Recently read childhood hero (a la WIRED) Kevin Kelly’s hugely enjoyable What Technology Wants, a book that seeks to make sense of the ‘technium’ that wasn’t so much created by man as ordained by the physical laws of the universe.
The technium according to KK :
- extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections
KK places the ‘evolution’ of technology in the continuum of the universe’s evolution:
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The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain.
He calls Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near a mythic book and in some ways so too is Kelly’s:
- Technology is not just a human invention; it was also born from life.
Interestingly kk spends much of the book studying the lives of luddites the Unabomber and the Amish in trying to assess technology’s impact on society (Kelly has plenty of respect for the Unabomber as a technium theorist). After positing that technology is in some ways a creation of the natural order (i.e. the big-bang ) with attendant built-in possibilities and outcomes, the book addresses the question of whether or not technology is a positive force. It usually comes down in favor albeit in a more balanced contest that one might expect from a co-founder of WIRED. The reasoning seems weak to me, coming down to a tautological ‘choice is good’ and technology offers more choice and therefore ‘technology is good’.
So how can a spoon possibly want something? It’s important to differentiate the complex system he calls the technium from the underlying technology. Similar to how we talk of evolution and markets wanting certain outcomes (and there are lots of issues with doing that!), kk talks of the technium.
Kevin’s tone is at once matter of fact and yet full of awe of the technological forces he describes. Towards the end of the book his wonderment at technology turns mystical and uses the kind of language that helps me communicate my post-religious worldview with my mother’s religious views:
- There is even a modern theology that postulates that God, too, changes. Without splitting too many theological hairs, this theory, called Process Theology, describes God as a process, a perfect process, if you will. In this theology, God is less a remote, monumental, gray-bearded hacker genius and more of an ever-present flux, a movement, a process, a primary self-made becoming. The ongoing self-organizing mutuality of life, evolution, mind, and the technium is a reflection of God’s becoming.
Unquestionably one of my most enjoyable reads of recent times.
Kevin reviews the book himself over at cool tools.
Customarily great EconTalk podcast with Russ Robert.
