The Joy of tech – Bill Joy, the Venture Capitalist talks about the future – "Why the future doesn’t need us."

When Bill Joy joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers http://www.kpcb.com/index.php as a partner earlier this year, it sounded at first blush like an odd coupling.

Here you had Kleiner Perkins, perhaps Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firm, accepting into its midst a guy painted in some corners as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.

But that would be a misreading of the famed developer, as well as of his provocative essay published five years ago in Wired magazine.

Joy caused a stir when he questioned the ethical aspects of pursuing research in emerging fields, like genetic engineering, where biology intersects with technology. But he approached the issue from the perspective of a veteran technologist–one with a long list of accomplishments.

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Joy created what became a popular variant of the Unix operating system. He later co-founded Sun Microsystems, where he led the development of the company’s Solaris operating system as well as its UltraSparc processor.

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com

Full Story: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5648804.html

More about Bill: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1226

Why the future doesn’t need us. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html