"Why The future Doesn't Need Us" summary

The first part of the essay written explains the theory that humans will no longer be needed in the future. The Author, Bill Joy, is a computer scientist and was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems who, in this article, discusses his personal feeling about what the future holds for us all. The author feels that with recent advancements in technology that in a very near future human life will be obsolete. He fears that eventually technology will over-rule our biological way of life and that slowly we will not care that it is happening to us. he goes on to say in his article that he fears this new world will be filled with self-replicating terrors, and that these advancements will breed new evil into the world. In the second part of the article he continues on to explain how he has grown up and how he feels about technology as a whole. At the end of the entirety of the article he asks the question of what we can do to coexist with our new technology.

The argument raised in this article is "if the future will need us at all?" The argument made asks the question of what humans will be useful for in the future, and if we will even exist at all. The argument raised here is not a good one. The argument states that humans will not be needed in the future and so that they will be terminated, which is never founded upon any facts. He makes the argument from an example in one of his colleagues books of mammalian species in the Americas and how one was more apt to survive after hundreds of years of divergent evolution. This argument is flawed because it does not compare like things in the least, instead it makes a weak metaphor for humans and their robot "predecessors." Another argument he raises is that the new technology will breed a new sort of evil, and claiming that the new weapons of mass destruction will be based solely on knowledge, as opposed to the rare materials as they are today. Overall, this is a very poor argument. The author is not coherent in what he is trying to argue, he does not acknowledge the opposition to his claim, makes wild conjecture without reasons, and focuses the support of his argument on others musings. The authors facts to support his argument are non-applicable to the real world and often unfounded claims about the future.