Bill Joy: Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Alex Jones is a man obsessed with the idea that "the Globalists" are bent on some form of a technological genocide against the rest of humanity. The specifics of his dystopian vision change from time to time, but they usually revolve around the same themes: elites merging with machines, elites then wiping out of the rest of us left behind, etc.
These are all common themes to anyone at all familiar with science fiction, but as a world reality, they seem a little far fetched.
The one piece of evidence that Alex Jones consistently uses to reinforce his belief that "the Globalists" are technocrats who have openly declared their intention to destroy us is an article in Wired Magazine from 2000 by Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems. The article is called Why The Future Doesn't Need Us, and you can read it in its entirety here.
To give you a sense of what Alex took away from the article, here is a clip of him discussing it, taken from the February 28, 2018 episode of his show:
The way Alex is characterizing Bill Joy's article is completely laughable. At no point does he say that anyone came to a consensus about destroying humanity, shit, he doesn't even say that he went to an elite meeting at any point.
The premise of the article is that Bill Joy was invited to speak at the 1999 Telecosm Conference, a meeting of minds in the technology and entrepreneurship world. If you want to get yourself all freaked out about what they're up to, consider that at their 2000 conference, they held symposiums with such scary names as "Are Cable Modems Dead?" and "Financing The Bandwidth Revolution."
At the conference, Joy met noted futurist Ray Kurzweil and Berkeley philosopher John Searle. A conversation that the three have is said to have scared Joy a little bit:
“I had missed Ray’s talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they’d left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn’t happen, because the robots couldn’t be conscious.”
What scared Joy was that he had conceived of this idea of humanoid robots as being mere science fiction, but it startled him that someone he respected as much as Ray Kurzweil would present this as a reality, and as something that may be coming sooner than we think.
One thing that's important to remember is that Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and is known for making bold predictions of things to come, often being wrong just as often as he is right.
Be that as it may, the rest of Joy's article goes on to lay out some of his fears about what dangers new emerging technologies could bring with them, if we are not careful. He goes on to discuss how man is driven by the pursuit of knowledge, and oftentimes, once he achieves that knowledge, he realizes the consequences were not worth the new information gained. He uses the regrets of the scientists who pursued nuclear weapons, after they witnessed and understood what they had helped create:
“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.”
More than anything, Joy's essay is a long, but engaging, plea for people to take nanotechnology and genetics research very seriously, with an awareness that if we create something truly awful, it will then already be too late to do anything about it. Self-replicating robots leading to the Grey Goo Theory, and all that.
His points are valid and well-defended, but at no point does he say that he went to a meeting of elites and that they voted to exterminate humanity. Quite literally, Alex is making all of this up out of whole cloth.
What is truly amazing is that this complete fabrication has been a piece of Alex's worldview for a long time. In fact, he thought that this article was important enough to his narratives that he made it a major piece of the "evidence" he presented that the New World Order wanted to kill us all in his 2006 "documentary" Endgame:
As I wrestled with how Alex could have come to this conclusion, I reread Joy's essay to see if I had missed something and this passage popped out:
“Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals”
Now that sounds pretty close to what Alex was talking about. Sounds real scary, so how the hell did I skip over that in my first reading of the essay?
Oh, I don't know, probably because I'm not an idiot and I read the next few sentences:
“...the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber.”
Alex Jones is such a terrible reader, or such a manipulative liar, that he has taken a passage from this essay that was quoting the Unabomber, and decided to just pretend that the quote reflects the consensus of the world's technological leaders.
It's a real struggle to decide whether or not I think that this misunderstanding came from evil or illiteracy. The fact that Alex seems to actually believe the things he's saying makes me lean toward the latter explanation, and somehow, that is the sadder of the two.