’t laissez-faire and free markets won out over planned economies?

Our problem is no longer “going faster,” getting to the future as fast as possible, but rather dealing with limits - limiting our own greed to avoid disaster in the environment and limiting what rogue individuals and states can do. Market mechanisms don’t address these problems. Things that aren’t accounted for in the cost equations - especially catastrophic events, the value of our survival - don’t get dealt with…

Are you any more at peace with what you see coming?

Not when the forces at play are so powerful that we have such strongly negative possible outcomes. Do we care whether we get a police state without civil liberties because the government’s “protecting us” from terrorists? I think we do care. Are people paying enough attention to stop it? I don’t think so.