Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

262 Joy, Billwho will be unable to compete with them. He believes thatgiven the ability to reproduce themselves, intelligent robotsor even “nanobots” (see nanotechnology) might soon beuncontrollable.Joy also expresses misgivings about biotechnology andgenetic engineering, seen by many as the dominant scientificand technical advance of the early 21st century. Hehas proposed that governments develop institutions andmechanisms to control the development of such dangeroustechnologies, drawing on the model of the agencies thathave more or less successfully controlled the developmentof nuclear energy and the proliferation of nuclear weaponsfor the past 50 years. (For contrasting views see Kurzweil,Ray and singularity, technological.)In 2003 Joy left Sun and became a venture capitalist,specializing in technologies and projects to combat whathe sees as serious global dangers, such as pandemic diseaseand the possibility of bioterrorism.Joy received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award forhis contributions to BSD UNIX before the age of 30. In1993, he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of theUSENIX Association, “For profound intellectual achievementand unparalleled services to the UNIX community.”Further ReadingBrown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. “A Response to Bill Joy andthe Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists.” Available online. URL:http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/ch4.pdf. Accessed August 12, 2007.Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired, 8.04, April2000. Available online. URL: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. Accessed August 12, 2007.Joy, Bill, et al. The Java Language Specification. 3rd ed. Upper SaddleRiver, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005. Available online. URL: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/download/langspec-3.0.pdf.Accessed August 12, 2007.O’Reilly, Tim. “A Conversation with Bill Joy.” O’Reilly Network, February12, 2001. Available online. URL: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/02/13/joy.html. Accessed August 12, 2007.