For those of you who don’t know Bill Joy, let’s just say that he has had more to do with shaping the way the internet works that almost anyone else. You might know him better from a little program language he created called Java.
Do you have any specific ideas for solving the virus problem? After all, most commercial activity depends on the Internet.
Nature deals with breakdowns in a complex system with evolution, and a very important part of evolution is the extinction of particular species. It’s a sort of backtracking mechanism that corrects an evolutionary mistake. The Internet is an ecology, so if you build a species on it that is vulnerable to a certain pathogen, it can very well undergo extinction. By the way, the species that go extinct tend to have limited genetic diversity.
When asked by the interviewer he says that he wasn’t specifically talking about Microsoft Windows and Outlook, but its really easy to infer a relationship and understand his point.
Read the whole interview at Fortune.