Technology progresses exponentially-  working as the founding members of Sun Microsystems and with such credentials under his belt as creating the Internet staples Java and Jini, Bill Joy is certainly no stranger to technological breakthrough.  Joy cites Moore’s Law of exponential improvement in semiconductor technology to highlight his point that, in a completely free market place, advances in technology (more specifically genetic engineering, nanotech, and robotics) will continue to progress and evolve at an unstoppable, exponential rate (240 and 243).  Joy contents that the human desire to know, and to create drives them to this growth, a growth which, untamed, will produce technology “in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today-suffiecient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.”

Joy contends that it is a failure of science to understand the consequences of its inventions that creates this disastrous scenario.  In the words of Joy:
 

Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science’s quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.(243)

 A key example of this is the nuclear arms race.  After J. Robert Oppenheimer’s initial desire to join the nuclear team at Los Alamos in order to guard against the threat of the Third Reich, he became involved in the program so intimately that he vehemently argued for its continuation after the German threat was gone.  As Joy contends, Oppenheimer’s reasoning stemmed from a desire to see the fruition of his efforts in the first nuclear test, Trinity (250).  The danger is clear, an initial desire to help, continued because of the scientific drive present in Oppenheimer and his counterparts.

Joy, however, goes on to say that humans can still overcome this seemingly inevitable occurrence.  By noticing trends in the banning or attempted banning of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, Joy explains that there is promise for the relinquishment of GNR technology.  Joy insists that scientists must keep the would-be “Pandora’s box” closed by taking on a strict code of ethical conduct (see Pathos), and an attitude of proactive reform (257 and 258).  By this measure, Joy contends that humanity could thwart the exponential evolution of these dangerous technologies.