Selected highlights of and notes on What Technology Wants

the ability to outwit circumstances,

Technology could be found everywhere in the ancient world except in the minds of humans.

“The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power.”

Like in the Myst book ...

Once named, we could now see it.

whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a single system.

I experienced the immediacy that opens up when the buffer of technology is removed.

I admired the Amish for their selective possessions. Their unadorned homes were square bundles of contentment.

I noticed that other bossy technologies, such as the car, also seemed to be able to get people to serve them,

it seemed to me my friends’ true voices were being drowned out by the loud conversations technology was having with itself

Is a programming language a technology?

Once you gain your voice around technology and become more sure of what you want, it becomes obvious that some technologies are simply superior to others.

Is this the appeal of photography for most people? What do videogames do?

photography had ignited my muse.

books had opened my mind;

antibiotics had saved my life;

I was thrilled by the changes that simple, well-selected tools could provoke in people’s lives.

To my immense surprise, I found that these high-tech computer networks were not deadening the souls of early users like me; they were filling our souls.

I saw online networks connect people with ideas, options, and other people they could not possibly have met otherwise.

This was new to me. Cold silicon chips, long metal wires, and complicated high-voltage gear were nurturing our best efforts as humans.

I realized that other technologies, such as automobiles, chain saws, biochemistry, and yes, even television, did the same in slightly different ways. For me, this gave a very different face to technology.

I continue to keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length so that I can more easily remember who I am.

Our lives today are strung with a profound and constant tension between the virtues of more technology and the personal necessity of less:

Can we resist it, or is each and every new technology inevitable?

the first question I faced was the most basic. I realized I had no idea what technology really was. What was its essence?

Techne was used to indicate the ability to outwit circumstances

Weird

Because of his contempt for practical knowledge, Plato omitted any references to craft in his elaborate classification of all knowledge. In fact, there’s not a single treatise in the Greek

As Lynn White, historian of technology, wrote, “The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power.” Machines were becoming our coolies.

I'd like to see this!

a textbook titled Guide to Technology

We still are to this day

we were distracted by its masquerade of rarefied personal genius.

This global-scale, circular, interconnected network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, codes, calculators, sensors, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators—this whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a single system.

there might be, or must be, a certain equivalency between the made and the born.

However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. And as technology was unveiled from its shroud of atoms, we could see that at its core, it, too, is about ideas and information. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.

any list of great inventions in history contains plenty that are rather wispy: the calendar, the alphabet, the compass, penicillin, double-entry accounting, the U.S. Constitution, the contraceptive pill, domestication of animals, zero, germ theory, lasers, electricity, the silicon chip, and so on.

A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google’s search engine and the iPod: They are something useful produced by a mind.

Why not just call this vast accumulation of invention and creation culture? In fact, some people do. In this usage, culture would include all the technology we have invented so far, plus the products of those inventions, plus anything else our collective minds have produced.

The term culture fails to convey this essential self-propelling momentum pushing technology.

I’ve somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the technium.

technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.

"the society and culture of tools" - sounds like the "maker movement"

the French noun technique, used by French philosophers to mean the society and culture of tools.

No one can agree on exactly where life or mind or consciousness or autonomy begins and where it ends. The best we can agree on is that these states are not binary. They exist on a continuum.

this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain.

The wants of technology are closer to needs, a compulsion toward something.

In order to decide how to respond to technology, we have to figure out what technology wants.

This book is my report on what technology wants. My hope is that it will help others find their own way to optimize technology’s blessings and minimize its costs.

The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of one’s own body is a half-billion-year-old trick at least.

Cooking acts as a supplemental stomach—an artificial organ that permits smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provides more kinds of stuff to eat.

contradiction is also core to human identity.

The speed at which Sapiens marched across the planet and settled every continent (except Antarctica) is astounding.

This sudden global expansion following millennia of steady sustainability was due to only one thing: technological innovation.

("they" is humans)

They fanned out from the grasslands, and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands of individuals in Africa to an estimated eight million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals were never abundant; they may have only numbered 18,000 individuals at one time.

A number of scientists (including Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, and William Calvin, among many others) think that the “something” that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language.

The growth of the African hominin’s brain size and physical stature had leveled off, but evolution continued inside the brain.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett crows in elegant language: “There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language.

The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything.

Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns a mind into a tool

Some postulate that "god" is what new language users called their inner dialog?

With a grip on the slippery, aimless activity of self-awareness and self-reference, language can harness a mind into a fountain of new ideas.

And still is?

Tribal life was a lifestyle for and of young adults.

Sapiens used innovations such as the bow and arrow, spear, and cliff stampedes to kill off the last of the mastodons, mammoths, moas, woolly rhinos, and giant camels—basically every large package of protein that walked on four legs.

Violence between tribes was endemic as well.

Unexpected

As Lawrence Keeley says in his survey of early warfare in War Before Civilization, “The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicated unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version. In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. . . . It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous.”

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have coevolved with our inventions.

the bounty of nature, though vast, does not hold all possibilities. The mind does, but it had not yet been fully unleashed.

We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology—every last knife and spear—were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.

discovered

Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time to steer complex business.

Learn more about him

Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science

It would have been ludicrous a century ago to think of technology as ordained. It was a suspect force.

since technology predated humans, appearing in primates and even earlier, we need to look beyond our own origins to understand the true nature of technological development.

a nest or a hive can best be considered a body built rather than grown. A shelter is animal technology, the animal extended.

If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas.

Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them.

In a parallel to Smith and Szathmary, I have arranged the major transitions in technology according to the level at which information is organized.

The major transitions in the technium are: Primate communication → Language Oral lore → Writing/mathematical notation Scripts → Printing Book knowledge → Scientific method Artisan production → Mass production Industrial culture → Ubiquitous global communication

Language enabled information to be stored in a memory greater than an individual’s recall. A language-based culture accumulated stories and oral wisdom to disseminate to future generations.

The scientific method followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating.

Eldredge discovered that the pattern of evolution in the technium is not the repeated forking of branches we associate with the tree of life, but rather a spreading, recursive network of pathways that often double back to “dead” ideas and resurrect “lost” traits.

As Eldredge points out, “No way did the transistor ‘evolve from’ the vacuum tube the way the eyes on one side of a flatfish’s head are derived from the original bilaterally symmetrical conformation of the ancestral fish.”

Not only that, it was developed by the same lab as the vacuum tube

the transistor leaped from the ancestral vacuum tube via dozens of iterations at the most.

set myself the challenge of finding all the products on a sample page from the 1894-95 Montgomery Ward catalog. Flipping through its 600 pages, I selected one fairly typical page that featured agricultural implements.

In a few hours I was able to find every single item listed on this page of a century-old catalog. Each old tool was available in a new incarnation and sold on the web. Nothing was dead.

The practical know-how for the Inca system of accounting using knots on a string, called quipu, is forgotten.

lantern slide projectors

With very few exceptions, technologies don’t die.

Technologies are idea based, and culture is their memory.

Technologies are forever. They are the enduring edge of the seventh kingdom of life.

Of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power—the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second—lies at the core of your laptop.

Energywise, a Pentium chip may be better thought of as a very slow nuclear explosion.

Really?

Energy is simply the potential—the difference needed—to cool.

Entropy is the crisp scientific name for waste, chaos, and disorder. As far as we know, the sole law of physics with no known exceptions anywhere in the universe is this: All creation is headed to the basement. Everything in the universe is steadily sliding down the slope toward the supreme equality of wasted heat and maximum entropy.

Difference within the universe is not free. It has to be maintained against the grain.

We tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature was described as a body, then a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine in the industrial age. Now, in the “digital age,” we apply the computational metaphor.

I don't understand the last part

We use information to mean (1) a bunch of bits or (2) a meaningful signal. Confusingly, bits rise but signals decrease when entropy gains,

Like the "luck of Tila" in the book Ringworld?

Exotropy can be thought of as a force in its own right that flings forward an unbroken sequence of unlikely existences.

The multibillion-year rise of exotropy—as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind, and the technium—can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.

Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says, “Data from nearly all parts of the world show us that consumers tend to spend relatively less on goods and more on services as their incomes rise. . . . Once people have met their basic needs, they tend to want medical care, transportation and communication, information, recreation, entertainment, financial and legal advice, and the like.” The disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium.

Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an “unhiding”—a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of anything manufactured.

if we create only 1 percent or 2 percent (or even one-tenth of 1 percent) more positive stuff than we destroy, then we have progress.

Craft from ancient times can surprise us in its sophistication, but in sheer quantity, variety, and complexity, it pales against modern inventions.

King Henry’s wealth—the entire treasure of England—could not have purchased an indoor flush toilet or air-conditioning or secured a comfortable ride for 500 kilometers. Any taxicab driver can afford these today. Only 100 years ago, John Rockefeller’s vast fortune as the world’s richest man could not have gotten him the cell phone that any untouchable street sweeper in Bombay now uses.

Menzel’s book, called Material World.

Where can I see an inventory like this?

Typical historical inventories of deceased homeowners from that period totaled up 40, maybe 50 and usually less than 75 objects in the entire estate.

We don’t find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption,

it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter will upgrade to a car, and those with a car dream of a plane. Farmers everywhere trade their ox plows for tractors, their gourd bowls for tin ones, their sandals for shoes. Always. Insignificantly few ever go back.

The third piece of evidence for small, steady, long-term advance resides in the moral sphere. Here metrics for measurement are few and disagreement about the facts greater. Over time our laws, mores, and ethics have slowly expanded the sphere of human empathy.

We live in urban and suburban environments for the same reason migrants do—to gain that marginal advantage of more choice.

We have lots of opportunity to revisit the past, but few people really want to live there.

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make

Cities, even more than gadgets, revive the eternal tension we feel about the technium: Do we buy into the latest inventions because we want to or because we have to?

As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities. That’s how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works.

In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5 percent, but 94 percent of their kids were literate.

Discomfort is an investment.”

The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future—to head toward possibilities and increased freedoms.

There was a tight feedback loop as increased knowledge enabled us to discover and manufacture more tools, and these tools allowed us to discover and learn more knowledge, and both the tools and the knowledge made our lives easier and longer.

For thousands of years this slow cycle of birth and death crept along, when suddenly—boom!—complex industrial technology appeared and everything started moving very fast. What caused the boom in the first place? What is the origin of our progress?

By systematically recording the evidence for beliefs and investigating the reasons why things worked and then carefully distributing proven innovations, science quickly became the greatest tool for making new things the world had ever seen. Science was in fact a superior method for a culture to learn.

science needs prosperity and populations.

The necessary ingredients of the scientific method are conceptual and fairly low tech: a way to record, catalog, and communicate written evidence and the time to experiment. Why didn’t the Greeks invent it? Or the Egyptians?

The evidence from plagues is that population growth is necessary but not sufficient for progress.

as prosperity increases due to expanding population, fertility rates drop, which will shrink population.

homeostasis

If the origins of prosperity lie solely in growth of the human population, then progress will paradoxically temper itself in the coming century. If the origins of progress lie outside population growth, we’ll need to identify them so that on the other side of the population peak, we can continue to prosper.

The evidence for the rising curve of technological progress is deep and wide. The data fills volumes.

There is real, serious environmental damage caused by technologies. But this damage is not inherent in technologies. Modern technologies don’t have to cause such damage. When existing ones do cause damage, we can make better technologies.

We address the problems of tomorrow not with today’s tools but with the tools of tomorrow. This is what we call progress.

It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination.

Progress is real. It is the reordering of the material world that is made possible by flows of energy and the expansion of intangible minds.

does the six-time independent self-assembly of the camera eye signal a supreme degree of improbability, sort of like tossing six million pennies in a row heads? Or does the multiple invention mean that the eye is a natural funnel that attracts evolution, like water in a well at the bottom of a valley?

if evolution displays an attraction to universal solutions, then so will technology, its accelerated extension.

insectivorous

homologous

Simultaneous, independent invention seems to be the rule in nature.

rhodopsin

(cryptochromes)

jerboa,

a hundred, or a thousand, cases of isolated significant convergent evolution suggest something else at work. Some other force pushes the self-organization of evolution toward recurring solutions.

Is this true?

While a mouse’s heart and lungs beat rapidly compared to an elephant’s, both mouse and elephant count the same number of beats and breaths per life. It is as if mammals are assigned 1.5 billion heartbeats and told to use them as they like.

“We’ve found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these [metabolic] rates and times are remarkably similar,” say James Gillooly and Geoffrey West, the researchers who discovered this law

Some recurring designs, such as the arboreal splay of branches in a tree and coral or the swirling spiral of petals on a flower, are based on the mathematics of growth. They repeat because the math is eternal.

infinitude

(This is in fact the “job” of minds: to produce types of complexity that evolutionary self-creation cannot.)

Simon Conway Morris calls DNA “the strangest molecule in the universe.”

Again and again evolution returns to a few solutions that work.

Life, rather than being boundless and unlimited in every direction, is bounded and limited in many directions by the nature of matter itself.

The technium can’t make all imaginable inventions or all possible ideas. Rather, the technium is limited in many directions by the constraints of matter and energy.

There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked.

The world of the actual-possible is much smaller than it first appears.

life is an inevitable improbability.

As both parent and child of the technium—evolution accelerated—we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said.

Learn more about

Elisha Gray

Discovered!

Three different geniuses discovered (or invented) decimal fractions.

“The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances,” writes anthropologist Alfred Kroeber.

A century ago the failure of communication was in its slow speed; a researcher in Moscow or Japan might not hear about an English invention for decades. Today the failure is due to volume. There is so much published, so fast, in so many areas, that it is very easy to miss what has already been done.

When the necessary web of supporting technology is established, then the next adjacent technological step seems to emerge as if on cue.

Varieties of the Lightbulb. Three independently invented electric lightbulbs: Edison’s, Swan’s, and Maxim’s.

Itellectual Ventures isn't an "idea factory". If anything, it's a "lawsuit factory".

Myhrvold came up with an idea factory called Intellectual Ventures.

As universal ideas become more specific they become less inevitable, more conditional, and more responsive to human volition. Only the conceptual essence of an invention or discovery is inevitable.

As it steadily becomes embodied stage by stage into the constraints of a very particular material form, it is shared by fewer people and becomes less and less predictable. The final design of the first marketable lightbulb or transistor chip could not have been anticipated by anyone, even though the concept was inevitable.

The more abstract the new idea remains, the more universal and simultaneous it will be (shared by tens of thousands). As it steadily becomes embodied stage by stage into the constraints of a very particular material form, it is shared by fewer people and becomes less and less predictable.

Walter Isaacson, who wrote a brilliant biography of Einstein’s ideas, Einstein: His Life and Universe,

Just as in technology, the abstract core of an art form will crystallize into culture when the solvent is ready.

“Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate,” says sociologist Robert Merton,

In addition to instruments and tools, a discovery needs the proper beliefs, expectations, vocabulary, explanation, know-how, resources, funds, and appreciation to appear.

these, too, are fueled by new technologies. An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is worthless; no one can follow. Ideally, an innovation opens up only the next adjacent step from what is known and invites the culture to move forward one hop.

What about the Xerox Star?

Technologies are like organisms that require a sequence of developments to reach a particular stage.

As Broderick notes, humans arrived on the moon “close to a third of a century sooner than loony space travel buffs like Arthur C. Clarke had expected it to occur.”

Moore’s Law represents the acceleration in computer technology, which is accelerating everything else. Faster jet engines don’t lead to higher corn yields, nor do better lasers lead to faster drug discoveries, but faster computer chips lead to all of these.

("it" is Moore's Law)

After [it] happened long enough, people begin to talk about it in retrospect, and in retrospect it’s really a curve that goes through some points and so it looks like a physical law and people talk about it that way. But actually if you’re living it, which I am, then it doesn’t feel like a physical law. It’s really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe.

what is the curve of Moore’s Law telling us that expert insiders don’t see? That this steady acceleration is more than an agreement. It originates within the technology.

the curve (let’s call it Kurzweil’s Law) transects five different technological species of computation: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, transistors, and integrated circuits. An unobserved constant operating in five distinct paradigms of technology for over a century must be more than an industry road map. It suggests that the nature of these ratios is baked deep into the fabric of the technium.

Where is ths from?

The map becomes the territory.

A nice phrase

the essence of the immaterial.

if Moore’s Law ceased, would our optimism end, too?

In Greek mythology the Moirae were the three Fates,

Our choice, and it is significant, is to prepare for the gift—and the problems it will also bring. We can choose to get better at anticipating these inevitable surges. We can choose to educate ourselves and our children to become intelligently literate and wise in their employment.

When we spy our technological fate in the distance, we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather, we should lurch forward in preparation.

The invariant growth ratios found in transistors, bandwidth, storage, pixels, and DNA sequencing are some of the first few Moira threads we’ve teased out in our short history in the accelerated technium. There must be others still to be uncovered by tools not yet invented. These “laws” are reflexes of the technium that kick in regardless of the social climate.

Rewind the tape of time and it will be reinvented.

The picture phone was imagined in sufficient detail a number of times, in different eras and different economic regimes. It really wanted to happen.

Yet today it is back. Perhaps it is more inevitable over a 50-year span. Maybe it was too early back then, and the necessary supporting technology absent and social dynamics not ripe. In this respect the repeated earlier tries can be taken as evidence of its inevitability, its relentless urge to be born.

The strength of what others believe about us is enormous.

How we handle life’s cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the given, but the choices we made.

prey and predator evolve together, and evolve each other, in a never-ending arms race.

choices. Like personality, technology is shaped by a triad of forces. The primary driver is preordained development—what technology wants. The second driver is the influence of technological history, the gravity of the past, as in the way the size of a horse’s yoke determines the size of a space rocket. The third force is society’s collective free will in shaping the technium, or our choices.

technology is shaped by a triad of forces. The primary driver is preordained development—what technology wants. The second driver is the influence of technological history, the gravity of the past, as in the way the size of a horse’s yoke determines the size of a space rocket. The third force is society’s collective free will in shaping the technium, or our choices.

cultural historian David Apter, “Human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen.”

The second corner of the triad is the historical/contingent aspect of evolutionary change (lower right). Accidents and circumstantial opportunities bend the course of evolution this way and that, and those contingencies add up over time to create ecosystems with their own internal momentum. The past matters.

It is the third leg, the collective choice of free-willed individuals, that provides the character of the technium. And just as our free-will choices in our individual lives create the kind of person we are (our ineffable “person”), our choices, too, shape the technium.

Inevitability is not a flaw. Inevitability makes prediction easier. The better we can forecast, the better we can be prepared for what comes.

Although constrained by predetermined forms of development, the particular specifics of a technological phase matter to us greatly.

No matter how many babies we have seen, we are unsettled each time these moments of independence arrive. Collectively we are at one of these moments with the technium. We encounter this natural life cycle every day in biology, but this is the first time we have met it in technology, and it is unnerving us.

we will always be conflicted about technology and find making our choices difficult. But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it.

Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believe) to resist our second self.

In the words of psychologist Sherry Turkle, technology is our “second self.” It is both “other” and “us.”

the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.

“Problems are the answers to solutions,” says Brian Arthur.

mass education and media train humans to shy away from low-tech manual work, to seek jobs working for the digital technium. The divorce of the

mass education and media train humans to shy away from low-tech manual work, to seek jobs working for the digital technium. The divorce of the hands from the head puts a strain on the human psyche.

Our ability to impact has expanded beyond our ability to care.

By turning our lives inside out with technological mediation, we are open to manipulation by mobs, clever advertisers, governments, and the inadvertent biases of the system.

Langdon Winner suggests there is a kind of conservation of life force: “Insofar as men pour their own life into the apparatus, their own vitality is that much diminished. The transference of human energy and character leaves men empty, although they may never acknowledge the void.”

ecumenopolis—planet-sized city—

the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires.

I have read almost every book on the philosophy and theory of technology and interviewed many of the wisest people pondering the nature of this force. So I was utterly dismayed to discover that one of the most astute analyses of the technium was written by a mentally ill mass murderer and terrorist.

The Luddite theorist Kirkpatrick Sale, who, unlike Abbey, railed against the machine while living in a brownstone in Manhattan,

jeremiads

if you use any part of the technium, the system demands servitude

technology does not “reverse” itself, never releasing what is in its hold;

Kaczynski argues that it is impossible to escape the ratcheting clutches of industrial technology for several reasons:

we don’t have a choice of what technology to use in the long run.

Unless that person has the power to wield technology?

GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person.

Perhaps this is more scary if you presume that machines can be intelligent and have their own will?

Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

Are exploseves not "technology"? How did he square that?

if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to use technology as a tool for reaching that other goal.

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite.

Nicely put!

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite.

The young are not under some kind of technological spell that warps their minds into believing civilization is better. Sitting in the mountains, they are under no spell but poverty’s.

Perhaps this is why some find it easier to live in suburbs?

The more people who participate, the more essential it becomes. Living without these embedded technologies requires more effort, or at least more deliberate alternatives.

The great difficulty of the anticivilizationists is that a sustainable, desirable alternative to civilization is unimaginable. We cannot picture it. We cannot see how it would be a place we’d like to move to.

And because we cannot imagine it, it will never happen, because nothing has ever been created without being imagined first.

“Needing more to be satisfied less” is one definition of addiction.

The way to reveal the full costs of technology and deflate its hype is with better information tools and processes.

One Amish man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, BlackBerrys, and iPhones (yes, he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.”

As one Amish man said, “We don’t want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down.” But their manner of slow adoption is instructive:

They are selective. They know how to say no and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ignore more than they adopt.

They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory.

“hormones kick in around the ninth grade, and boys, and even some girls, just don’t want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads, and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age.”

Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew—that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn’t no technology but some technology, and that what seem to work best were the low-tech solutions we called “appropriate technology.”

Alan Kay’s definition of technology.

“Technology,” Kay says, “is anything that was invented after you were born.”

We expand technology to find out who we are and who we can be.

“something that doesn’t quite work yet” (Danny Hillis’s definition of technology)

I owe the Amish hackers a large debt because through their lives I now see the technium’s dilemma very clearly: To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world.

Do we? Is he speaking of implicit or explicit adoption?

Although we don’t realize it, at the global scale, we opt out of more technology than we opt in to.

True of anything, really

It is much easier to maintain a disciplined refusal of a popular technology when all your peers are doing likewise and much harder if they are not.

Large-scale prohibitions against technologies are rare. They are hard to enforce. And my research shows most don’t last much longer than the normal obsolescence cycle of accepted technology.

The gun was outlawed in Shogun Japan for three centuries,

exploration ships in Ming China for three centuries,

silk spinning in Italy for two centuries.

Using what instead? Roman?

In 1299, officials in Florence prohibited their bankers from using Arabic numerals in their accounts.

Technologies can be postponed but not stopped.

Really?

The radio was funded by early backers who believed it would be the ideal device for delivering sermons to rural farmers.

I think this is sort of what McLuhan is saying in "The Medium is the Message"?

We make prediction more difficult because our immediate tendency is to imagine the new thing doing an old job better.

This sounds like McLuhan

It took a while to realize the full dimensions of cinema photography as its own new medium

Technologies shift as they thrive. They are remade as they are used. They unleash second- and third-order consequences as they disseminate. And almost always, they bring completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity.

Thalidomide

If we examine technologies honestly, each one has its faults as well as its virtues. There are no technologies without vices and none that are neutral.

an invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously abused.

The Precautionary Principle was first crafted at the 1992 Earth Summit as part of the Rio Declaration.

it advised that a “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” In other words, even if you can’t prove scientifically that harm is happening, this uncertainty should not prevent you from stopping the suspected harm.

Cass R. Sunstein, who devoted a book to debunking the principle, says, “We must challenge the Precautionary Principle not because it leads in bad directions, but because read for all it is worth, it leads in no direction at all.”

When it comes to risk aversion, we are not rational. We select which risks we want to contend. We may focus on the risks of flying but not driving.

Psychologists have learned a fair amount about risk. We now know that people will accept a thousand times as much risk for technologies or situations that are voluntary rather than mandatory.

we know that the acceptability of risk is directly influenced by how easy it is to imagine both the worst case and the best benefits, and that these are determined by education, advertising, rumor, and imagination. The risks that the public thinks are most significant are those in which it is easy to think of examples where the risk comes to fruition in a worst-case scenario. If it can plausibly lead to death, it’s “significant.”

the consensus of evidence-based science is more reliable than anything else we have, including the hunches of precaution.

Isaac Asimov made the astute observation that in the age of horses many ordinary people eagerly and easily imagined a horseless carriage.

Asimov went on to remark how difficult it was to imagine the second-order consequences of a horseless carriage, such as drive-in movie theaters, paralyzing traffic jams, and road rage.

contrary to the Precautionary Principle, a technology can never be declared “proven safe.” It must be continuously tested with constant vigilance since it is constantly being reengineered by users and the coevolutionary

contrary to the Precautionary Principle, a technology can never be declared “proven safe.” It must be continuously tested with constant vigilance since it is constantly being reengineered by users

In his book about unintended consequences of technology, Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner spells out the nature of constant vigilance:

The only way to wisely evaluate our technological creations is to try them out in prototypes, then refine them in pilot programs. In living with them we can adjust our expectations, shift, test, and rerelease. In action we monitor alterations, then redefine our aims. Eventually, by living with what we create, we can redirect technologies to new jobs when we are not happy with their outcomes. We move with them instead of against them.

The assumption that any given technology will create problems should be part of its process of creation.

Prohibition and relinquishment of dubious technologies do not work. Instead, find them new jobs.

Since banning fails, redirect technologies into more convivial forms.

Here he is speaking of "biological" and "technological" children

We can’t really change the nature of our children, but we can steer them to tasks and duties that match their talents.

As in raising our children, the real question—and disagreement—lies in what values we want to transmit over generations. This is worth discussing, and I suspect that, as in real life, we won’t all agree on the answers.

technology is a type of thinking; a technology is a thought expressed. Not all thoughts or technologies are equal.

In his book Tools for Conviviality, the educator and philosopher Ivan Illich defined convivial tools as those that “enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups. . .

this is where our choice comes in. The evolution of new technologies is inevitable; we can’t stop it. But the character of each technology is up to us.

He answers the titular question, finally!

So what does technology want

Our role as humans, at least for the time being, is to coax technology along the paths it naturally wants to go.

exotropic

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency Increasing opportunity Increasing emergence Increasing complexity Increasing diversity Increasing specialization Increasing ubiquity Increasing freedom Increasing mutualism Increasing beauty Increasing sentience Increasing structure Increasing evolvability

They are really only inevitable in the long term. These tendencies are not ordained to appear at a given time. Rather, these trajectories are like the pull of gravity on water. Water “wants” to leak out of the bottom of a dam.

Technology’s imperative is not a tyrant ordering our lives in lock-step. Its inevitabilities are not scheduled prophesies. They are more like water behind a wall, an incredibly strong urge pent up and waiting to be released.

crenulated

exotropic systems rarely reverse, devolve, or become simpler.

need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a UNIX kernel.

So far humans have created 500,000 different movies and about one million TV episodes.

It is true that too many choices may induce regret, but “no choice” is a far worse option.

in trying to choose a medical-benefits plan with hundreds of options, many consumers give up because the complexity of choice is mind numbing and instead withdraw from the program, whereas programs that included a default choice (no decision necessary) had much higher enrollments.

Increasingly, the technium will converge upon a few universal standards—perhaps basic English, modern musical notation, the metric system (except in the United States!), and mathematical symbols, but also widely adopted technical protocols, from the metric system to ASCII and Unicode. The infrastructure of the world today is built upon a shared system woven from these kinds of standards.

remarkable diversity of thoughts. For the most part, technology will converge to uniform usage around the globe, but occasionally some group or subgroup will devise and refine a type of technology or technique that has limited appeal to a fringe group or marginal use.

Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance. We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces or shapes our identity.

Diversity powers the world. In an ecosystem, increasing diversity is a sign of health.

The astounding diversity of manufactured items today is primarily driven by the need for specialized parts of complicated devices.

You can no longer tell what a person does by looking at their workplace, because they all look the same: a personal computer;

Computers have already absorbed calculators, spreadsheets, typewriters, film, telegrams, telephones, walkie-talkies, compasses and sextants, television, radio, turntables, draft tables, mixing boards, war games, music studios, type foundries, flight simulators, and many other vocational instruments.

Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

the most ubiquitous technology on the planet are the five major domesticated crops: maize, wheat, rice, cane sugar, and cows.

the list of near-ubiquitous technologies includes cotton cloth, iron blades, plastic bottles, paper, and radio signals. These five technological species are within reach of nearly every human alive today,

In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question, What happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?

As in factories, these single “home motors” were designed to drive all the machines in one home. The 1916 Hamilton Beach “Home Motor” had a six-speed rheostat and ran on 110 volts.

The technology was still expensive, requiring a personal computer, a telephone line, and a monthly subscription fee—but those who adopted it acquired power through knowledge.

Thanks to Moore's law?

This was simply a case, as computer scientist Marvin Minsky once put it, of the “haves and have-laters.”

Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has six billion people,

when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous. That will produce unintended consequences worth worrying about.”

We were so focused on those who don’t have plenty to eat that we missed what happens when everyone does have plenty.

The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are convivially open-ended: communications, computation, socialization, and digitization.

The amount of computation and communication that can be crowded into matter and materials seems infinite.

Fascinating

Some theoretical physicists, including Freeman Dyson, argue that free will occurs in atomic particles, and therefore free choice was born in the great fire of the big bang and has been expanding ever since.

A mind, of course, is a choice factory, constantly inventing new ways to choose. “With more choices, we have more opportunities,” declared Emmanuel Mesthene, a technology philosopher at Harvard.

technology teaches us how to make innovative kinds of mistakes we could not make before.

Once our machines unleashed possibilities as fast as we could think them up; now they unleash possibilities without waiting for us.

2. As life evolves, nature creates more opportunities for dependencies between species. Every organism that creates a successful niche for itself also creates potential niches for other species

As life evolves, nature creates more opportunities for dependencies between species. Every organism that creates a successful niche for itself also creates potential niches for other species

our life is deeply symbiotic; we live inside of other life.

The technium spends only one quarter of its energy on human comfort, food, and travel needs; the rest of the energy is made by technology for technology.

Nearly 75 percent of the world’s total nonsolar energy—

technium—is used for the benefit of moving, housing, and maintaining our machines. Most trucks, trains, and planes are not moving people but freight.

spherical diatom

The attractive scissors and the beautiful hammer and the gorgeous car all carry in their form the wisdom of their ancestors.

every technology is our child, and so we love our children—all of them. We are embarrassed to admit it, but we love technology.

I walked across the marble star map that traces a side-reel revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left.

I have to see this

Hoover Dam,

In the technium, revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand.

In the technium, revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an “evocative object.”

Turkle says, “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.”

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and “useless.”

I find some of the things I've seen in Minecraft more inspiring than much of human creation

I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world.

Learn more about this

The rock ant is tiny, even for an ant. Individually, each ant is the size of a comma on this page.

As biologist Anthony Trewavas argues in his remarkable paper, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” plants demonstrate a slow version of problem solving that fits most of our definitions of animal intelligence.

A plant thinks without a brain. It uses a vast network of transducing molecular signals instead of electronic nerves to carry and process information.

The manipulation, storage, and processing of information is a central theme of life.

All the inventions we have constructed to assist our own minds—our many storage devices, signal processing, flows of information, and distributed communication networks—all these are also essential ingredients for producing new minds. And so new minds spawn in the technium in inordinate degrees. Technology wants mindfulness. This yearning for increasing sentience reveals

new minds spawn in the technium in inordinate degrees. Technology wants mindfulness.

technium because humans have a chauvinistic bias against any kind of intelligence that does not precisely mirror our own. Unless an artificial mind behaves exactly like a human one, we don’t count it as intelligent.

Some problems will require multiple kinds of minds to crack, and our job will be to discover new methods of thinking

What is a "thinking tool"?

We’ll need all varieties of thinking tools.

What technology wants is increasing sentience.

Minds are highly evolved ways of structuring the bits of information that form reality. That is what we mean when we say a mind understands; it generates order.

There’s no stream of information that is lessening.

Everything we manufacture produces an item and information about that item. Even when we create something that is information based to start with, it will generate yet more information about its own information.

Despite its own rhetoric, science is not built to increase either the “truthfulness” or the total volume of information. It is designed to increase the order and organization of knowledge we generate about the world

“Truth” is really only a measure of how well specific facts can be built upon, extended, and interconnected.

They “discovered” previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating of structured knowledge science.

Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don’t fit into the larger pattern of the known. But in time, more facts are brought into this structure of information.

Is this true?

Facts, in fact, were invented. Not by science but by the European legal system, in the 1500s.

At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new ways of discovery, different ways of structuring information. We call that organization knowledge.

Evolution searches for designs that will keep the game of searching going. In this way, evolution wants to evolve.

If we think of each living species as an answer to the question “How does something survive in this environment?,” then evolution is a formula that provides concrete answers that are embodied in matter and energy.

Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities and change the methods of searching for solutions.

If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning.

The technium can feel like a black hole of uncertainty sometimes. But humanity has passed through several similar evolutionary transitions already.

The first, as I mentioned earlier, was the invention of language.

The second invention, writing, changed the speed of learning in humans by easing the transmission of ideas across territories and across time.

The third transition is science, or rather, the structure of the scientific method.

The third transition is science, or rather, the structure of the scientific method. This is the invention that enables greater invention.

visible in the blink of a year.

The elaborate system of law that undergirds Western societies is not very different from software. It’s a complex set of code that runs on paper instead of in a computer, and it slowly calculates fairness and order (ideally).

How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to be different from his or her parents, a chance to create something his or her own.

... and so on

Ideally, we would find a position of excellence tailored specifically for everyone born. We don’t normally think of opportunities this way, but these possibilities for achievement are called “technology.” The technology of vibrating strings opened up (created) the potential for a virtuoso violin player.

How many geniuses at the level of Bach and Van Gogh died before the needed technologies were available for their talents to take root?

nuancs

In the beginning there was no choice, no free will, no thing but nothing.

In general, the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, and techniques of creating choices.

technium. I needed a bigger view to enable me to choose technologies that would bless me with greater benefits and fewer demands.

In 3,000 years, when everyone finally gets their jet packs and flying cars, we will still struggle with this inherent conflict between the technium’s own increase and ours. This enduring tension is yet another aspect of technology we have to accept.

As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options.

An infinite game has no boundaries. James Carse, the theologian who developed these ideas in his brilliant treatise Finite and Infinite Games, says, “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”

When we play the game of life, or the game of the technium, goals are not fixed, the rules are unknown and shifting. How do we proceed? A good choice is to increase choices

I like the idea of God as a "hacker genius"

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.

What I hope I have shown in this book is that a single thread of self-generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy. The technium is less an adversary to life than its extension. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made.

The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium, with questions and problems and the thickening relations between bits that we call con scientia—shared knowledge—or consciousness.

In a new axial age, it is possible the greatest technological works will be considered a portrait of God rather than of us. In addition to holding spiritual retreats in redwood groves, we may surrender ourselves in the labyrinths of a 200-year-old network. The intricate, unfathomable layers of logic built up over a century, borrowed from rainforest ecosystems, and woven together into beauty by millions of active synthetic minds will say what redwoods say, only louder, more convincingly: “Long before you were here, I am.”

Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the authors of the Upanishads, and the Jewish patriarchs all lived within a span of 20 generations. Only a few major religions have been born since then. Historians call that planetary fluttering the Axial Age.

The technium is not God; it is too small. It is not utopia. It is not even an entity. It is a becoming that is only beginning.

FIN

No one person can become all that is humanly possible; no one technology can capture all that technology promises. It will take all life and all minds and all technology to begin to see reality. It will take the whole technium, and that includes us, to discover the tools that are needed to surprise the world. Along the way we generate more options, more opportunities, more connection, more diversity, more unity, more thought, more beauty, and more problems. Those add up to more good, an infinite game worth playing. That’s what technology wants.

Annotated Reading List

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. W. Brian Arthur. New York: Free Press, 2009. This is the clearest, most utilitarian description of technology that I’ve come across.

The Singularity Is Near. Ray Kurzweil. New York: Viking, 2005. I call this book mythical because I think the Singularity is a brand-new myth for our age.

Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy. Carl Mitcham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. An accessible entry into the history of technology, sometimes used as a textbook.

Finite and Infinite Games. James Carse. New York: Free Press, 1986. This tiny book holds a universe of wisdom. Written by a theologian, you probably need to read only the first and last chapters, but that is enough. It altered my thinking about life, the universe, and everything.

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. Eric Brende. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. This is a refreshing, fast read about the two years Brende lived off the grid near an Amish community. His book is the best way to get the feel—the warmth, the smell, the atmosphere—of the minimal lifestyle. Because Brende comes from a technological background, he anticipates your questions.