100 answers from Free Voices like Bill Joy now avaiable

Among the 100 questions that Bill Joy answered at the Table of Free Voices were 13 questions about “Innovation Acceleration: Science, Technology and the Future.” Read what the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Green Technology investor, and the man Fortune magazine calls the “Edison of the Internet” has to say about the social impact of new media, local food, and why companies should insure against genetic catastrophes. Here are some (exclusive) transcribed excerpts of Joy’s answers from the “Innovation Acceleration” question session from the Table of Free Voices. Like all content from the Table, Joy’s answers are Copyleft.
Rodrigo Baggio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
We are in the knowledge age. How can the increase in access to technology (Internet and computer) among low-income communities help to promote social and economic development?

Joy: The first thing to recognize is that the advance of technology makes technology radically cheaper, so that the cost of computers and Internet access for low-income communities continues to drop. This gives the people who are curious and have the desire for education the opportunity to reach out into the net and find things that can stimulate their minds. Many projects are working on putting courses and education materials completely freely available online. It’s amazing to me: I can sit in my house in Colorado today and I have a high-speed internet connection – not super high-speed, not much different from what I would expect to find in low-income communities in the near future - and I can do video conferencing to almost anywhere in the world. I can see images from anywhere, one-to-one, for free! And this kind of ability, to have videos sent real-time to the net, should allow people to take classes over the Internet, and to learn more about the world, and also to publicize problems in their community, so people who care can help. So, I think the access to new media is of great help and in the long-run promoting social and economic development in local communities.

I actually think that in the United States the thing that is intimidating and controlling us more than ever is television. Television is the medium that brings us the images of war and the fear of terror with the red, white and blue terror alert stuff running across the bottom of the screen. If we could simply unplug people from television… I don´t watch television, accept when I´m in the place where I have no choice. (…) The average American thinks someone of their family is gonna die from terrorism and it’s this drum-beat of television, they get addicted to the fear they watch on their television.

On the Internet, people can choose where to go and what to see, you’re not fed this constant stream, you don’t have to show up at a particular time - maybe you find yourself around all the time playing video games - but I don’t see the Internet as a tool for control. In fact, I see it as a tool for choice, people can choose good, people can choose bad, but especially people can choose to learn and explore. My children go to the Internet and discover amazing things and everybody has that opportunity that information is freely available.

I believe in the precautionary principle in that we should be careful about what we do and think about it before we are making changes. Let´s take an example of medicines. When we develop new medicines, we test them very carefully and we use statistical methods to determine whether they´re efficacious and whether they are safe for people to use before we put those into our own body.

Similar, when we create new modified crops and we put them in the environment we have to be careful that we don´t create a lot of unintended consequences and unintended side effects. I´m sure in some cases people have been too cavalier with doing this or people have made mistakes. But we´ve been modifying plants for a long, long time so I don´t believe we should stop doing things, simply because we can´t reduce the probability of any accident to zero.

But if a company wants to put a genetically modified in the environment it should have to get insurance against potential catastrophe. And the insurance company should evaluate the risks, should study the programs, should study the science and make a business judgment to what the insurance will cost. That doesn’t mean we won’t have accidents, those things might get away, but at least it puts a rational, economically, scientifically based constraint on the cost benefit of any particular new genetically modified technology.

It’s quite clear that animals have co-evolved with people, in the same way that plants have co-evolved with people. For example, cats have done very well by domesticating themselves into our households and I’m not sure if this has made cats obese or lazier or dependent or less curious. They’ve just adapted evolutionarily and there are many more cats as a consequence.

But humans have become less healthier in the last 50 years because we have become disconnected from physical activity and this a consequence of the greater use of the car, the busyness in our lives that prevents us from exercising, the incentives of the food companies to satisfy our cravings for fats and sugars. And we have become dependent on industrial agriculture and addicted to some of the relatively poisonous food that it produces. So, I think it’s industrial agriculture and industrial agricultural technology that has done the most harm to our health and that’s the kind of thing that the local food movement can reverse and I think there’s a strong movement in the world towards more local sources of food and to eating healthier food.

I think our curiosity is being raised by technology in opposition to what the question implies - that the Internet allows us to be curious and to learn about things. I can pull up questions and answers on my cell phone. Are we more dependent on technology? We’ve been dependent on technology for a long time, for if it wasn’t for agriculture, we’d be still hunters and gatherers, most of us wouldn’t be here. Are we lazy? I see people working very hard. So, the single most important thing we can do is probably to relax and be a little less engaged to work and to eat better by buying more local sourced food.

• four answers from Bill Joy mean about 1/2800 of the total content the Archive from The Table of Free Voices offers. To transcribe them took me two hours. Unless everything is translated into written English, you can find all video answers online in the native language of the participant.
• See what Bill Joy answered to the other 9 questions about “Innovation Acceleration” or his 87 answers to different categories of social change (e.g. communication, energy, war, ethics, economics).
• Bill must know, but see what 111 other inspiring individuals like freedom fighter Martin Almada from Paraguay, US-activist Jodie Evans or Chinese painter Yang Shaobin said about “Innovation Acceleration”.
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