Start your review of What Technology Wants. Jan 17, Dan rated it did not like it. I immediately took issue with this book. Not because the beginning is slow and dry, as others have rightly pointed out — to setup his argument, Kelly bafflingly appears to have concluded that he must start with the The Big Bang.
More than once, his factoid-barrage approach left me feeling as though I were reading the back of a cereal box instead of a structured argument. His constant use fact tidbits was distracting and, worse, abstracting, since it was frequently impossible to figure out why a piece of information was included.
Unfortunately, it was only to get far worse when Kelly actually got to the meat of his argument nearly pages in. While the comparison is cute and can lead to some fun and even thought-provoking analogies, Kelly takes this argument seriously. This is a shame, because not only is the analogy a rather weak one e.
Which is too bad, because the remaining pages of the book are entirely based on reusing this analogy. Complement sandwich time! The reader does at least get a well-deserved break when they stumble upon Chapter Lessons of Amish Hackers. This chapter is genuinely interesting, insightful, and novel — so much so that I read it aloud to my friends. This chapter gave me a new understanding and respect for the Amish culture, and was not at all what I expected to find buried halfway through the tome.
All good things must come to an end though… Pushing onward, the reader is tossed back into the cesspool of shallow thinking and Pollyanna-on-Christmas-sugar-high wishfulness that defines the work.
View all 4 comments. Jan 18, Marc Weidenbaum added it. This is a characteristic exercise in factoid-packed mega-optimism by the founding editor of Wired Magazine.
The man whose final year of tenure as head of the magazine brought us the famous "Dow 36," article here tackles the role of technology in our lives, and how technology has what is, in essence, a life of its own. The future is just as bright, according to What Technology Wants, as it was in "Dow 36," -- but, of course, we know what came of that prediction. I found the opening chapter This is a characteristic exercise in factoid-packed mega-optimism by the founding editor of Wired Magazine.
I found the opening chapter to be one of the most infuriating things I've read in a long time, so dense is it with anthropomorphic mental hijinks. I highly recommend that if you elect to read this book, you do so by starting with the chapter on how Amish tinkerers are themselves a kind of hacker culture.
That chapter provides a sense of grounding to the book, a lens of informed skepticism that is largely lacking elsewhere. It's absolutely fascinating stuff, and of all the books in this book's extensive bibliography, the ones on Amish life are the ones I'm most likely to read next. Not out of some incipient back-to-the-landness on my part, but because if the ideas on Amish-ness seem the most engaging here, then perhaps the source material for them is also engaging.
The book has a lot of interesting ideas, but they're ideas digital sentience, for example that I prefer to have filtered through consciously employed science fiction and I don't mean that as a put-down; if this were all rewritten by Greg Egan, I'd probably love it.
My second biggest issue with the book after its anthropomorphic exuberance is how Kelly shifts his depth-of-field in ways that support his moment-by-moment sense of what he is describing.
Toward the end, for example, he criticizes Wendell Berry for being "stuck on the cold, hard, yucky stuff," by which he seems to mean focusing too much on specific technological objects, rather than the broad sweep of technology.
But Kelly himself has focuses on specifics himself throughout the book when it serves his rhetorical purpose. View all 5 comments. Oct 07, Jane Friedman rated it it was amazing. This is a history and culture book as much as it's a "technology" or futurism book. It's one of the few books I've read in the last decade that really deserved to be a BOOK—something that commands your attention and requires immersive reading.
The way you see the world is likely to change by the end, and if you're not already immersed in the tech industry and likely feel yourself "above" this book , then I guarantee you'll be talking about and recommending it to others. View 2 comments. Mar 12, Dave Emmett rated it it was amazing Shelves: , must-read , technology. Our minds are accelerating evolution using ideas instead of genes. To me, the most beautiful section of this book was the beginning of Chapter 4, which describes the history of the universe through the lens of a single atom.
For billions of years, atoms traversed the universe in solitude, never encountering anything else but the em Wow. For billions of years, atoms traversed the universe in solitude, never encountering anything else but the emptiness of space. The history of the universe is one where atoms encounter greater and greater change, from nothingness to being used in the running of a computer chip. Atoms just want to have fun, and technology allows them to hang out with a lot more atoms and have a lot more fun I'm paraphrasing.
But the whole thing was amazing, if you are even remotely interested in what the future entails and if you aren't, you should be then you have to read this book. Apr 25, Nick rated it it was ok Shelves: non-fiction. Although I disagree with many of Kelly's points, my main reasons for giving this book only two stars are its length--was it really necessary to recap the history of the universe from the Big Bang?
He consistently dismisses or downplays criticisms and negative aspects of the evolution of technology, developing from his basic premise--that technology is a self-sustaining and somewhat autonomous system--the tautological proposition that al Although I disagree with many of Kelly's points, my main reasons for giving this book only two stars are its length--was it really necessary to recap the history of the universe from the Big Bang?
He consistently dismisses or downplays criticisms and negative aspects of the evolution of technology, developing from his basic premise--that technology is a self-sustaining and somewhat autonomous system--the tautological proposition that all technology is good because it creates more choices for humans.
Kelly asserts that all choices are good choices, equating the choice among 85 different kinds of crackers in the average American supermarket with a young person's choice of vocation, or the choice to use a weapons technology with the choice to use civil disobedience. In the real world, not all choices are morally equivalent or equally meaningful. Not recommended. Jan 23, Book Calendar rated it really liked it Shelves: computers , philosophy , internet , innovation , technology.
He calls it the technium. He views it as being part of human evolution. I found the ideas to be fascinating but overly anthropomorphic.
He gave living qualities to stone, steel, spoons, bricks, and computers. There is both a humanizing and a dehumanizing aspect to this writing. The humanizing aspect is a view of increased possibilities, more opportunities to create greater freedoms and greater c What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly views technology as a natural organic living process.
The humanizing aspect is a view of increased possibilities, more opportunities to create greater freedoms and greater choice. The author shows how machines improve our lives and expand our possibilities. He also includes systems of thought like science, art, and law as part of technology. He describes how technology evolved as we evolved from the stone age to modern cities. Where it fails and seems a bit dehumanizing is his taking a picture of nature that seems very utilitarian. He describes that eventually there will be no waste with biophilic technology.
I think this lessens nature and makes it machine like. He even claims the Amish are part of the technium because of how they use technology. This was a bit far fetched to me. I don't like to think of myself as evolving in a similar way to a machine. The unabomber, Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology views are gone into. This was quite daring to do. Kevin Kelly does not shy from tackling some opposing view points. He even talks about primitivism. This makes the book different.
There is a deeply philosophical bent to the writing. I can recognize some of the philosophy. Some of it is very much at the edge of high technology.
He seems to be trodding a slightly different path than transhumanism where the idea is that we will become more than human when we integrate with machines. Kevin Kelly also does not argue for the singularity where machines become smarter than humans. Machines are a different kind of intelligence than human intelligence. His ultimate goal is to open infinite games for people, more choice, more freedom, more opportunities through technology.
Read this book it will open your mind to new ideas. It makes you think. Kevin Kelly helped launched Wired Magazine. It includes notes, an annotated reading list, black and white photographs, charts, and an index. It is very much a popular science title. Jun 02, Jon rated it liked it.
How can a book about technology have such interesting parts about fire and agriculture, and such boring parts about computers and cell phones? He's really into the Amish. Mar 23, Nick rated it it was ok. I've been following the technium blog for a while, and always remember liking it. The book certainly has parts I appreciated, and on the whole they probably mostly compensate for the negatives.
But still. I think my dislike was primarily based on evidence-lacking claims, or things passed off too quickly as some sort of fact. Trying to sound technical doesn't make something correct. Graphs without axes scales don't help. He talks about the Amish a few times, how they interact with technology, and how they balance it with community.
Without the cerebral structure of language we couldn't access our own mental activity. Just because we have a language doesn't mean creatures couldn't access their mental activity without one. And I don't know that language reveals what the mind thinks Apparently the phrase is, then, a "skeuonym".
You decide whether to speak the truth at any trial, even if you have a genetic or familial propensity to lie. You decide whether or not to risk befriending a stranger, no matter your genetic or cultural bias toward shyness.
You decide beyond your inherent tendencies or conditioning. But isn't some cognitive research about decision making a little less certain on the subject? Lower processes determine things before you're aware of the decision? I highly recommend elective poverty and minimalism as a fantastic education, not least because it will help you sort out your technology priorities. But I have observed that simplicity's fullest potential requires that one consider minimalism one phase of many even if a recurring phase The Paradox of Choice.
In that way I am not that different from the Amish, who benefit from the outsiders around them fully engaged with electricity, phones, and cars. But unlike individuals who opt out of individual technologies, Amish society indirectly constrains others as well as themselves. If we apply the ubiquity test - what happens if everyone does it - to the Amish way, the optimization of choice collapses. By constraining the suite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the Amish are holding back possibilities not just for their children by indirectly for all.
Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally. In other words, the risks of a particular technology have to be determined by trial and error in real life. It is to come up with a better idea.
Indeed, we should prefer a bad idea to no ideas at all, because a bad idea can at least be reformed, while not thinking offers no hope.
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. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism a, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternatives realities.
The diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism, and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the conviction that something is not real until it is captured on camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view.
Quantum choice probably does not play a role in these choices. Rather, a billion interacting deterministic factors influence it. Because unraveling these factors is an intractable problem, these choices are in practice free-will decisions of the network, and the internet is making billions of them every day.
I'm not physicist, but quantum effects have to bubble up to everything else, right? While we don't understand them, it doesn't mean they don't play a role in more macro-scale happenings. And that last sentence really gets me. F that. Co-dependence, working together 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. Just started to read it yesterday.
So many good insights into history of technology, how it makes us human and how human, in fact, is being used by technology actually vice versa. Each new innovation comes only when there is an appropriate environment - proper tools and base of ideas - that guides birth of new technology. For Kelly each technology is like a species that "instead of expressing the work of genes..
I am already acquainted by ideas of McLuhan and Koert van Mensvort Next Nature , this book is like a match that sets on fire new perception. Technium and humankind both depend on each other co-evolutionary relations. Kevin Kelly is fascinated by the cosmos, nature, humanity and technology.
For me it turned out to be both. Kelly begins with the cosmic singularity that became the Big Bang, from which all that existed, is, or will be, originates. While denying Intelligent Design he believes that there is an imperative operating which instigates and lays the founda Kevin Kelly is fascinated by the cosmos, nature, humanity and technology. While denying Intelligent Design he believes that there is an imperative operating which instigates and lays the foundations and conditions for biologic life and even sentience.
Taking it one step further, arising out of life and sentience must come technology. At the pinnacle of these phases is the one we currently inhabit, the Technium. If we are but a stepping stone toward some undiscovered purpose of the Technium, what might that be? To demonstrate the inevitability of this cosmic drive he references the Goldilocks Principle - that our planet has just the right combination of conditions to support biological and intelligent life.
Beyond that he spotlights the many times that critical developmental milestones in human history have occurred almost simultaneously in different parts of the world or from the minds of different people. For instance, the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian to villages, cities and empires, extending from China to the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, Central and South America. Pointing out that Newton was not the only person to reveal the intricacies of calculus, Darwin not the only one to see evolution at work, Bell was actually rather lucky to be credited with inventing the telephone.
Other examples abound. In other words, there seems to be an inevitability in the march of technological progress. Beyond parallel cultural developments, another tendency seems to be manifesting itself over time, expanding choices, allowing individuals ever more avenues to explore and exploit to their individual benefit and that of humanity in general.
In support of this Kelly cites individuals who, if born in other times, would have wasted their enormous talents and insights. If Einstein had been born in the 17th and not the 19th century the mathematical nor scientific groundwork would have been conducive to the fertile products of his imagination. Had Steve Jobs or Bill Gates been born but a couple, or even a single, generation before where would their talents have placed them.
The conjunction of time and individual are important. The Technium maximizes the value of individual genius by allowing greater choices and appropriate areas in which to apply their talents - and it does this on a lesser scale to everyone.
The developments of Artificial Intelligence and robotics are symptomatic of the Technium at work. In a few corners here and there, though, there are stars that maintain order over billions of years, and sometimes they have planets around them, and they maintain orbits and have just the right distance and other essential properties. They may have life, like we have. There may be water. And so we have increasing order in this universe of increasing disorder.
This ordering — this life — has made another level of ordering possible, which is technology. What life is doing is making all kinds of things that it could not make itself. You could think of artifacts we make-hammers, cars, airplanes-as species of stuff that life was not able to make directly.
Life made minds and humans to make new things. What does the concept of the technium imply for those who fear or avoid technology? The whole system does have its own agenda. He believes the agenda of technology is the destruction of personal freedom, and he was willing to kill people for that belief. I do think that people who fear technology should reexamine what technology really brings.
It is true that every new invention makes new problems. Today, most of the problems we have in our society are technogenic. People who fear technology think technology does nothing but create problems. Technology gives us many things besides problems-increased choices, options, possibilities. I think that the total sum of what it offers us is just barely a little more than the total sum of its harms.
A tenth of a percent, compounded over a century, is how we make civilization. But I have bad news for everyone who does: we are already a part of technology. Our genes are evolving a hundred times faster than they were 10, years ago.
About 50, years ago we invented a technology called cooking. Our nutrition changed. Our jaws shortened. Our teeth moved and got smaller. We invented something with our minds, and that changed our bodies. We domesticated ourselves. Examination of their parallel developmental sequences can reveal inherent biases. Many of the dynamics of evolution and syntropy extend from living organisms into artificial systems, primarily because they share similar disequilibrial states.
We can see the direction of technology in the direction of life and evolution that is if you accept evolution has a bias as I do. We can ignore individual inventions and chart long-term flows which enable them.
Much as we might want the compressed history of a growing creature and guess where it goes next. If the organism is a caterpillar we are out of luck; if it is a worm, it will succeed.
Strandbeest by Theo Jansen. So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium?
What does technology want? Complexity To increase complexity To increase social co-dependency To increase self-referential nature To align with nature. Evolvability To accelerate evolvability To play the infinite game. In general the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, techniques.
More ways, more choices. Over time technological advances invent more energy efficient methods, and gravitate to technologies which compress the most information and knowledge into a given space or weight. Also over time, more of more of matter on the planet will be touched by technological processes.
Also, technologies tend toward ubiquity and cheapness. They also tend towards new levels of complexity though many will get simpler, too. Over time technologies require more surrounding technologies in order to be discovered and to operate; some technologies become eusocial — a distributed existence — in which they are inert when solitary.
In the long run, technology increases the speed at which it evolves and encourages its own means of invention to change. It aims to keep the game of change going. Those varieties that give humans more free choices will prevail. Going niche will always be going with the flow. There is almost no end to how specialized and tiny some niches can get. What flips when everyone has one? What happens when it is free? Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first.
These are just some of the things technology wants. And nor do I accept evolution having any bias. It just runs, things happen and accumulate, or fade away. Why do you resist accepting that technology is a fully living and conscious organism? Same goes for a building and a business — any organism, any population.
This is a biased, a-priori assumption on your part with precious little evidence in its favor. One listens for the tell-tale signs of a phenomena, always with an eye for paradoxes and an ear to the nagging noise in the signal. And vice versa? What foolishness!
The protozoan has immense power over us. Our lives hang on the right-living of the nearby microbiotic population. Sometime after Kepler it became universally fashionable to deprive the outer world of its inner thoughtfulness.
Your man Dyson knows a bit about what Kepler knew: he was penetrating the language of the living cosmos, a communion with mind at large: not the discovery of some inert math, but meaningful speech. It wants every human being to be connected to every other human being at electricity speed. It wants it to happen fast. Nothing magical: only a natural, mechanical process.
I have a phrase that I have coined which should give you something to think about. It is beyond our control and it is hurtling the human race towards a singularity that will cause the overthrow of humanity by an AI. It exists now in a embryonic state. It is dependent on nourishment through its virtual umbilical cord from its nurturing mother which is human civilization.
The Singularity will be the moment of its birth, but it is already alive. Every complex system seems to liberate entities that constitute it. I like to search for analogy on different levels of being.
For example, a cell in the human body can do more, make larger distances and generally put itself to conditions it could not do by itself. Likewise, you can see that in molecules constituting a cell, or atoms in a molecule.
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