The tragedy of Karachi Zoo is not just caged animals dying a slow death in the name of “education” but the haunting reflection of our own moral decay.
I had never set foot in a zoo before; I now wish I hadn’t.
As a mom of two feline monarchs who rule my home and a self-appointed
custodian of strays that stumble into my orbit, my lessons in love have
come padded in fur and whiskers. Cats, after all, love without
surrendering their sovereignty. They teach you that affection can be
fierce yet uncompromising of selfhood. That dignity breathes in freedom.
And if dignity breathes in freedom, naturally, captivity is its slow
suffocation. Few places advertise that suffocation as boldly as cages
built in the name of leisure and ‘education’.
So when my editor assigned me a story on the Karachi Zoo, I knew it
wouldn’t be one of those breezy reporting days, neatly filed away before
lunch. This one would sit heavy.
But journalism, inconveniently faithful to reality, does not make
exceptions for personal aversions. Zoos exist whether I approve or not,
and my job was to bear witness. So, I went (a naïve corner of my heart
clung to the hope of encountering some grace).
I didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, the zoo surprisingly brimmed with life, just not
the kind its caged inhabitants could claim. It was a life monopolised by
the visitors. There were no roars, screeches, growls, or chirps — the
very sounds I had imagined would dominate a place primarily built for
animals. There was only the droning hum of speakers pumping out
Bollywood classics from the 90s that I could have happily grooved to
anywhere else. Children shrieked with delight as they bounced on
trampolines and kicked footballs; families engrossed in mere mirth and
laughter as they spread chadors across the sun-kissed grass for their little picnic.
Azmi’s birth name was Sayyid Akhtar Hussein Rizvi but he is better known by his pen-name-Kaifi Azmi (1919 -2002). He was one of the finest and most prominent poets of India. He was a die-hard communist, not just in name, but his lifestyle, principles, and actions aligned with this philosophy.
It is strange, but true, that Azmi was sent by his Shia Muslim family to a religious seminary or madrassa Sultan-ul-Madaaris to become a maulvi, a religious scholar). “The would-be maulvi became a card-holding party member and a Marxist poet.” He joined the CPI (Communist Party of India) and carried the CPI card on him till his death.
Azmi was also influenced by reading the book Angaaray <1> or “Burning Coals,” a collection of nine short stories written by Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmood-uz-Zafar.
Once Kaifi Azmi said:
“I was born in a slave India, grew up in an independent India and would like to die in a socialist India.”
Today, most people in India feel like they are slaves of the capitalist class who controls the economy and the government — run by the openly Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi who never misses a chance to denigrate Muslims as he continues to accumulate as much power as he can to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra (nation) with him as its fascist leader.
In the mid 1940s, during one of his mushairas, (a gathering of poetry reading by poets in front of an audience), Azmi read his epic poem Aurat or Woman.
“Arise, my love, for now you must march with me Flames of war are ablaze in our world today Time and fate have the same aspirations today Our tears will flow like hot lava today Beauty and love have one life and one soul today You must burn in the fire of freedom with me Arise, my love, for now you must march with me”
Before the poem ended, Shaukat had decided to end her engagement to another man. She married Azmi in 1947. Their marriage resulted in two children, Shabana Azmi, and Baba Azmi. Economic pressures compelled Azmi to concentrate on writing songs for movies. His daughter, Shabana Azmi became a very good actress and Baba became a cinematographer.
Shaukat joined the theater and later films, as an actress. Azmi wrote dialogues in verse form, for the 1970 film Heer Raanjha. For another film Garam Hava (Scorching Winds) based on Ismat Chughtai‘s short story, he joined Shama Zaidi to write the story and its screenplay. Azmi wrote the dialogues for that film. Garam Hava depicted realistically the dilemma of a Muslim family on whether to move to Pakistan or to stay in India. It was an exceptionally good film.
In 1973, Azmi suffered brain hemorrhage which disabled his left hand and leg. He left Bombay for Mijwan, where he was born, a tiny village in Azamgarh Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Mijwan, an unknown town, later became globally known due to Azmi’s efforts as he founded Mijwan Welfare Society for the empowerment of women with a focus on the girlchild.
Azmi saw the emergence of bloody Hindutava atrocities first hand, when BJP-led goons demolished the Babri Masjid. Azmi wrote The Second Exile. One of the couplet taunts Hindutva goons who talk about sanctity of life by forcing people not to eat animals, on the one hand, and carry out devastation and death of human lives, on the other.
Azmi has written many heart wrenching film lyrics and the following one is also very emotional. This song was written for the movie Shola aur Shabnam (Flame and Dew). The song is picturized on Tarla Mehta and Dharmendra. It was sung by Mohammed Rafi and became one of Rafi’s greatest hits. The music director for the song is Khayyam whose minimalist music rendered extra poignancy to the lyrics. This is one of my most favorite song ever.
Original lyrics:
jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN
jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai
ab na vo pyAr na us pyAr ki yAdeiN bAki Ag yuN dil meiN lagi kuchh na rahA kuchh na bachA jiski tasveer nigAhoN meiN liye baiThi ho meiN vo dildAr nahiN uski huN khAmosh chitA jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai
zindagi haNs ke guzarti to bahut achchhAa thA khair haNs ke na sahi ro ke guzar jAyegi rAkh barbAd muhabbat ki bachA rakhi hai bAr-bAr isko jo chheDA to bikhar jAyegi jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai
Arzu jurm vafA jurm tamannA hai gunAh ye wo duniyA hai jahAN pyAr nahiN ho saktA kaise bAzAr kA dastoor tumheiN samjhAuN bik gayA jo vo khareedAr nahiN ho saktA jAne kyA DhoonDhti rehti hai ye ANkheN mujh meiN rAkh ke Dhair meiN sholA hai na chiNgAri hai
Translation:
I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me
I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains
neither that love, nor the memories remain the fire of separation engulfed the heart — and nothing is left the picture you carry in your vision I’m not that lover, just his silent corpse I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains
it would’ve been nice if life had passed cheerfully anyway, it will pass mournfully too my ruined love’s ashes, I’ve saved if disturbed frequently, it will get scattered I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains
longing is a crime, loyalty is a crime, and desire a sin in our world, its not possible to fall in love how do I explain the rules of the market to you the one who got sold can never be a buyer I don’t know what those eyes keep searching in me in this heap of ash, neither the flame nor the spark remains
Note:
<1> The book Angaarey questioned Muslim practices, the prevailing condition of Muslim women, inequality, and criticized British imperial rule in India. Many Muslims burned the book, and the British government banned it.
Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmood-uz-Zafar refused to apologize for their book Angaarey. Mahmood-uz-Zafar defended it in an article titled: “In Defence of Angarey:”
“The authors of this book do not wish to make any apology for it. They leave it to float or sink of itself. They are not afraid of the consequences of having launched it. They only wish to defend ‘the right of launching it and all other vessels like it’ … they stand for the right of free criticism and free expression in all matters of the highest importance to the human race in general and the Indian people in particular… Whatever happen to the book or to the authors, we hope that others will not be discouraged. Our practical proposal is the formation immediately of a League of Progressive Authors, which should bring forth similar collections from time to time both in English and the various vernaculars of our country. We appeal to all those who are interested in this idea to get in touch with us.”
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
The 2025 Malayalam film Lokah: Chapter One – Chandra claims
to reimagine Kerala’s infamous female spirit Kalliyankattu Neeli
through a contemporary feminist lens. Promoted as India’s first
female-centred superhero movie, Lokah has earned both
commercial success and critical attention for subverting the traditional
portrayal of the yakshi, the vengeful enchantress of Kerala folklore,
and for crafting a new cinematic universe blending local myth with
modern genres. In the film, Neeli (renamed Chandra) steps out of the
pages of legend and into present-day Bengaluru, no longer as a demonic
temptress but a vigilant protector. This transformation has been
celebrated as a feminist intervention in a genre long dominated by male
heroes and male gazes. However, a closer analysis through the
intersecting lenses of caste and gender reveals that Lokah’s
empowerment narrative, while interesting in some respects, remains
constrained by certain blind spots, notably a dilution of Neeli’s caste
critique and a lingering reliance on male saviour figures.
Kalliyankattu Neeli’s origins in Kerala folklore are deeply rooted in
patriarchy and caste hierarchy. In the early 20th-century compendium
Aithihyamala, Neeli appears as Alli, the daughter of a temple-bound
devadasi (hereditary temple dancer-courtesan). Alli’s life was
circumscribed by caste – forbidden from marrying upper-caste men – until
a Brahmin priest named Nampi lured her into marriage, only to betray
and murder her. The legend narrates her resurrection as a yakshi, a
bloodthirsty female spirit, arising directly from this act of
caste-and-gender oppression. Neeli’s “monstrosity” is explicitly
inseparable from the caste order, she is punished for transgressing the
boundaries of caste and for daring to desire outside her ascribed
status. Folklorists note that nothing is liberating in these old tales,
as they function primarily as cautionary fables that reinforce
brahminical patriarchal boundaries rather than celebrate female agency.
The yakshi’s beauty and fury serve as a warning that a woman who defies
societal norms (too beautiful, too wilful, or reaching beyond her caste)
will be demonised as a deadly threat. Thus, the early Neeli story
encodes a double critique: as it exposes the violence of caste
patriarchy, even as it ultimately reinforces that social order by
portraying the avenging woman as a supernatural menace to be feared or
subdued.
Daniel Day-Lewis, Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears were almost unknown when they burst onto the scene with this low-budget English film
There are blockbusters that flop before reaching the screen. And then, there are independent gems that become huge, thanks only to word of mouth. My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985), now 40 years old, is an extreme example of this second
category. At first, it didn’t even aspire to reach theaters, yet it
became an international hit and a fixture on lists of the best British
films, in addition to catapulting the careers of many of its creators.
And it did all of this with a seemingly conflictive story, filled with
social criticism, barbs at English classism, and queer themes.
My Beautiful Laundrette
tells the story of Omar. The son of Pakistani immigrants in South
London, he doesn’t want to end up like his father, a failed left-wing
journalist, disillusioned by English society. Omar prefers to stay with
his uncle Nasser, a successful businessman with a double life: at home,
he acts like a classic patriarch, while outside, he maintains an English
mistress and frequents dance halls.
One night, Omar reunites with Johnny, a white childhood friend who has become a skinhead.
They both realize they’ve become the opposite of what they once were
because of their society’s contradictions: one, racialized, has become a
cynic who only believes in money, while the other — who hails from the
working class — blames everything on immigrants. Acknowledging all this
brings them closer together… and they resume the love they had for each
other as teenagers. In the process, they agree to modernize and run a
laundromat that Nasser uses to “launder” the money he earns from drug
sales. Obviously, everything ends up shattering (including the laundry’s
window) in an ending that’s as happy as it is cynical.
For the British Film Institute (BFI), it’s one of the 100
best British films of the 20th century. And it’s also on the BFI’s list
of the 30 best films with LGBTQ+ themes. But the story of how it came to
be filmed and how it reached movie theaters around the world is as
fascinating as the fate of its creators and protagonist.
A shepherd near Jericho, Palestine, circa 1920s IMAGE/via Library of Congress.
In 1958 the assistant headmaster did the Bible reading at the morning
assembly of the Karachi Grammar School (Pakistan), founded in 1848 by
the Church of England. The reading from Acts 17:23 concerned St. Paul’s
declaration upon seeing the Athenian monument to an unknown God. “What
you worship but do not know—this is what I now proclaim,” at which point
I, 17 years old at the time, shouted the answer for all to hear:
“Communism.”
As a child of both British and American empires I had come to this
rebellious conclusion two years earlier at the Frankfurt Army High
School. Based on study of The Communist Manifesto which I
conducted in the library of the Officers Club at the I.G. Farben
building, I was able to answer this ancient question posed in the
Athenian agora by a man from Palestine.
I approach the wars in Palestine neither as an Arabic nor a Hebrew
scholar or even as one knowledgeable to other forms of life in the
region—olive, almond, fig, citrus fruits, sheep, cotton, or the grains
like wheat. I come as a student, with a life-long admiration for the
radical, abolitionist, and antinomian traditions: Jesus and the
prophets, Karl Marx, Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano,
the IWW, Frederick Douglass, Shunryu Suzuki, Elizabeth Poole, Ann
Setter, Ivan Illich, Malcolm X, William Blake, Silvia Federici, E.P.
Thompson, Robin Kelley, Manuel Yang, Michaela Brennan, Midnight Notes, Counterpunch, and Retort;
and then I became an historian of all the above with particular
interest in the commons. As Marcus Rediker and I said in the
introduction to the Arabic translation of our Many-Headed Hydra, Herodotus, “the grandfather of history,” explained that Palestine lay between Phoenicia and Egypt.
Besides going to Athens, a home of philosophy (philia = love, Sophia =
goddess of wisdom), Paul went to gatherings where they had “everything
in common” (Acts 4:32). Jubilee was another Biblical thing I could
cotton on to because I love its principles of land back, freedom now, no
work, debt forgiveness, and rest for revered mother Earth. It all seems
to me a beautiful combination of revolution and relaxation. Paul became
a follower of Jesus who was thrown out of his hometown and almost
killed for proclaiming jubilee right now. He called for rest and
forgiveness. The only economic basis of such a thing is the commons. The
struggle in Palestine helps us see this.
I believe that the musha’a (community-owned agricultural
lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us
realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is
your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons.
The renewed thinking of the commons was born of struggles against the
new enclosures of the neoliberal era and inspired by the commoning
practices of autonomist Zapatista communes in Chiapas and its defense of
the ejido. The commons is now understood as a key conceptual
breakthrough in orienting visions and pathways to postcapitalist
futures. The commons also marks the radical escape from the paralyzing
misfires and legacies of modernist state socialisms (Ray 2024, see
especially Federici 2019).
It is getting harder every day to do the fundamental journalistic task of collecting facts and verifying information. It is also getting much more dangerous, writes Phil Chetwynd.
In the first half of 2025, the climate facing journalists darkened to
levels not seen in decades, reflecting a coordinated escalation of
violence, intimidation, and censorship.
The fabric of societies is
being torn apart by what in many cases are deliberate and calculated
campaigns to undermine facts, the bedrock of our shared reality.
There
is no need to prove things are untrue; you only need to relentlessly
smear, sow doubt and float conspiracies. Often social media algorithms
will do the rest.
For Agence France-Presse, an
international news agency with a reporting team spread across the globe,
the figures are stark: we had 25 serious incidents involving
journalists working for us in the first six months of this year. That is
more than occurred in the whole of 2024.
But these incidents of
assaults, arrests, expulsions or journalists fleeing for their lives
only hint at the full scale of the global assault on the public’s right
to information.
The geographical spread of violence and
intimidation is widening. The situation is aggravated by the rise of
authoritarian practices and populist rhetoric that openly targets the
press.
Law enforcement’s growing impunity – emboldened by
prevailing political messages – has made physical assaults on
journalists commonplace.
This is not a phenomenon isolated to
so-called unstable regimes; it is surfacing in established democracies
and countries with long traditions of press freedom, pointing to a
dangerous shift in global norms.
Journalists have traditionally
identified themselves at protests and public events, believing this
identity carried some form of protection and legitimacy.
But we increasingly see these identifiers as targets.
Over
the past year journalists working for us have been targeted in
different and violent ways at protests in countries as varied as Turkey,
Argentina and the United States.
All of them were clearly identified as press. All of them are convinced they were targeted because they were journalists.
In
significant swathes of the world, journalism is effectively
disappearing. The intimidation and threats have become unmanageable. We
have seen journalists working for us being forced to flee from across
the Sahel area of West Africa and also in areas of Central America such
as Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In parts of Eastern and Central Europe our fact-checkers face regular death threats and campaigns to intimidate and silence.
The
message often comes from the top. The presidency in Argentina posted on
social media last year: “We Do Not Hate Journalists Enough”. In total
the Argentine Journalism Forum recorded 179 assaults on media workers in 2024.
And then there is Gaza.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says nearly 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed over the past two years.
It points to over 20 incidents where it believes individuals were deliberately targeted.
Some
of the journalists who work for AFP in Gaza refuse to wear their
protective flak jackets because they fear it will make them a target.
They also say people are scared to be near them because they think
journalists are targets.
And yet perhaps what is
most notable is how few governments in the many countries that have
thrived on press freedom are prepared to raise their heads above the
parapet to stand up for facts, truth and press freedom.
Many brave and dedicated journalists feel horribly alone at this point.
This
assault on journalism and campaign to undermine facts comes as the
management of our digital lives is increasingly transferring to powerful
Generative Artificial Intelligence tools.
We can all see the
astonishing capacities these tools have for knowledge building and human
advancement, but we are also already seeing how they can be used to
pollute our information ecosystem with vast amounts of false and made-up
content.
This feels like an inflection point.
People
talk casually about living in a post-truth world. Journalism is
imperfect, it will not always get it right. But the honest aspiration to
gather information and seek the truth is fundamental to the healthy
functioning of our societies.
Now, more than ever, we need to stand up for facts.
Former slave Willis Winn with horn with which slaves were called. Near Marshall, Texas. Photo: Russell Lee, c. 1939. IMAGE/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.
Although nearly fifty-seven years have passed since Stanley Elkins’
provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical
community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises
he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders’ psychological terrorism
still inspire intense debates, it should prove helpful for scholars to
focus on how severely the enslaved were mentally tortured. Perhaps one
of slave owners’ more innovatively cruel strategies concerned the ways
they sought to completely emasculate enslaved boys and men—by denying
them the right to wear pants. By forcing young African American boys and
men to wear dress-like shirts, the owners of flesh attempted to
feminize and humiliate enslaved males on a daily basis. According to
scores of interviews with the formerly enslaved, denying black boys and
young men the right to wear pants was a relatively widespread
practice throughout the Deep South.1
A group of African American slaves posed around a horse-drawn cart, with a building in the background, at the Cassina Point plantation of James Hopkinson on Edisto Island, South Carolina. IMAGE/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
This custom certainly becomes even more interesting when
slaveholders’ beliefs about slave breeding and the virility of young
“bucks” is taken into consideration. Countless owners commented time and
again in diaries and letters about the supposedly highly-sexualized
nature of young black men, and the emasculation of the enslaved must
have allowed slaveholders some type of psycho-sexual superiority
complex. By feminizing African American males, slave owners likely
reassured themselves that they were the most masculine men on the
plantation, which could be demonstrated, of course, by the rape and
sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls.
“Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national” – this advice from Keynes remains just as relevant today as it was in the 1930s.
On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the
Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization
Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the
Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with
Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel
Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The audience judged Bello’s position the more
persuasive of the two sides.
In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as
globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows
in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible
worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites
bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas
Friedman of TheNew York Times lampooned those of us
who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat
earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine
singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim
of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a
Jurassic past.
Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast
the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central
contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing
poverty in both the Global North and the Global South,
deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries,
massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole
countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis,
the rise of the far right, uncontrolled climate change, and intensifying
geopolitical conflict.
Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.
Snapshots of a Dreary Era
Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:
Snapshot No 1: Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of
globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the
national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap
labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and
20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers
at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General
Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an
additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones
and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United
States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and
elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon
to build their wares.
Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize
America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel,
and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants
Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries
and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and
Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where
wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The
“China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of
2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7
million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all
manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12
million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War
II, in 1941.
Snapshot 2: The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital
globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which
almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions,
and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called
Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was
accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led
to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called
magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime
mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when
the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global
system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by
the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of
over $1 trillion.
Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up
of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first
century.
“Buckminsterfullerene C60, also known as the buckyball, is a representative member of the carbon structures known as fullerenes. Members of the fullerene family are a major subject of research falling under the nanotechnology umbrella.” IMAGE/Wikipedia
Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything. Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking
In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of the computer
company Sun Microsystems, sounded an alarm about technology. In an
article in Wired titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Joy
wrote that we should ‘limit development of the technologies that are too
dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.’ He
feared a future in which our inventions casually wipe us from the face
of the planet.
The concerns expressed in Joy’s article, which prompted accusations
of Luddism from tech advocates, sound remarkably similar to those now
being voiced by some leaders in Silicon Valley that artificial
intelligence might soon surpass us in intelligence and decide we humans
are expendable. However, while ‘sentient robots’ were a part of what had
spooked Joy, his main worry was about another technology that he
figured might make that prospect imminently possible. He was troubled by
nanotechnology: the engineering of matter at the scale of nanometres,
comparable to the size of molecules.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say Joy was troubled by the version of nanotechnology that he had read about in the book Engines of Creation (1986) by the engineer K Eric Drexler, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the close of the 20th century, it was nanotechnology, not AI (which didn’t seem to be getting very far), that loomed large as the enabler of utopias and dystopias. Drexler’s book described a vision of nanotech that could work wonders, promising, in Joy’s words, ‘incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold’ as well as ‘[low-cost] spaceflight … and restoration of extinct species.’
But Joy had learnt from the inventor
Ray Kurzweil (now a scientific adviser to Google) that Drexler’s
nanotech promised something yet more remarkable: the singularity, a
point at which our accelerating technological prowess reaches escape
velocity and literal marvels become possible – in particular,
immortality through the merging of human and machine, so that we could
upload our minds to computers and live forever in a digital nirvana.
‘[N]anotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be
capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw
materials and information,’ Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near (2005).
The technology ‘will provide tools to effectively combat poverty, clean
up our environment, overcome disease, extend human longevity, and many
other worthwhile pursuits.’
But, Joy learned, there was a downside to all this. Drexler’s
nanotechnology could get out of hand, unleashing swarms of invisibly
tiny nano-robots that blindly start pulling everything apart, atom by
atom, until they have reduced the world to what Drexler called ‘grey
goo’. In the late 1990s, the grey-goo problem was the golem that, like
‘superintelligent AI’ today, might bring about our hubristic downfall.
