Chats on the Charles

William Nelson Joy is a visionary computer scientist and thinker. As a founder of Sun Microsystems, and an inventor of UNIX (one of the formative programming languages), Bill has been at the forefront of computing and science for the past half a century. He crossed over from the scientific community to pop culture in April 2000 when he wrote a prescient article on the evolution of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us? posed many of the ethical dilemmas we are beginning to struggle with. It is a great and thoughtful read.

Bill recently spoke with Wired magazine about a major technological breakthrough in battery storage technology and its implications in accelerating the clean energy revolution. He also touches on his other themes of AI and genetic engineering. As always, I keenly wait to hear Bill’s updated thoughts on the state of technology and this piece doesn’t disappoint. Hope you enjoy it and please remember to leave your thoughts in the comments section.