Bill Joy’s recommendation that we relinquish artificial intelligence, biotech, and nanotechnology because they’re just too dangerous for human beings to handle, is “so far off the mark that it is not even wrong,” says entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Thiel.

It would “actually lead to the future he fears. If the virtuous people relinquish these things, it means that they will be developed by the evil people, and that seems to me to be a recipe for these technologies going wrong.

“The only way for something like Joy’s approach to work would be basically a totalitarian world-state in which we control the technologies worldwide. It is incredibly arrogant to say that the only smart people in the world exist in the United States and that if you can stop it in the U.S., you’ll stop it everywhere. Maybe it’s going to be developed by the Chinese military. Maybe it’ll be developed by people working for Islamic terrorist groups.

“The anti-Joy view that I would articulate is that what we need to be doing is to be pushing the accelerator further and harder.”