future quiz 3

1. Bill Joy dates his unease about the future to the day he met __________ and then read the dystopian vision of ________________.

2. (T/F) Roboticist Hans Moravec predicts that humans will eventually be displaced by machines.

3. "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it," said ____________.


4. Joy's biggest worry is that uncontrolled _________ in robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology may lead to undetectably-gradual changes eventually inhospitable to human life.


5. (T/F) Joy's childhood vision was of benevolent, ethical robots-- guided by something like Asimov's Laws and Roddenberry's Prime Directive-- directing and dominating the human future.


6. (T/F) Joy admits he is something of a Luddite.


7. George Dyson has written that, in "the game of life and evolution," he sides with nature but nature sides with _________.


8. (T/F) Cloning and other forms of genetic re-engineering pose no realistic threat (says Joy) to democracy.


9. The possible proliferation of synthetic plants and bacteria overtaking  natural organisms, the _______ problem, could allegedly "reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days."


10. What's Joy's point about Nietzsche? Thoreau? The Dalai Lama? Woody Allen?