The context for this page: on the "AI is irrelevant" page, I discussed a hypothetical experiment in which IBM assembled a team of very bright humans to simulate an AI. Originally I included David Jones in this list. Of course it was meant as a very high compliment.

After reading Jones's comments in Nature, 6 January 2000, page 20, I removed his name. In a review of The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years, by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, Jones wrote:

I cannot blame the tank-thinkers for failing to foresee the ramifications of the social trends of their day. The 1960s hippies, pursuing happiness as the Declaration permits them, caught it up in the form of addictive drugs -- and lit a vast social conflagration that is still spreading...

Kahn and Wiener did, however, glimpse the spread of electronic totalitarianism. Their technical predictions included some shrewd guesses at how, by the merging of big databanks and the widespread installation of surveillance equipment, whole populations could be routinely and continually monitored. They clearly foresaw the erosion of privacy. To them this was an evil, a threat to freedom. Our more enlightened age knows it as a safeguard. Only the gaze of innumerable cameras saves us from the underclass. Only by allowing the government to peruse all our bank accounts can we discourage the tax-dodgers and the money-launderers. Only when every telephone conversation and every internet connection is logged, and even recorded, can the gangsters, terrorists and pushers be kept in check. Freedom must sometimes be destroyed to serve it.

Conceivably this could be sarcasm, but I don't think so. I think he means it. I can't believe I read this in Nature. I read it first thing in the morning, and it ruined my day. It should be noted that Herman Kahn himself took LSD, one of those notorious addictive drugs.

The drug-crazed hippies are coming for you, Mr Jones. Guard yourself well.