Tech Talk With Bill Joy

News.com publishes an an interesting conversation with Bill Joy, now with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Excerpts wit edits:
Bill once wrote,The Future Doesn't Need Us saying,Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. Bill's current view on key developments centered around technological advances, innovation and entrepreneurism:

- There has to be a balance between the profit motive, which drives a lot of creativity and ethical behavior, and the responsibility to manage things, which can be abused. That balance is usually through the laws and regulations in the scientific societies, and it's important to emphasize that that balance needs to be maintained.
- Technology can be a force for incredible good. We face a lot of problems that we'd like to address with technology, such as the threat of the flu endemic.
- On tracking the multidimensional developments that technology should factor while planning for the future, Bill says,"It's not the case that any one person can deal with the consequences of what they're doing necessarily when they're doing it. It has to come from a collective responsibility. For example, in biology, where a lot of new powerful techniques are being created, it's very important that everybody pays attention to the work in their field and comment on different things in their field-not just their own work".
-In general, technology is a very powerful force for openness and change. Any rearguard attempts to limit what people can read will ultimately fail. There's a lot of creativity out there right now.
- There were a number of years where PCs were the thing, and then networking was the thing, and then the Web was the thing, and so on. But now there are really many different themes...there's a raft of different innovation going on in different areas. One can't pin it down like you could in the latter part of the '90s.