Ain't Karma a Bitch?

Why the future doesn't need us.

2010-01-28T22:24:00.001+08:00

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 how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1

In the book, you don't discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target.

Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.

Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.2

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote fromThe Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil's book, let them read the quote, and then watch their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec's bookRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world's largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University.Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's argument. For example:

The Short Run (Early 2000s)

Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.

There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.

A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be "ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries" by passing laws decreeing that they be "nice,"3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be "once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot." Moravec's view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction.

I decided it was time to talk to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as the cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect Danny's knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of any other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See "Test of Time,"Wired 8.03, page 78.)

So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer - directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.

But I guess I wasn't totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in Kurzweil's book in which he said, "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." It seemed that he was at peace with this process and its attendant risks, while I was not.

While talking and thinking about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec, I suddenly remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague, by Frank Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We're lucky Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a molecular biologist.) I was also reminded of the Borg ofStar Trek, a hive of partly biological, partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn't I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren't other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?

Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.

Each of these technologies also offers untold promise: The vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger.

What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) - were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively unavailable - raw materials and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.

The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Nothing about the way I got involved with computers suggested to me that I was going to be facing these kinds of issues.

My life has been driven by a deep need to ask questions and find answers. When I was 3, I was already reading, so my father took me to the elementary school, where I sat on the principal's lap and read him a story. I started school early, later skipped a grade, and escaped into books - I was incredibly motivated to learn. I asked lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction.

As a teenager I was very interested in science and technology. I wanted to be a ham radio operator but didn't have the money to buy the equipment. Ham radio was the Internet of its time: very addictive, and quite solitary. Money issues aside, my mother put her foot down - I was not to be a ham; I was antisocial enough already.

I may not have had many close friends, but I was awash in ideas. By high school, I had discovered the great science fiction writers. I remember especially Heinlein'sHave Spacesuit Will Travel and Asimov's I, Robot, with its Three Laws of Robotics. I was enchanted by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to have a telescope to look at the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I checked books on telescope-making out of the library and read about making them instead. I soared in my imagination.

Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own.

I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive.

I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines. Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written.

InThe Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, "breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind.4 In my most ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to give the ideas concrete form.

After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the software I had written - an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi (which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, which became a personal "success disaster" - so many people wanted it that I never finished my PhD. Instead I got a job working for Darpa putting Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be reliable and to run large research applications well. This was all great fun and very rewarding. And, frankly, I saw no robots here, or anywhere near.

Still, by the early 1980s, I was drowning. The Unix releases were very successful, and my little project of one soon had money and some staff, but the problem at Berkeley was always office space rather than money - there wasn't room for the help the project needed, so when the other founders of Sun Microsystems showed up I jumped at the chance to join them. At Sun, the long hours continued into the early days of workstations and personal computers, and I have enjoyed participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and Internet technologies such as Java and Jini.

From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial Revolution has immeasurably improved everyone's life over the last couple hundred years, and I always expected my career to involve the building of worthwhile solutions to real problems, one problem at a time.

I have not been disappointed. My work has had more impact than I had ever hoped for and has been more widely used than I could have reasonably expected. I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting.

But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon.

Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.

I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers, but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineer and device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the incredible possibilities of molecular electronics.

In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC - and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law. For decades, Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential rate of improvement of semiconductor technology. Until last year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore's law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly.

But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.

As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor.

In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent that, even as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future.

But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?

The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas,Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot species.

How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.

A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body, as illustrated on thecover ofWired 8.02.)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.

Genetic engineering promises to revolutionize agriculture by increasing crop yields while reducing the use of pesticides; to create tens of thousands of novel species of bacteria, plants, viruses, and animals; to replace reproduction, or supplement it, with cloning; to create cures for many diseases, increasing our life span and our quality of life; and much, much more. We now know with certainty that these profound changes in the biological sciences are imminent and will challenge all our notions of what life is.

Technologies such as human cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

Given the incredible power of genetic engineering, it's no surprise that there are significant safety issues in its use. My friend Amory Lovins recently cowrote, along with Hunter Lovins, an editorial that provides an ecological view of some of these dangers. Among their concerns: that "the new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not evolutionary, success." (See "A Tale of Two Botanies," page 247.) Amory's long career has been focused on energy and resource efficiency by taking a whole-system view of human-made systems; such a whole-system view often finds simple, smart solutions to otherwise seemingly difficult problems, and is usefully applied here as well.

After reading the Lovins' editorial, I saw an op-ed by Gregg Easterbrook inThe New York Times (November 19, 1999) about genetically engineered crops, under the headline: "Food for the Future: Someday, rice will have built-in vitamin A. Unless the Luddites win."

Are Amory and Hunter Lovins Luddites? Certainly not. I believe we all would agree that golden rice, with its built-in vitamin A, is probably a good thing, if developed with proper care and respect for the likely dangers in moving genes across species boundaries.

Awareness of the dangers inherent in genetic engineering is beginning to grow, as reflected in the Lovins' editorial. The general public is aware of, and uneasy about, genetically modified foods, and seems to be rejecting the notion that such foods should be permitted to be unlabeled.

But genetic engineering technology is already very far along. As the Lovins note, the USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for unlimited release; more than half of the world's soybeans and a third of its corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life.

While there are many important issues here, my own major concern with genetic engineering is narrower: that it gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally, or in a deliberate terrorist act - to create a White Plague.

The many wonders of nanotechnology were first imagined by the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a speech he gave in 1959, subsequently published under the title "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." The book that made a big impression on me, in the mid-'80s, was Eric Drexler'sEngines of Creation, in which he described beautifully how manipulation of matter at the atomic level could create a utopian future of abundance, where just about everything could be made cheaply, and almost any imaginable disease or physical problem could be solved using nanotechnology and artificial intelligences.

A subsequent book,Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler cowrote, imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world where we had molecular-level "assemblers." Assemblers could make possible incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by augmentation of the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the environment, incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers - in fact, any product would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that of wood - spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and restoration of extinct species.

I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after readingEngines of Creation. As a technologist, it gave me a sense of calm - that is, nanotechnology showed us that incredible progress was possible, and indeed perhaps inevitable. If nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present. I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time; I might as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn't make sense, given his vision, to stay up all night, all the time.

Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing them with all the things Drexler described I would give a homework assignment of my own: "Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for extra credit create an antidote."

With these wonders came clear dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said at a nanotechnology conference in 1989, "We can't simply do our science and not worry about these ethical issues."5 But my subsequent conversations with physicists convinced me that nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it wouldn't work anytime soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to Colorado, to a skunk works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet, specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini.

Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This wasnew news, at least to me, and I think to many people - and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back toEngines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called "Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become "engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then. (Having anticipated and described many technical and political problems with nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s "to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies" - most important, nanotechnology.)

The enabling breakthrough to assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20 years. Molecular electronics - the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual molecules are circuit elements - should mature quickly and become enormously lucrative within this decade, causing a large incremental investment in all nanotechnologies.

Unfortunately, as with nuclear technology, it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear military and terrorist uses, and you need not be suicidal to release a massively destructive nanotechnological device - such devices can be built to be selectively destructive, affecting, for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of people who are genetically distinct.

An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.

As Drexler explained:

"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.6 Oops.

It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder - or even impossible - to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman inNature titled "Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It" discusses the discovery that a 32-amino-acid peptide can "autocatalyse its own synthesis." We don't know how widespread this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at "a route to self-reproducing molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing."7

In truth, we have had in hand for years clear warnings of the dangers inherent in widespread knowledge of GNR technologies - of the possibility of knowledge alone enabling mass destruction. But these warnings haven't been widely publicized; the public discussions have been clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.

The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.

This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others.

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds - a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, inPale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan's contribution was not least that of simple common sense - an attribute that, along with humility, many of the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack.

I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the overuse of antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse and had a commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were absolutely necessary, was bad for you.

It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost 70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or even understanding - ourselves.

I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril. The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles me.

We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation are troubling.

The effort to build the first atomic bomb was led by the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was not naturally interested in politics but became painfully aware of what he perceived as the grave threat to Western civilization from the Third Reich, a threat surely grave because of the possibility that Hitler might obtain nuclear weapons. Energized by this concern, he brought his strong intellect, passion for physics, and charismatic leadership skills to Los Alamos and led a rapid and successful effort by an incredible collection of great minds to quickly invent the bomb.

What is striking is how this effort continued so naturally after the initial impetus was removed. In a meeting shortly after V-E Day with some physicists who felt that perhaps the effort should stop, Oppenheimer argued to continue. His stated reason seems a bit strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an invasion of Japan, but because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed, should have foreknowledge of atomic weapons. A more likely reason the project continued is the momentum that had built up - the first atomic test, Trinity, was nearly at hand.

We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite a large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a calculation by Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. A revised calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a three-in-a-million chance. (Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect of atmospheric ignition entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned about the result of Trinity that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the southwest part of the state of New Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear danger of starting a nuclear arms race.

Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some scientists had suggested that the bomb simply be demonstrated, rather than dropped on Japanese cities - saying that this would greatly improve the chances for arms control after the war - but to no avail. With the tragedy of Pearl Harbor still fresh in Americans' minds, it would have been very difficult for President Truman to order a demonstration of the weapons rather than use them as he did - the desire to quickly end the war and save the lives that would have been lost in any invasion of Japan was very strong. Yet the overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman Dyson later said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no."

It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of emotion: first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the people that had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account should another bomb be dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences."

Oppenheimer went on to work, with others, on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which, as Richard Rhodes says in his recent bookVisions of Technology, "found a way to prevent a clandestine nuclear arms race without resorting to armed world government"; their suggestion was a form of relinquishment of nuclear weapons work by nation-states to an international agency.

This proposal led to the Baruch Plan, which was submitted to the United Nations in June 1946 but never adopted (perhaps because, as Rhodes suggests, Bernard Baruch had "insisted on burdening the plan with conventional sanctions," thereby inevitably dooming it, even though it would "almost certainly have been rejected by Stalinist Russia anyway"). Other efforts to promote sensible steps toward internationalizing nuclear power to prevent an arms race ran afoul either of US politics and internal distrust, or distrust by the Soviets. The opportunity to avoid the arms race was lost, and very quickly.

Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."

In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the Soviet Union had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so the nuclear arms race began.

Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentaryThe Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."8

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition - despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.

In 1947,The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began putting a Doomsday Clock on its cover. For more than 50 years, it has shown an estimate of the relative nuclear danger we have faced, reflecting the changing international conditions. The hands on the clock have moved 15 times and today, standing at nine minutes to midnight, reflect continuing and real danger from nuclear weapons. The recent addition of India and Pakistan to the list of nuclear powers has increased the threat of failure of the nonproliferation goal, and this danger was reflected by moving the hands closer to midnight in 1998.

In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but from all of these technologies? How high are the extinction risks?

The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk of human extinction is at least 30 percent,9 while Ray Kurzweil believes we have "a better than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has "always been accused of being an optimist." Not only are these estimates not encouraging, but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction.

Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that we simply move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the galaxy using von Neumann probes, which hop from star system to star system, replicating as they go. This step will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years from now (or sooner if our solar system is disastrously impacted by the impending collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years), but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec at their word it might be necessary by the middle of this century.

What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly in order for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of those (most of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the stars, isn't it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked.

Another idea is to erect a series of shields to defend against each of the dangerous technologies. The Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the Reagan administration, was an attempt to design such a shield against the threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. But as Arthur C. Clarke, who was privy to discussions about the project, observed: "Though it might be possible, at vast expense, to construct local defense systems that would 'only' let through a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such schemes were 'very bright guys with no common sense.'"

Clarke continued: "Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles." 10

InEngines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nanotechnological shield - a form of immune system for the biosphere - to defend against dangerous replicators of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created. But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous - nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself. 11

Similar difficulties apply to the construction of shields against robotics and genetic engineering. These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are trying to protect against.

These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. 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.

Yes, I know, knowledge is good, as is the search for new truths. We have been seeking knowledge since ancient times. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple statement: "All men by nature desire to know." We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on the value of open access to information, and recognize the problems that arise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge. In recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge.

But despite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs.

It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face - the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction.

If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous - then we might understand what we can and should relinquish. Otherwise, we can easily imagine an arms race developing over GNR technologies, as it did with the NBC technologies in the 20th century. This is perhaps the greatest risk, for once such a race begins, it's very hard to end it. This time - unlike during the Manhattan Project - we aren't in a war, facing an implacable enemy that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know.

I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by our collective values, ethics, and morals. If we had gained more collective wisdom over the past few thousand years, then a dialogue to this end would be more practical, and the incredible powers we are about to unleash would not be nearly so troubling.

One would think we might be driven to such a dialogue by our instinct for self-preservation. Individuals clearly have this desire, yet as a species our behavior seems to be not in our favor. In dealing with the nuclear threat, we often spoke dishonestly to ourselves and to each other, thereby greatly increasing the risks. Whether this was politically motivated, or because we chose not to think ahead, or because when faced with such grave threats we acted irrationally out of fear, I do not know, but it does not bode well.

The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.

As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?

We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't trying yet, and the last chance to assert control - the fail-safe point - is rapidly approaching. We have our first pet robots, as well as commercially available genetic engineering techniques, and our nanoscale techniques are advancing rapidly. While the development of these technologies proceeds through a number of steps, it isn't necessarily the case - as happened in the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test - that the last step in proving a technology is large and hard. The breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal.

And yet I believe we do have a strong and solid basis for hope. Our attempts to deal with weapons of mass destruction in the last century provide a shining example of relinquishment for us to consider: the unilateral US abandonment, without preconditions, of the development of biological weapons. This relinquishment stemmed from the realization that while it would take an enormous effort to create these terrible weapons, they could from then on easily be duplicated and fall into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups.

The clear conclusion was that we would create additional threats to ourselves by pursuing these weapons, and that we would be more secure if we did not pursue them. We have embodied our relinquishment of biological and chemical weapons in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).12

As for the continuing sizable threat from nuclear weapons, which we have lived with now for more than 50 years, the US Senate's recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty makes it clear relinquishing nuclear weapons will not be politically easy. But we have a unique opportunity, with the end of the Cold War, to avert a multipolar arms race. Building on the BWC and CWC relinquishments, successful abolition of nuclear weapons could help us build toward a habit of relinquishing dangerous technologies. (Actually, by getting rid of all but 100 nuclear weapons worldwide - roughly the total destructive power of World War II and a considerably easier task - we could eliminate this extinction threat. 13)

Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We are fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the BWC and other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that are naturally much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities.

I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face: The nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military uses, and monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with which radioactivity could be measured. Research on military applications could be performed at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept secret as long as possible.

The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses; given their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespread commercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verification regime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedented scale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual privacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verification to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistance to this loss of privacy and freedom of action.

Verifying the relinquishment of certain GNR technologies will have to occur in cyberspace as well as at physical facilities. The critical issue will be to make the necessary transparency acceptable in a world of proprietary information, presumably by providing new forms of protection for intellectual property.

Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would answer the call - 50 years after Hiroshima - by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the most senior of the surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that all scientists "cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction."14 In the 21st century, this requires vigilance and personal responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass destruction.

Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material needs - and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone.

Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality, while perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream.

I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar Jacques Attali, whose bookLignes d'horizons (Millennium, in the English translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his new bookFraternités, Attali describes how our dreams of utopia have changed over time:

"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to the company of gods and toEternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal City whereLiberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they soughtEquality."

Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in tension in our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia,Fraternity, whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.

This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.

Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies that seems consonant with Attali's Fraternity utopia.

The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key - that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.

Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as "the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." 15

Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.

It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. I see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and relinquishment and in those people I have discovered who are as concerned as I am about our current predicament. I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility - not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.

But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte - as if awareness of what could happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before, and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments are already old hat.

I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns? I am aware of how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about so authoritatively. But does this mean it has reached people? Does this mean we can discount the dangers before us?

Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?

The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.

My continuing professional work is on improving the reliability of software. Software is a tool, and as a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come.

This all leaves me not angry but at least a bit melancholic. Henceforth, for me, progress will be somewhat bittersweet.

Do you remember the beautiful penultimate scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is lying on his couch and talking into a tape recorder? He is writing a short story about people who are creating unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.

He leads himself to the question, "Why is life worth living?" and to consider what makes it worthwhile for him: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Swedish movies, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the apples and pears by Cézanne, the crabs at Sam Wo's, and, finally, the showstopper: his love Tracy's face.

Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us.

My immediate hope is to participate in a much larger discussion of the issues raised here, with people from many different backgrounds, in settings not predisposed to fear or favor technology for its own sake.

As a start, I have twice raised many of these issues at events sponsored by the Aspen Institute and have separately proposed that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences take them up as an extension of its work with the Pugwash Conferences. (These have been held since 1957 to discuss arms control, especially of nuclear weapons, and to formulate workable policies.)

It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was out of the bottle - roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable.

So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up late again - it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone.

1 The passage Kurzweil quotes is from Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto, which was published jointly, under duress, byThe New York Times and The Washington Post to attempt to bring his campaign of terror to an end. I agree with David Gelernter, who said about their decision:

"It was a tough call for the newspapers. To say yes would be giving in to terrorism, and for all they knew he was lying anyway. On the other hand, to say yes might stop the killing. There was also a chance that someone would read the tract and get a hunch about the author; and that is exactly what happened. The suspect's brother read it, and it rang a bell.

"I would have told them not to publish. I'm glad they didn't ask me. I guess."

(Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Free Press, 1997: 120.)

2 Garrett, Laurie.The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Penguin, 1994: 47-52, 414, 419, 452.

3 Isaac Asimov described what became the most famous view of ethical rules for robot behavior in his bookI, Robot in 1950, in his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

4 Michelangelo wrote a sonnet that begins:

Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto
Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all' intelleto.

Stone translates this as:

The best of artists hath no thought to show
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

Stone describes the process: "He was not working from his drawings or clay models; they had all been put away. He was carving from the images in his mind. His eyes and hands knew where every line, curve, mass must emerge, and at what depth in the heart of the stone to create the low relief."

(The Agony and the Ecstasy. Doubleday, 1961: 6, 144.)

5 First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in October 1989, a talk titled "The Future of Computation." Published in Crandall, B. C. and James Lewis, editors.Nanotechnology: Research and Perspectives. MIT Press, 1992: 269. See alsowww.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT01/Nano1.html.

6 In his 1963 novelCat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a gray-goo-like accident where a form of ice called ice-nine, which becomes solid at a much higher temperature, freezes the oceans.

7 Kauffman, Stuart. "Self-replication: Even Peptides Do It." Nature, 382, August 8, 1996: 496. Seewww.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/sak-peptides.html.

8 Else, Jon.The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Atomic Bomb (available at www.pyramiddirect.com).

9 This estimate is in Leslie's bookThe End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, where he notes that the probability of extinction is substantially higher if we accept Brandon Carter's Doomsday Argument, which is, briefly, that "we ought to have some reluctance to believe that we are very exceptionally early, for instance in the earliest 0.001 percent, among all humans who will ever have lived. This would be some reason for thinking that humankind will not survive for many more centuries, let alone colonize the galaxy. Carter's doomsday argument doesn't generate any risk estimates just by itself. It is an argument forrevising the estimates which we generate when we consider various possible dangers." (Routledge, 1996: 1, 3, 145.)

10 Clarke, Arthur C. "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids."Science, June 5, 1998. Reprinted as "Science and Society" inGreetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998. St. Martin's Press, 1999: 526.

11 And, as David Forrest suggests in his paper "Regulating Nanotechnology Development," available atwww.foresight.org/NanoRev/Forrest1989.html, "If we used strict liability as an alternative to regulation it would be impossible for any developer to internalize the cost of the risk (destruction of the biosphere), so theoretically the activity of developing nanotechnology should never be undertaken." Forrest's analysis leaves us with only government regulation to protect us - not a comforting thought.

12 Meselson, Matthew. "The Problem of Biological Weapons." Presentation to the 1,818th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 13, 1999. (minerva.amacad.org/archive/bulletin4.htm)

13 Doty, Paul. "The Forgotten Menace: Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles Still Represent the Biggest Threat to Civilization."Nature, 402, December 9, 1999: 583.

14 See also Hans Bethe's 1997 letter to President Clinton, at www.fas.org/bethecr.htm.

15 Hamilton, Edith.The Greek Way. W. W. Norton & Co., 1942: 35.

Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor ofThe Java Language Specification. His work on theJini pervasive computing technology was featured inWired 6.08.

Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.

近况记录

2009-05-06T20:35:00.002+08:00

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjI2MTE0NjQ=.html
好吧，其实我就是为了贴这个而写这篇简短的bo的，Ryo在大仓的鼓点伴奏下唱Jin写的Care...
亮晶晶是好朋友，大爷的亲友是大爷|||

近况记录
1.最近用Twitter用到崩溃掉，虽然我也没有大很多条就是了
2.去HK的时候赶上Swine flu(H1N1)，坐的是确症病人的同一家航空公司的同一个航班的后一天，住的是和确症病人的酒店隔了n条街的酒店（n<5），妈妈说这个叫缘分，不会碰面的缘分= =
3.XQ是世界的J饭的，看到credit to XQ/= =的时候我会笑疯掉
4.6月HK考SATII，考场在沙田，我真的不想在猪流感大肆世界的今天去那个人流混乱的地方
5.Group 4 Project我竟然当了组长，大概可以挽救我那微乎其微的责任心吧

那些旋律和文字 (1)

2009-04-12T20:28:00.006+08:00

我试着努力回想我那些可以标有显著的tag的日子是怎么过的，于是：

我想起我在2006年最糟糕却也最无畏的日子里一遍一遍地看着和<蜕变>。一边看一边念着，然后狠狠地把眼泪抹了，舔了或者咽了。
那是第一次被逼迫至要如此明确地找一个方向，我看着2004 Summary里面Kazuya如此孤单上天的样子我就泪了。我看着他2003年泰国ML里在Takki身下躺着扭腰的样子的时候我说不出任何话把视频看完了。
那时候疯狂地刻碟，只是都是给别人的。
我爱2004 Summary里Kazuya穿着金色的武士服斩龙的样子，然后把颔扬起，开始用最少年坚定的声音唱月之道。我想我不知道怎么样才会不喜欢他。

我重复着《绊》，不知道我究竟有着怎样的kizuna，我还可以握住谁的手。
我想握住你的手。

我在填写志愿的时候以为未来就是这样子决定了的。然后义务返顾地冲进考场享受最后的时光。那个暑假大约是最逍遥和猖狂的了。虽然我的猖狂看上去也是内敛的。反复播放着six senses的live，我想我会有一个轻松但没有志向的未来。但这样很好，我又很多很多时间去关注他，关注他们，without feeling guilty or irresponsible for myself.

世界是这么突然转变的，或者说世界上的某一微小的人群是如此觉得天崩地裂的：赤西仁先生说他要去美国留学了。然后我说，我也留吧，既然他这个高中辍学的家伙都可以的话。

在那年冬天我看到了我最喜欢的一个Kazuya的样子：他穿着黑色的短风衣外套，围着很长很长的黑白两色的围巾，留着微微卷翘的黑色短发，走在寂静的铁轨上，一个人。他会翘起嘴唇，不是要表达不满或者不耐，而是下意识里倔强的体现。用拇指和食指比划着取景框，因为可以拍到的美丽风景而微微笑。然后用最坚定的眼神望着远方以及无限的困难和可能。

他立马打败了弘人。

我要夸夸他

2009-04-07T18:04:00.002+08:00

1582是好物。接下来，我词穷了，引用：

说说自己觉得有妙到的地方：
一个是一开始的篝火的声...
一个是紧随其后的电子声
一个是小批量反复出现的弦乐声
一个是被电音化的咩咩的声音
一个是听起来很普通的曲调
一个是02：33的高潮...说是电音，但

是听到这个高潮的时候却又莫名的觉得

“啊，和风...”果然是意由心生。

这歌太TMD的好听了！
完完全全超出期待！！！！！！！！

如果冷静评价的话，其实曲调并没有什么
关键是关键是，编曲太BH了！！！
把弦乐和电音混合在一起还这么HX
把叙事的大气和ERO结合的这么完美！

k这歌儿。。。我觉得很有他的风格。
。。ero。。。

不过最特别的是。。。。
通过k的电音声，原音声，女声，chuan_Xi，流水等等不同要素，组成了不同的“角色”和“画面”
同时又通过音乐层次分明的递进，好像“故事”在不断的往前发展这样，不同的“角色”在不断发展的“故事”中，穿揷出现。。
就形成了上面很多人说的故事性，情节性的SOLO。。。
最后赞下编曲，把这些要素HX的溶人到一首歌里完全体现了编曲者的超高水准。。

总之，是J家少见的高水准作品
是首大气厚重，性感，时尚的好作品

开始想象他穿着和服但却很刚毅悲壮的样子

妖豔又氣勢這就是亀梨和也

Gossips of Oscar fashions

2009-02-24T08:14:00.003+08:00

Photos are from Oscars Fashion Report Card 2009 (Yahoo! Entertainment)

Vanessa Hudgens
The dress is good and the earrings match but the feathers for decoration are somehow extraneous. The color is suitable for her hair and eyeball but the whole dressing makes she seems older than she really is.
Grade: B+

Heidi Klum (supermodel)
Everybody knows the former supermodel Heidi Klum has a good body but this red dress is just pieces of cloth uncombined. Also the shiny bracelet and earrings make her look cheap.
Grade: D

Angelina Jolie
Black is classic and so is simplicity. Her emerald earrings add her elegance and the dress fits her slender body so well. Everything is perfect except the handbag is a little bit manly.
Grade: A

Tina Fey <30>
The champagne color is good and the bracelet is a good pick. The hairstyle and her makeup properly show her grace. The dress and the shoes are generally good but the design on her shoulders takes several points off.
Grade: A-

23歳のお誕生日おめでとう

2009-02-23T19:49:00.002+08:00

我知道你已经吹灭了许多蜡烛，
我知道你已经尝到了很多蛋糕，
我知道你已经收到了很多祝福，

我只是想高高兴兴地过完这一整天。
我第一次为你庆生是2006.2.23
彼时作为一个尾末loli的我很自豪我喜欢上了这么一个人，
然后我现在已经跨过我青涩的未成年时代了，
我依旧很骄傲地喜欢着你。

我看到你那些昂贵咂舌的衣服（Blue Jacket from Dior Hommes @Music Station 090220）,
我想起你万年不变的棕色手圈和笑脸Tee，
我知道你在努力地做一个大人，从20岁一直到如今23岁。
我一直坚信着男人在23岁的时候会把今生的定居都给固定下来，
原先我很着急，担忧你的Dorama，焦虑你的舞台剧，怨念你的个人CM...

可是现在，我仅仅想说：
Happy Birthday, my dear Kazuya.
You're loved by so many people and there's nothing needed to worry about.

I rescue you

2009-02-23T01:17:00.002+08:00

RESCUE LIVE @MUSIC STATION 2009.02.20

实在是太赞了～～
虽然Kame的蓝色皮衣让我稍微憋屈了一下下...但是他扭（腰）捏（麦）的样子实在是太美好了T0T 我的两排海带泪
而且重要的是脱下外套那好到爆棚的body以及那副和我的熊猫镜万分想象的sunglasses实在让我龙颜大悦啊（我这什么说法嘛@@）
更重要的是这次的真唱啊！！！这水准和这舞蹈俺很满足很满足了。有英文，有和音，有高音%￥#@嗷嗷嗷啊

1440大档是好物^^
咩咩你脸上的痘痘有开始多了，好好补水和休息哦（沈小娜同学也是）

最后，我不是很为了偷懒并庆生帖才拖到现在的！！
我举中止发誓我不是！！！

chips of talk about Resident Evil 5

2009-02-18T10:21:00.002+08:00

First of all I want to state that it's an Asian game series made by Japan for at least ten years. I think this game is of no racism judged by the information I know about the game and the screen snatches above. It's a horror survival game that all you need, in this case Chris needs is to catch any chance to live at last. You kill zombies to live. The characters are black zombies because its setting is in the African village.

新年好

2009-02-18T10:18:00.002+08:00

虽然现在已经太晚了，不过说一句总是好的吧
潜水太久了，上来冒个泡～～

Peaceful Days

2008-12-29T21:26:00.004+08:00

哦上帝

我确定我爱赤西仁
当然我也爱龟梨和也

我每次看到赤西仁清唱我就会想哭，这已经成为我很难压抑的冲动了。从第一次听说他在Concert上当着数千人的面放下麦克风唱着僕らの街で的时候，到第一次听到密音的时候，再到追着每场的repo和密录单单只为这么一小段的时候，到现在我仅仅是在线反复重播着在DOME末唱的歌声嘹亮，我认定了这个男人。我很爱他。我想起几年前我很爱的陈绮贞的《太多》里的一句：像一只鸟在最高的地方歌声嘹亮～

而我每次看到KAME的时候我就会有一种莫名的幸福感，能和他一起活在这个地球上是一件很美妙的事情。我总是这么想的，即使他可能永远也不会知道这样的我，以及以他没有想到的方式眷恋着他的我们。

他们带给我惊喜，感动以及坚持。
我爱他们。

=================================

Jessie一直叨念着要嫁给Chase，却又力挺Chase和Cameron，很矛盾，小纠结。

我怨念着KAT-TUN 2008 Live Tour Queen of Pirates的剪辑以及镜头特效编排，我想看02年一般的拍摄花絮，04年一般的回想个谈以及06年一般的特选Solo。对于Concert收录而感到遗憾的是：过多的Back Performance Time(其实也还好，只是我想多看看我家的人，既然标榜着是他们的Live Tour),退场时没有牵手一起致谢，没有单独的感言，没有约好下次的承诺......

没有钱是万万不能的

2008-12-23T22:05:00.003+08:00

最近日币汇率呈现疯狂态势，果然理论到了一个境界以后和实际连接的结果就是格外单一而愚蠢的。这个世界是个只追求预期的世界，永远的用今天的臆测去估量明天的可能～～

最为一个M性质的KAT-TUN FAN,我只能欣喜地抹泪迎接我团的活动：

Jan. 「KAT-TUN LIVE TOUR 2008 QUEEN OF PIRATES」DVD
Feb. 「ONE DROP」Single
Mar. 2009-2010 ジャニーズスクールカレンダー学年历
Apr. 「Tactics」Album

已经不想再叙述和统计价钱了TAT

另：恭喜Uebo舞台剧初主役！！

寒假确定要去袋鼠国了～～哦哦～～

回顾是展望的前传

2008-12-22T23:13:00.002+08:00

最近回顾看的东西有：

《人类群星闪耀的时刻》茨威格著
原因：现在《象棋的故事》是我们的课堂读本，所以想起来他老人家的东西我是貌似有读过的，然后就翻出来这本书，当初仅仅是为了那个拿破仑失败的故事买下来的。但最后看完整本后被虐得不行。当然当时也不知道这种感觉是被虐心了，只是现在再次看着那个关于南极的故事的标题就会觉得要哭出来了。

《Tour 2007 Cartoon KAT-TUN II You》
原因: 横竖数着日子觉得2009.1.1就快来了，所以很高兴地在迎接同时就顺便把资源共享者的补档行为纳入自己的感谢范畴了。看了第一个小时的Live后立马埋在纸巾里开始哭，想起来第一次看海贼帆的时候，第一次听Koki吼“不叫的话都会没命的”时候，我的最狂热的岁月里最充沛的感情已经交付给他们了，不后悔也不复返了。

《好久不见》陈奕迅歌
原因：我爱Eason. 这是继《爱情转移》和《圣诞结》后再度听到后就会以光速失态的Eason的歌。《十年》以及《对不起，谢谢》是另一个深埋的坑。

真人兽

2008-12-10T22:41:00.003+08:00

好吧...
真人兽=True man Show (不是那部很TOK的电影)

今天晚上8：10左右（时间！！！），在碧云路上的全家便利店里（地点！！！），看到一个侧颜超像Ueda Tatsuya的男人。真的很像，穿着比较厚的衣服和驼色的外套（穿衣风格！！！），在一个个柜子边转来转去不知道应该买些什么。

特点：
1.一眼望去就很混血。
2.身高至少有175。
3.正颜属于帅气的那种，和妖精沾不上边。
4.侧颜无敌像,尤其是刘海，鼻子和嘴唇的角度。

就这样，我今天一天的Down心情因为这个男人被治愈了^^ 好神奇哦^^

White X'mas

2008-12-08T23:03:00.001+08:00

如果他们卖得好，我很骄傲，可是他们是我的骄傲早就不只是因为他们卖得好了

狠狠排。

最近听White X'mas 清唱版听到整个人麻木掉。这么说其实是因为实在是很好听的循环再循环。AK是美好的，KAT-TUN六个人是无穷的。

另，回顾《我是帅哥》以及观看《我开始摇滚啦》以后觉得，冏才是真正无极限的= = |||

平凡是福

2008-11-27T22:29:00.002+08:00

这是明天的辩题。今天硬撑着去学校把一些事情都交代清楚了，包括CAS，化学实验和中文辩论会。

想要好好睡一觉，头疼得厉害，脸红得滚烫，手冻得冰凉。

最近一直在想倾听和诉说的问题。我发现自己是一个很热衷于诉说的人，尤其在听众小于等于三个人的范围内，我会十分有兴致地发表自己的观点并对倾听这件事情感到很不耐心。而大于三人（不包括我自己在内）以上的讨论群体会让我的话语变得无措起来，虽然思维还是一样的散发并且跳跃。

不过现在我已经不用诉说了，嗓子坏了，或者更应该说喉咙哑掉了。想要说话只能发出呜咽以及鼻音，我还是好好做一个听众吧。

平凡是福。平凡是福。平凡是福。

神の雫

2008-11-13T23:09:00.003+08:00

亀梨和也

神の雫@NTV（火22）

当冬天有了期待，我就会觉得温暖。
因为我会开始好好照顾自己，
因为我希望能够在最愉悦的状况下看见最让我喜爱的你。

时光走了，你还在

2008-11-09T23:22:00.000+08:00

时光走了，你还在。

我要哭了我要哭了我要哭了
我知道纸巾在哪里
我假象着你们在一起

Decade

2008-11-09T22:48:00.003+08:00

A decade = 10 years

在11.8那天做了River of Hearts的义工（早上8：30-14：00）
然后就是回家睡觉（16：00-7：30 of Day2）

睡了很久很久，回家的时候只是再度想起来是AK的Anniversary,然后倒头就睡了。
我在很久很久之前就曾经策划过这一天应该怎么过，甚至比考虑我自己的十八岁成年日还用心。
但结果都是平淡而无奇地任时间流逝。我的十八岁也好，AK十周年庆也好。
或者应该说我已经学会淡然地处事了？激昂，兴奋，感动和那么多强烈而又青春无限的情绪已经很久没出现过了，怀想去年的11.8但总觉得那已是记录下来的南柯一梦。

最近一直听Stefanie的《很好》，然后再空荡的房间里自己一遍又一遍地唱。
查了一下，作曲人就是Stefanie自己，所以才会常常觉得那个旋律如此之感人和特殊吧。

自言自语的时候一向用英文。
开始越来越爱我的同学们。
看着英式幽默并且出现中毒症兆不能自拔。

KAT-TUN: White X'mas

A ballade by AK may be something all I need.

Eighteen

2008-11-02T01:34:00.002+08:00

只是突然想起来，今天我十八岁了。
上星期取消了生日晚餐因为不想打搅别人繁忙的作息，不过是一个孩子成年了，没什么大不了的。
也不打算去会见青春无限的同学，不过是一个同伴成年了，大家都会经历的。

其实，只是不想让大家注意到这件事情。
I am afraid of the new and extreme expectations from other people, though I know they are plausible and rational.

Technically, I can still have my "Seventeen" for another 20 hours.

为赤西仁电影初主役——撒花！！！

2008-10-29T23:21:00.002+08:00

我看到小林武史和岩井俊二的名字就觉得瞬间窒息了。。。
感觉和闷笑三声大人写的《击掌》不约而同了。果然，生活是狗血的？

By 最近正在阅读狗血万分的《呼啸山庄》的Miss.L

File:Miss.L

2008-10-22T22:53:00.002+08:00

由名词而堆砌起来的生活状况表：

物质篇：
手机: Nokia S6500 (2008.2)
相机: Casio EX-700(2007.3)
笔电: HP dv9815nr(2008.8)
MP3: Ipod touch II(2008.10)

娱乐篇：
小说：The Five People You Meet in Heaven
杂志：Newsweek
电影：蜡笔小新.-.奇异乐园大冒险 (不许笑！！！)
美剧：The Big Bang Theory
日剧：風のガーデン

ETC.

秋天

2008-10-19T22:52:00.003+08:00

所谓秋天，就是不会发春的好季节(Daniel同学因为知晓了Spring Awakening而对发春这个词有了全新的认识= =)

00.F1归来
倒腾了基本上一整个周日去看了F1上海站，当然是和我的亲亲小朋友一起去的，他好会闹腾TOT
结果是英国黑哥们拿了分站冠军，我强烈认为总冠军也会是他的。他经纪人(也就哈密尔顿他爹)可以联系演艺制作公司给他造一个黑白纪录片：《何为BH的人生》

最近流行一句话的『简评』：明年打死我也不去看了！！！

01.文艺咩
首先，最文艺的当代青年是DV男——006同学。但是，在此，我要向咩咩同学致敬：文盲也是可以问题的，既然流氓都可以煽情= =|||

从文艺咩的欣赏列表里拣出来的一些（包括已看或为看的）：
Boogie Nights
The Green Mile
Hotel Rwanda
Sleepy Hollow
Corpse Bride
Edward Scissorhands
The Bucket List
The Basketball Diaries
火垂るの墓
一瞬の風になれ

参考目录：http://www.douban.com/group/kazu/collection

最近流行一句话的『简评』：我果然还是欧美系的TAT

03.米帅来临上海
其实和我没什么关系，只是偶尔想想一个Homosexual的男明星收到如此多straight的女粉丝追捧，而且很明显“贪图”的是他的“美色”，这究竟是一个什么样的世界和规则呢？

秋天

2008-10-19T22:52:00.000+08:00

回归

2008-10-12T21:46:00.002+08:00

~Ipod Touch 使用良好中。虽然已经死过机了。

~感冒暂时无法痊愈。咳嗽/喷嚏/痰/鼻涕ing。

~香港新界归来。新界果然就是活脱脱的深圳。

~西安秋游归来。那是一座居住着帝王们灵魂的鬼城。最尊贵的鬼城。

~回上海的火车上做了很恐怖的梦。恐怖在其真实性：10.4的SAT分数为1760『For God's Sake』

~考场上被Ada认出。但她在接近10.5的凌晨时才告知当事人—我。

~配了新的眼镜：Espirit的镜框。旧的在去西安的火车上压断了镜腿。本来想参考一下Sarah Perin的风格，但在看过她的访谈后彻底放弃。

~回归Obama阵营。

Mottos

2008-09-30T10:48:00.002+08:00

From

0.0.Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit on it. {Pat Koppman}

0.1.The obvious choices aren't the only choices. {Steve Roberts}

0.2.The beginning is the most important part of the work. {Plato}

0.3.The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer. {Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM}

0.4.It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end. {Ursula K.LeGuin, author of The Dispossessed}

1.1. Consider the past and you shall know the future. {Chinese Proverb}

1.2.First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us. {Marshall McLuhan}

1.3.Invention breeds invention. {Ralph Waldo Emerson}

1.4.All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly... {Martin Luther King, Jr}

1.5.It is the business of the future to be dangerous... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. {Alfred North Whitehead}

2.1.There is no invention—only discovery. {Thomas J. Watson, Sr.}

3.1 As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can. {Julius Caesar}

3.2 A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness. {Elbert Hubbard}

Life is Life

2008-09-29T23:11:00.002+08:00

Friends S04E23 中出现House年轻时候的样子，不过一个性格诡异的英国跑龙套
...
House S03E04 中出现Blair高中时的少女样，不过是一个患病求爱的未成年金发女郎
...
最后，并不是顺理成章，也不是水到渠成，只是千帆过尽，无始无终。

二三事

2008-09-23T20:50:00.004+08:00

00. Ipod Classic 卖掉了～～
想想还是觉得太亏了：180美刀...但还是决定投向itouch的怀抱

01.十·一之后回来秋游—西安行(Tuesday to Saturday)
旅行中还有ITGS的research task要完成...
决战Toefl的学子们毅然拒绝了此次出游...
回归后得知所有科目monthly test的成绩，关键点是得知的主体是家长们...
#但总得来说，还应该会是一次开心的旅程吧？！

02.学生会竞选开始
热血的孩子们...这个天下会是你们的...名义上来说...

03.HK Trip准备达成
酒店+机票都ok了...基本路线：机场快线+东涌线+荃湾西铁+TAXI

04.人格测试+职业倾向测试：完毕
回答原则1：尽量两极化发展，使得人格充满矛盾，达到分裂或双重的标准
回答原则2：诚实=邪恶+卑鄙+虚伪
回答原则3：答题速度=Toefl 听力选择题速度=click+next

最近纠结的问题：为什么我的生活如此这般那般的就殆逝了呢？

Writing Assignment 0917

2008-09-17T10:15:00.004+08:00

A frightening Picture

Nothing could be seen; even the sparkles of the stars in the gloomy, dark night were dead, as all the bulbs in lights were eradicated. Only the shape of a hope for brightness was hanged subtly. A slight sound of breath came far away. The pace was slow. Touch and Smell were all the rest of actions that could be fulfilled. The cankerous air led to nausea, just as the vomit feeling that can be found in any gargantuan and grimy refuse dump. The right hand felt suddenly slimy when covering the nose and wetted by the snot. Then the left hand got mucus-like liquid when the unexpected saliva from the mouth was not able to be swallowed back.

The breath gradually came nearby. The neck was clawed by a cold and slithery talon. All the nerves were pulsating but failed to screech for a word. Silence spread all over the place, from the surroundings to the person, climbing from a nail on the toe through the ankles, the knees, and the waist to the shoulder, just as being cannibalizing in a graceful way. It stopped in a sudden at the center point of the neck. The roar started in an animal and hysterical way. Fingers stretched to the cheeks, shivering.

Foreseer or Reminiscent?

2008-09-16T22:29:00.005+08:00

一开始接触日本的杂志的时候总觉得一阵怪异，比如说你在五月初就可以买到标明着六月的杂志而里面的内容和所有的照片是早在四月中旬就编辑好了的。朋友说这不过是一个时间差，我却抵触到觉得是件反季节的事情，尤其是在已经开始寒冷的11月却看到穿着薄薄一件单衣，无论从表情，神态，光线，氛围上都可以感觉得出炎热的夏天的尾巴的时候。这极其轻易地勾起了我对夏天的回忆。

于是，12个月和4个季节在我的脑海里混乱一团，时间的划分只是依靠那一点点肆意的感觉。

我在一年中只有两个分明的时段:
挥霍夏天，或者怀念兼并且期待下一个夏天。

月饼节后一日

2008-09-15T20:56:00.006+08:00

十五的月亮我没看到....(怎么会？>o<)

但是十六的月亮着的很圆

在月饼节被我联想到的一些东西

其实我想像力挺乏味的(注意：不是缺乏而是乏味!!)

比如说这两天看早期的，大约是2004年年底的<康熙来了>开头问：

说到苹果你会想到什么？

我的第一联想：牛顿= = (鼓掌吧T-T 最平凡的居然是红色，不是Newton)
我的第二联想：金苹果+建平高中+隔壁的私校+希腊神话+特洛伊+海伦美女+战争 = =++

还是列举一些我很简单的联想吧(我对我手上HP的笔电发誓我不是在给联想公司做广告)：
#1.Winds-<十六夜之月>
...几年前的一张single...个人最常听的一首Winds的歌...
#2.江米团子
...日本人在赏月的时候吃江米团子，称为“月见团子...就糯米团子...
#3.Mid-Autumn
...Festival...只放一天假期的节日没有资格被称为Festival，怒！
#4.夏日的终结
...虽然在大多数情况下我会把开学的9月1日当作夏季的结束...但事实是，还是有个短小的尾巴不是么...只是现在一切都要终结了...

正式的告别：My Last Being-a-Child Summer.

PS练习

2008-09-13T23:18:00.002+08:00

PS练习—滤镜高光
简单150×150 Icon两枚：

在昏暗的灯光下，调色调得一塌糊涂= =+

New Ipods

2008-09-11T22:09:00.005+08:00

首先，坚定地告知自己：
努力考上美国的大学，然后享受Apple公司专门对待学生的优惠政策：Buy 1 Get 1 FREE !
而在此之前，所有电器设备的更新换代还是不要想了……

然后，开始花痴：YEAH!!
新的Ipod Nano是最吸引我的，可以有重力sensor，shake&change，自主的playlist编辑，lean to fit.
当然，最重要的是appearance(外貌协会的slogan = =)
9种颜色—red,orange,pink,yellow,green,purple,silver and black.
瘦长机身—这年头到底流行的不是“羊脂球”这个style的……
36g—天杀的，我现在就是嫌弃我的手机和classic都太重了啦～～
16GB—其实这些就够我用的了;Classic我到现在都不知道应该怎么装满= =

决定现在开始宣传代购～～
十一去HK,那里的价格看得我好心痒啊～～

Writing Assignment 0910

2008-09-10T10:58:00.004+08:00

Things I fear:
Hospital
Darkness
Ants
Horror Movie
Jail

Sentence Making:
This new laptop is as sharp as a cutting dagger that can pierce my throat, as shiny as a glamorous diamond that can reflect any facets of reality.

Writing Assignment 0909

2008-09-10T10:16:00.001+08:00

The cartoon is consisted of three graphs with only two simple people in each graph and a white man is always on the left side. The Caucasian is in the working suit showing his identity as a common, less-educated white who stands for the mainstream which has the voice of social media and domestic trend in America. The ethic discrimination and ownership of the land can be seen through this set of cartoon.

In the first scene, the Caucasian pointed to the African and threw the words out: Go back to Africa. This indicates that the majority in America, the whites, don’t welcome African American because of their poverty and crimes which bring out the problem of the instability and insecurity of the society. The greater threatens that African American presents to the whites are the decreasing opportunities for the majority especially under the universal law of affirmative action. The reasons are clear and the circumstances cannot satisfy long as there are African Americans staying in the country.

The Caucasian repeated his actions to the African American with the new object, a Mexican. He told him to go back to Mexico which reveals the true condition in America after a large number of the Mexicans illegally immigrates to the Whites’ world. Mexicans take away about 30% of the jobs in America and occupy the domestic works. They usually have jobs as construction workers, baby sitters, farming assistants and gardening helpers. In spite of their illegacy Mexicans still have human rights and cannot be protested under the law of America. Thus, resources and opportunities are redistributed including the range of the increasing Mexicans. The whites consider it harmful to their existing society and prone to become severe. Therefore, the best way for the majority to avoid this foreseen issue is to send those Mexicans back home.

The last picture illustrates a native Indian staring at the white American and the Caucasian replying in silence. The whites are not fond of the aborigines and believe them lagging and uncultured but there is no place for them to go back since the land they are staying are their origins and whites are regarded as the invaders for them.

Irony of the racism is the theme of this cartoon. Prejudice and bias occur in the heart of every self-asserted person who blame their own suffering to the others.

Laziness

2008-09-09T10:14:00.002+08:00

I should have finished the SAT writing practice essay last weekend.
I should have done my Economics assigned reading last weekend.
I should have well prepared my ITGS presentation last weekend.

Besides all those works which I did none completely, what the hell was I hanging all around?
Well...Reflection.. Conclusion for my wasted golden teen time and decision for the future ambitions.

I kind of forget my own purpose and remind my myself once and once again.
Finally, there may be nothing left.

The song I am listening is by Stefanie Sun.
I first fall in love with this song at the age of 11.

And now I am still loving it.

My life would continue with my laziness and self-hatred all along.

Blair X Chuck

2008-09-07T17:23:00.006+08:00

Blair and Chuck deserve each other.
Blair Waldorf is a bitch and Chuck Bass is an ass.
Blair and Chuck should be together.
Neither of the above is a good reason.
But love is the only one that counts.

反复把Gossip Girl 201 (Season 2 Episode 1)看了4遍，一而再再而三地跳跃过Dan那一段。我爱Serena和Nate的老友战线，也爱Serena和Blair的闺话碎谈，还有Little J每次凭借自己的小聪明所耍的花招，我知道又太多的人不待见她，但这才是真正的生活写照，一个中产阶级的普通小孩要爬上upper class，要成为Queen J,那只有创造更加BH的人生。

BlairXChuck的对手戏我最爱看，看一次就琼瑶一次，但还是颠来倒去看。那个幽静的夏天的绿色，Blair最后挤回去的眼泪，我一直就赞叹着这姑娘是如此的BH，能够狠下心来这样对付自己，糟蹋别人也不顾伤了自己；还有White Party上不断被人津津乐道的3 words,8 letters 然后还有更猛地一句Say it. I'm yours. 我瞬间怀疑我在看哪个NC的90后写得虐心小说，但就是沉醉于两个人之间纠结的眼神。

Chuck还是个Teenager，他还没有学会像他老头一样跪下来求婚，看着对方的眼睛，拿着期许的戒指恳求：Would you do me the honor to be my wife?
Chuck会学会这一切的，虽然他在内心恐惧着这样所带来的一切责任和束缚，他想先消耗完青春的尾巴再承受commitment这么巨大的issue。

但是Chuck最终会踏上这么珍重的一步的，因为Blair是这么一个值得她如此对待的女人，更因为他爱Blair.
He knows it and he's afraid of it.

让Blair和Chuck在一起吧。
阿门。

（我在这两年里仅仅祈祷过的Couples:千秋王子和野田妹,中田容子和冈本陆，Blair and Chuck）

我很累

2008-09-07T01:26:00.006+08:00

我是真的想要认真地做一些事情了。我觉得我把自己放纵得太久了，用一个SAT词汇来说就是：Indulgent，从15岁的夏天至即将到来的18岁。人生中最美好的时光里我像是把自我放在一个稻草堆里一样滚来滚去，睁开眼可以望见天空和太阳，翻个身可以闻到泥土和新生的香草。一直都是懒洋洋的，也不去管未来的刮风和下雨，并不是因为此时的我认为完全没有必要，而恰恰是预见到了其重要性而一直做着自我催眠加以逃避。

我从来都很确定我是一个脑子很好用的人，这大概是我浑身上下唯一值得称赞的地方，也是我最肯定遗传自我父母的证明。但是我却在自己愈加清晰的想法中不断退缩，然后转身假装看不见这一切。

这样的结果是无休止地逃避: Shanghai-Hamburg-Shanghai Suburb-Boston.

我一边拖延着时间一边又责怪自己为什么没有在15岁之前，那是还有极大信心和热情的时候，做出一个冲动的决定，比如说：跳级or说服父母出国。暇余中偶尔审视一下自己，结果更加触目心惊：Why don't start now? It's never too late to begin.

所以，现在再质问一次自我，同时也希望这是我上大学之前的最后一次：
You aren't a coward, are you?

0322

2007-03-23T04:06:00.000+08:00

0322

阴 + 小雨

昨天是0321 上德语课的第一句话就是 Heute beginnt der Fruhling
春天在今日来到。

生活开始步入正轨去年的这个时候就这样说过这句话了
我喜欢这句话给人以安定的感觉虽然之后到来的将是困倦以及近乎无休止的厌烦

但是谁又知道在这困乏背后的隐约隐匿的未来会是什么样子的
不过正因为没有人知道所以未来才显现得如此诱惑无边的形状一点点清晰的呈现在眼前
来德国之前看到Ryo Chan[？]的J-Web日记里这么说
一天又过去了离未来又近了一步

这是我这段时间里看见过的最美好的话语
不是死亡不是衰老不是一切带着逝世意味的悲观词语
而是未来 Tomorrow Future

也许这时候才发现 Idol 真的是精神上的某种愿望
能够那么激励自己和我们的人在那里闪闪发耀地活着

在这个城市每天都在思考都在记忆不是像在上海去记忆那些书本上已刻画好的事物
而是范围更加广大的在记忆背对背后座的人所说的话语语音语调一切一切都在留意
Kinder Madchen Junge Frau Herr
Morgen Danke Entschudigung
der die das

我在尽力的适应着这个陌生的城市尽力地把那么多场景都变成熟悉的
包括公车路人火车站台河流湖泊
还有很多那些都在脑子里时刻的提醒着自己这个正在我脚下的土地的形状
不安的时候会拿出地图拼凑臆想的语法去问那些看上去善良的行人
表情无法调整出微笑的姿态因为很冷有雨还有风像走之前一个月的上海但那个时候我不用每天步行一小时往返于学校家庭

酸奶是要用调羹舀着吃的
Anna教过的

浴室用完是要擦干净的
耿叔叔的太太说过的

要消遣的时候就拿物理书看
妈妈最后嘱咐的

可是我联系不上你们该怎么办呢
其实也没有怎么办时间总是这样过去的

现在的处境都是自己的选择这种自由已是最大的恩赐