Suddenly, it struck me. There they are… the icons of Bill Joy’s GNR fears… people and passions that I have blogged about quite a bit.

For the genetic free speech <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/08/genetic-free-speech.html">class</a> that Larry Lessig and I taught at Stanford, we opened with Bill Joy’s <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html">Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us</a>, which explores the unbridled risks and “power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)”

Collected together for Brockman’s <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/08/coolest-thing-you-learned-this-year.html">EDGE</a> panel were the embodiment of Bill Joy’s future fears: <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/11/clones-and-mutants.html">Craig Venter</a> (creating a <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/11/giving-thanks-to-our-libraries-bio.html">new microbial life form</a>), <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/09/accelerating-change-and-societal-shock.html">Ray Kurzweil</a> (the nanotech futurist that catalyzed Joy’s article) and Rodney Brooks (the MIT robotics pioneer).

Of the three GNR risks, I think humanity will cut its teeth in the domain of biotech long before we face comparable threats in robotics or <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/11/nanotech-is-nexus-of-sciences.html">nanotech</a>. I blogged a bit about <a href="http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/08/genetically-modified-pathogen-gmp.html">genetically modified pathogens</a>, and reference Bill Joy in the comments: “The risk of our extinction as we pass through this time of danger has been estimated to be anywhere from 30% to 50%.”