The American Spectator

Another Perspective

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, Business as a Calling . In the 1980s, at the height of the Central American wars, he wrote Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology -- and it was about time that someone asked them. BR>Novak would bring that same searching spirit to the commission, with an eye toward the higher things. One theologian is far preferable to yet another K Street lawyer. p> 4) Bill Joy, entrepreneur/scientist. The cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, Joy was instrumental in the creation and coding of both the Unix operating system and the Java programming language. He's also a philosopher of sorts whose 2000 article, " Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us ," has become legendary for its deeply pessimistic take on where technology is taking human society. In it, he wrote: "The 21st-century technologies -- genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) -- are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups." Sound familiar? An entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of seminal developments in American business and technology, Joy is also a skeptic who says things like, "Clean water would do more to alleviate disease than high tech medicine." p>The 9/11 Commission includes no entrepreneurs, scientists, or philosophers. Joy gives us a bit of all three. p>

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