Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

In June 1863, Samuel Butler wrote (but signed “Cellarius”) “Darwin among the Machines” for The Press, a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. The article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species. The article ended, urging this notion that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” This article, along with later writings by Butler on “machine evolution,” was probably largely satirical in intent, although he may have been using these fanciful writings to allude to or explore deeper philosophical issues, such as the question of whether biological life and evolution can be explained in purely mechanical terms.

“We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”

- “Cellarius,” Darwin among the Machines

“Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather 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 think Kaczynski was right about these claims.”

- Kevin Kelly, “The Unabomber Was Right,” chapter from What Technology Wants

In November 2010, Jerry Coyne wrote “Better All the Time” for The New York Times. The thesis of Kevin Kelly’s bold new book begins with its title. How can technology — an inanimate collection of human inventions — want anything? According to Kevin Kelly, a professional tech-watcher and former editor of Wired magazine, it’s because technology is like a living organism, animated by the same evolutionary forces that resulted, over eons, in the human brain. Moreover, for Kevin Kelly, the whole process has been progressive and predictable: the eventual appearance of the BlackBerry was immanent in the Big Bang. Kevin Kelly argues convincingly that this expansion of technology is beneficial. Technology creates choice — compare the supermarket’s shelves with the pantry of a colonial farm — and therefore enhances our potential for self-realization. No longer tied to the land, we can become, in principle, what we want to become. He sees evolution — both biological and technological — as an inexorable and predictable process; if life were to begin again on Earth, he argues, we’d see not only the re-evolution of humans, but humans who would invent pretty much the same stuff. To support his claims, Kevin Kelly describes parallel inventions on different isolated continents (the blowgun and the abacus, for example), and the presence of near-simultaneous inventions in modern times (the light bulb was invented at least two dozen times).

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

- Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

In October 2010, Susan Jane Gilman wrote a review of the Kevin Kelly book for NPR’s All Things Considered. The provocative new Kevin Kelly book, What Technology Wants, claims that technology is an extension of the human body — not "of our genes, but of our minds." Everything that humans have thought of and produced over time — which Kelly dubs "the technium" — has followed, shaped and become integrated into human evolution — so much so, in fact, that it's now a part of evolution itself. As such, Kelly argues, the goal of the technium — its "want," if you will — is to foster progress ... human betterment ... and even a portrait of God. While Kelly stops short of arguing that a MacBook, an opera or Hammurabi's Code are the equivalent of, say, a live chicken, he comes close. "However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue or flesh," he writes, "but in the intangible organization of energy and information contained in those material forms." Because the technium is all about organizing energy and information, it, too, is an evolving form of life — beholden to the forces of the cosmos.