Focuses on technology in splendid isolation
John Seely Brown et al., April 2000 (The Industry Standard). John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox and director of Xerox PARC, and Paul Duguid of UC Berkeley, replying to Bill Joy's Wired essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" in spring 2000.
A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists
AI and safety · AI and culture · Before ChatGPT
Who else?
What it refers to: A tunnel vision in Bill Joy's essay and in 1950s nuclear-age forecasts that leaves people and social systems out of the picture.
Other voices
- “Threatening to make humans an endangered species” Bill Joy,
- “Your scaremongering is already hurting some people” Yann LeCun, Researcher,
- “Ghost stories are contagious” Meredith Whittaker, Builder,
- “Technology—like science—is neutral all through” John von Neumann,
- “I don't worry about the problem of overpopulation on the planet Mars” Andrew Ng, Builder,
- “If you want to know what it's like not to be the apex intelligence, ask a chicken” Geoffrey Hinton, Researcher,










