from the reverberations dept.
Pondering the question of whether one can have too much Joy, a set of commentaries on the issues raised by Bill Joy in his (in)famous article in Wired Magazine (April 2000) have been posted on the KurzweilAI website.
- The first is a lengthy article ("Stop everything…IT'S TECHNO-HORROR!") by George Gilder and Richard Vigilante that originally appeared in the March 2001 issue of The American Spectator. (The article blurb reads, "From Silicon Valley via Aspen, Bill Joy wants to call the police. On science. On technology. On the industry that made him rich. The Left is OverJoyed".)
- In a lengthy response, Ray Kurzweil discusses points of agreement and disagreement with Gilder and Vigilante, as well as Joy. As KurzweilAI summarizes it: "Although George Gilder and Richard Vigilante share Ray Kurzweil's grave concerns about Bill Joy's apparently neo-Luddite calls for relinguishing broad areas of technology, Kurzweil is critical of Gilder and Vigilante's skepticism regarding the feasibility of the dangers."
(Oh, very well — Joy's original article is still available on the web. Some of the earlier reactions to Joyís arguments were covered in the "Media Watch" column in Foresight Update 41, 42, and 43.)
