For someone whose work as a computer scientist is legendary, Joy is mighty worried. To quote: “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… will not require large facilities or rare raw materials… It is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation states.”

This isn’t science fiction. The incredible power of the revolution in genetics now makes headlines virtually every day; last week’s offerings saw the first cloning of pigs, a plea by the president of the United States and the prime minister of the United Kingdom that the results of research on the human genome should be made publicly available and the revelation that a high-school student in New York state could win a science prize by encrypting data in a strand of DNA. (“It is not really complicated,” 17-year-old Viviana Risca told The New York Times. Quite something, the teens of today…) Less well known are advances in nanotechnology, which builds “machines” by manipulating atoms and molecules. Joy guesses that by 2030 such technology may produce computers a million times more powerful than the PCs of today. Place such computers in a robot, and you risk–actually, pretty much guarantee–that you will have built something that can do anything imaginable better than humans.

Frightened yet? There’s more. For Joy, the real danger from GNR technologies comes from the fact that they have the ability to produce matter that is “self-replicating”–in other words, that can breed. That leads to the possibility of true horror, that an organism accidentally created could simply obliterate all other life on the planet. (To those in the know, apparently, this is known as the “gray goo” problem, though there isn’t any particular reason the stuff that might take over the planet must be either gray or gooey. Joy notes: “Gray goo would surely be a depressing end to our human adventure on earth… and one that could stem from a simple laboratory experiment. Oops.”)

Admittedly, those who think this dystopia the product of fevered minds have some arguments on their side. Through a combination of self-restraint and international regulation, humankind has learned how to live with and contain devastatingly dangerous technologies. No nuclear bomb has been exploded in anger since 1945; at a more mundane level, it took us only about 20 years to develop social rules that rendered reasonably safe the mass use of that deadly projectile, the automobile.

But in the new world, such comfortable analogies may not hold. The democratization of technology–the speed with which computing power increases as the price of information shrinks–has placed extraordinary resources in the hands of individuals as well as states. International treaties between nations may prohibit the development of GNR technologies into instruments of war, just as they have in the case of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. But those 20th-century weapons are made from rare natural resources like uranium; GNR technologies, on the other hand, depend on nothing more than the manipulation of weightless information. In those circumstances, says Joy, “the control mechanisms that have worked for thousands of years don’t work anymore.”

So what can be done? Joy advocates a policy of “relinquishment”–a self-denying ordinance by which nations, commercial organizations and scientists would agree that certain technological advances were simply too dangerous to be worth pursuing. Verifying such relinquishment would be a nightmare, partly because any regime of inspection would have to exist partly in cyberspace. (By contrast, detecting nuclear tests is child’s play.) It follows that any regime to control the development of GNR technologies would inevitably imply a massive invasion of privacy.

That’s just one of the issues with which the new century will have to come to grips. (“Privacy,” as one Silicon Valley hero has said; “get over it.”) The information revolution has changed the way we shop, work and communicate; quite soon it will change the way we have sex and reproduce. Why should we ever have thought that it would not change the way we think about international relations? Geeks and diplomats have not, hitherto, been natural bedfellows. But if they take the right lesson from Joy’s work, they will soon start learning each other’s language. That; or prepare for a world of gray goo.