We are often negligent, we admit, about keeping up with Wired, the popular monthly magazine about high technology that describes itself as “the journal of record for the future.” But a news report about a long essay in the April 2000 issue caught our attention. Titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the twelve-thousand-word essay dilates on the dangers inherent in certain impending technological advances. Nothing surprising about that, you might say: crackpots have been warning about the dangers of technology at least since 1750 when Rousseau argued that “our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved.”

What makes “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” newsworthy—as of this writing, The New York Times has already published three articles about the essay—is its provenance. It was written not by a disgruntled philosoph ...

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