Why the Future Doesn’t

Need Us?
Edgar Menor, RPh.
Isabela State University – Cauayan Campus
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Identify moral issues and standards in using modern technologies

• Discuss the effects of the interplay between technology and humanity through the dilemma(s) they face

• Evaluate contemporary human experience in order to strengthen and enlighten the human person functioning
in society.
 INTRODUCTION

• In April of 2000, Bill Joy ignited a heated discussion concerning the role of technology in modern society.

• His article in Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” became the focus of a growing
concern that technological advances are coming so quickly and are so dramatic that they threaten the
future existence of humanity itself.

• He argues that the 21st century technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics
(GNR) are a great threat that they might wipe out the human race from face of the Earth.

• In this module, we will focus in discussing the article of Bill Joy on “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” and
dig deeper on the concept of Artificial Intelligences through watching a documentary film.
 LEARNING CONTENT

• In the Philippines, modern technology has gradually flourished.

• It is something that we use in our everyday lives because it makes the tasks we come across in our daily
activities much easier.

• Without a doubt, technology can help to make a society more productive, and growing productivity is a
major predictor for future increases in standards of living.

• However, technology can likewise lead to large impact on a person’s physical, mental, psychological aspect
if abused thoroughly.

• It can cause harm to both the environment and individuals.

LESSON 1. An Argument on Dangers of Technology to Humanity

• Bill Joy argues that humanity is in danger from technologies that he believes are just around the corner.
•
• His concern is that robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology present risks unlike anything we
have created in the past.

• The key to understanding these new risks is the fact that these technologies share one remarkable
potential; that is, self-replication.

• Recently, some concerns of the people is about the effects of technology.

• The most dominant concern these days is artificial technology (AI) that would replace people in jobs.

• People worry that robots and the internet might eventually replace people in the work field.
 An Argument on Dangers of Technology to Humanity

• Joy believes that we will have intelligent robots by 2030, nano replicators by 2020, and that the genetic
revolution is already upon us.

• Hollywood has given us many stories of that kind of technology gone wrong; the Terminator series for
example.

• Surprisingly, Bill Joy concludes “The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development
of the technologies that are too dangerous by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.”
 LESSON 2. On Artificial Intelligence
• Artificial intelligence (AI) is wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart
machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.

• AI is an interdisciplinary science with multiple approaches, but advancements in machine learning and
deep learning are creating a paradigm shift in virtually every sector of the tech industry.

• In the paper published in the internet society organization, although artificial intelligence evokes thoughts
of science fiction, artificial intelligence already has many uses today, examples are:

• Email filtering: Email services use artificial intelligence to filter incoming emails. Users can train their
spam filters by marking emails as “spam”.
 On Artificial Intelligence
• Personalization: Online services use artificial intelligence to personalize your experience.

• Services, like Amazon or Netflix, “learn” from your previous purchases and the purchases of other users in
order to recommend relevant content for you.

• Fraud detection: Banks use artificial intelligence to determine if there is strange activity on your account.
Unexpected activity, such as foreign transactions, could be flagged by the algorithm.

• Speech recognition: Applications use artificial intelligence to optimize speech recognition functions.
Examples include intelligent personal assistants, e.g. Amazon’s “Alexa” or Apple’s “Siri” many uses today.
 On Artificial Intelligence
• The advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics poses challenges on its socio-economic impacts,
transparency, bias and accountability, new uses of data, security and safety, ethics and new ecosystems.
With this, adoption of ethical standard is needed to promote ethical considerations in innovation policies

• Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks

commonly associated with intelligent beings.

• The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with
the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning,
generalize, or learn from past experience.
 SUMMARY
• Bill Joy’s article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” provides an extensive analysis of the new technologies’
development in terms of their ethical dimensions.

• Examining the nature of NGR technologies, the author defines their destructive power as self-replication,
which complicates or even makes impossible keeping them under control.

• This power creates the weapon of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), which is dangerous enough
to assume the extinction of humanity in the coming years.

• Joy suggests the establishment of new ethics as the possible prevention of this threat.

• However, his belief in this is not convincing.

• As NGR technologies have mostly commercial uses they would be developed with lucrative purposes even if
the scientific community accepts the common ethical rules regarding this researches.

• Their extreme destructive power makes me rather pessimistic regarding the future of the Earth.
Do you have any questions?
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!

menoredgar12@gmail.com
ISU Cauayan Campus.