Glenn Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He serves on the board of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to the social issues raised by new technologies, and is the co-author of Legal Problems of Nanotechnology: An Overview, published in the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Review in 1994.

Lately, many pundits and commentators have been abuzz over Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy's publicly expressed fears of technological change. Technology, Joy argues in a Wired article, is rushing humanity toward extinction and must be stopped -- even if it means establishing an international regime of control over science and technology. What has puzzled many commentators in the mainstream press, though, is that Joy's fears, despite their occasional veers into Ted Kaczynski territory, have elicited mostly yawns from the technical community. As Sun's co-founder and chief scientist, Joy, after all, is a major figure in the computer and technology world. So why aren't more people interested in his arguments, even if only to refute them?

No Joy

There are several reasons. One is that Joy's arguments seem new to the pundit crowd because most of them (liberal-arts majors almost exclusively) have not paid any attention to issues like nanotechnology before. Another is that some of Joy's statements suggest that he has not been paying much attention, either. In an interview in Salon.com, Joy referred to the cloning of Dolly as a "complete surprise."

What's wrong with Bill Joy's argument?

The high-tech community responded with a resounding "huh?" -- people in the technology and bioethics communities had been expecting the cloning of a complex animal for a couple of decades before it happened. The scientific community had also spent a lot of time talking about the pluses and minuses of such technologies (as had hundreds of science-fiction writers). This may account for the cool reception Joy received, which in one case -- in a song by the pro-technology techno band Mobius Dick -- bordered on outright mockery.

Because people in the technical and scientific community have been thinking about the problem, they also find Joy's prescriptions -- which involve bans on research and international controls on science -- somewhere between frightening and laughable. Such bans have no chance of success (look at our efforts in controlling nuclear research in, say, Iraq and North Korea for example) and would require the establishment of a global police state even to fail plausibly. Research in the areas Joy fears -- biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence -- does not require large specialized facilities and multibillion-dollar budgets the way nuclear or even chemical-warfare research does. It can, quite literally, be done in basements. A nation that cannot keep basement chemists from brewing up methamphetamine and ecstasy within its own borders is unlikely to have much control over illicit nanotechnology researchers in a basement in Mongolia.

Of course, to the extent that such efforts succeed, the cure may be worse than the disease. In 1875, Great Britain, then the world's sole superpower, was sufficiently concerned about the dangers of the new technology of high explosives that it passed an act barring all private experimentation in explosives and rocketry. The result was that German missiles bombarded London rather than the other way around. Similarly, efforts to control nanotechnology, biotechnology or artificial intelligence are more likely to drive research underground (often under covert government sponsorship, regardless of international agreement) than they are to prevent research entirely. The research would be conducted by unaccountable scientists, often in rogue regimes, and often under inadequate safety precautions. Meanwhile, legitimate research that might cure disease or solve important environmental problems would suffer.

The dangers of limits and the limits of danger

Because of these problems, most people who have thought seriously about the problem reject regulatory solutions such as Joy's. Those solutions are not only unworkable, but would produce major setbacks for freedom and prosperity. Instead, many tend to support what Dartmouth College professor Arthur Kantrowitz (in an essay on this topic published more than 10 years ago) called the weapon of openness. The idea is that secrecy (including that bred by prohibition) breeds misconduct, while openness promotes good behavior. It is no surprise, Kantrowitz pointed out way back in 1989, that the greatest degree of misbehavior has occurred in classified government programs (like the infamous Energy Department experiments with pregnant women and plutonium) rather than in open programs. Certainly the history of biotechnology research supports this argument.

It is also the case that open, commercial programs breed technology that is tougher and more resistant to abuse -- and, generally, the more open the program, the tougher and more resistant the technology. Microsoft's products, riddled with back doors and security holes kept hidden from most users, are prime targets for virus writers. The open-source Linux world, on the other hand, is much more resistant because the entire user community criticizes its open code so that security weaknesses are quickly spotted.

Rather than too much technology, as Joy suggests, perhaps the problem is that we have too little. In the early days of nanotechnology, dangerous technologies may enjoy an advantage. Once the technology matures, it is likely that dangerous uses can be contained. The real danger of the sort of limits Joy proposes is that they may retard the development of constructive technologies, thus actually lengthening the window of vulnerability.

If Joy has done a service with his public worries, it is to draw attention to the dangers and opportunities posed by new technologies. Certainly there is room to discuss, for example, guidelines for safe research using nanotechnology, and to conduct a dialogue on the dangers -- and opportunities -- that advanced technologies might present. If the debate is to accomplish anything, however, it will have to proceed on a more informed level.