Bill Joy paints
a very bleak picture for us if we don't comply to his ideas. The
world being turned into "gray goo" is something everyone wants to prevent.
This gets all the readers' attention and horrifies them into action or
at least listening to what he has to say. He also tries to scare
his audience with ideas of "The White Plague" that can kill widely but
selectively making it the perfect weapon to carry out mass genocide.
Killing indiscriminately is bad enough, but being able to wipe out only
your enemies just by releasing a genetically engineered virus or a nanotechnology
"assembler" would make wars unbelievably costly in terms of lives and relatively
easy once the knowledge was acquired.
By comparing these three new evils GNR to the older weapons of mass destruction NBC, he can summon up the same fear that we already feel and direct it towards something new. Then comparing our ability to stop these technologies once they start to that of nuclear technology, makes the reader believe that once we start down the road, our own momentum will carry us through the point of no return possibly destroying the world, and at the very least causing the deaths of millions.
Then he horrifies
us with something far closer to home, about downloading ourselves into
robots that are nearly immortal: "the robots would in no sense be our children,
that on this path our humanity may well be lost." Losing the one thing
that makes us who we are is the greatest loss of all, and according to
Joy, robotics may one day do that to us. Losing the ability to make
children also is one that emotionally affects the readers since our children
are a key part to the human experience.