(FORTUNE Magazine) – Bill Joy, 46, is chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. The Aspen-based guru who pioneered Sun's Java and Jini initiatives is writing a book in which he warns that increasingly sophisticated robotic technologies threaten to displace--and inevitably dominate--humans. He spoke with Paul Andrews:

Do you have any robots around the house?

No, I don't. A friend of mine, Toshi Doi, the guy at Sony who invented the Aibo, gave me one. I gave it to the guy who takes care of my computers at my office, and I haven't seen it since. I prefer the living dog, actually. My son has a Border collie the same age as he is, 7 years old. She's very sweet. She doesn't need recharging; you just give her food.

What's your favorite "Joy toy"?

The most interesting thing I did recently was to implement my first digital convergence. Took an Apple Cube and one of Apple's 22-inch Cinema flat-screen displays and a USB TV tuner and got some of the nice Harman Kardon speakers they have. It's in the bedroom. It's a TV, a Web browser, it's mail, it's a stereo, a DVD player. It doesn't answer the phone, but that would be a simple addition. And turns out it's a night-light, because when you put the machine to sleep, the little white LED goes on and off.

What's the tuner?

The tuner is an Eskape Labs MyTV USB box. It's a box that plugs into the cable outlet.

The rest is wireless?

We put up a wireless LAN years ago, so what you see as normally separate things are all coming together. You can imagine running Sony's forthcoming wireless tablet with a browser, TV, music, movies...you could just carry the pad around your house. Phones, stereos, TVs, Web, mail, gaming--all these activities, which are becoming more Net-oriented, will be combined in different easy-to-use devices, many of them wireless and running on batteries.

In fact, I'm probably going to write the book on a PowerBook G4 Titanium, because I associate the PC too much with my other work. You need mental segregation for different tasks.