Why the future doesn't need us: Bill Joy wrote the cover article for the April, 2000 edition of Wired. In Why the future doesn't need us he looked backwards and forwards at technology and considered the implications of the advances we are working so hard to achieve. He worried 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."
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A look back at Joy's look forward: The announcement yesterday that Bill Joy will be leaving Sun led to my looking back at keynote addresses of his that I've covered over the years. In 1998 he was part of a JavaOne Panel that looked ahead to 2005. Joy predicted that there will be 8,000 Java packages with 200,000 classes, most of which "won't be written by Sun or even by today's leaders." In his Java University keynote he spoke of the different webs. He also said "You need to assume that devices are networked," he said. Further, he said we "need a pervasive and persistent wireless network. [That] will change everything."
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