What Technology Wants

Apr 22, 2013 Al Bità rated it 5 of 5 stars

Our love/hate relationship with technology has sprouted two extremes: those who become terrified if they contemplate the subject, and those who wholeheartedly relish the excitement of promise and potentiality it offers. Kelly’s approach here is to attempt to consider the problem a bit more dispassionately, and he does so by applying the concept of Darwinian evolution to technology, mainly because it appears to him that when one charts the development of technologies, the resultant graphs reminde...more Our love/hate relationship with technology has sprouted two extremes: those who become terrified if they contemplate the subject, and those who wholeheartedly relish the excitement of promise and potentiality it offers. Kelly’s approach here is to attempt to consider the problem a bit more dispassionately, and he does so by applying the concept of Darwinian evolution to technology, mainly because it appears to him that when one charts the development of technologies, the resultant graphs reminded him of similar charts for biological evolution. This approach allows him make a number of observations which, in and of themselves, are immensely stimulating and provocative, and make him conclude that whatever our feelings towards technology, we must needs directly face its potentially immense power to deal objectively with it if we are not to succumb to its control. It is for this reason I have given this book five stars: I believe this is an important problem, and Kelly’s approach does allow us to look it in the eye (or eyes!) as it were.

Each of the chapters in this book deals with specific matters, some of which might prove difficult for some readers to plough through — but I doubt there is any other way to deal with some of the issues dealt with. It is worth persevering with. For those who suspect some of his statements are too facile or broad brush, part of the reason for that is a publishing decision that seems to be prevalent in serious works intended for the ordinary public: the elimination of footnotes from the text (wherein sources are provided for statements in the text) and placed at the end of the book in the form of endnotes. That in itself is not a problem, but the complete absence of any notation in the text to reference the endnotes renders the latter useless; and it is not surprising if some readers subsequently believe the author is too facile…

It is also slightly unfortunate that the title, and the whole ‘evolutionary’ concept seems to suggest that Kelly’s ‘technium’ is somehow alive, and has ‘desires’ or ‘wants’ — I’m not that convinced (but it does make one reconsider what one means when on talks of ‘life’!). But this is particularly problematic for me at the extreme ends of this so-called ‘evolution’: it’s ‘existence’ at the Big Bang, and its continuance thousands/millions/trillions/etc. of years hence to achieve some god-like transcendence and ubiquity… Personally I think one can safely discard these extremities, and deal with the more interesting implications of an evolutionary-like expansion of technology for us humans today. Here Kelly is very astute: any dominating technology can be either ‘extremely good’ or ‘extremely bad’, and his confident belief that we can and will use that technology for our betterment is confidently demanded.

Whether one agrees with Kelly’s evolutionary conceit or not, his writing about the real beauty and real horrors that technology provides is powerfully expressed. It makes us seriously re-think just about everything we might have thought or felt about ourselves and our technology, and makes us aware that we really do need to deal intelligently with the matter and not shy away from it, since the latter approach merely serves to intensify technology’s domination of us. For this reason alone, and despite some areas of difficulty, this book is strongly recommended reading for everyone.(less)

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Feb 16, 2013 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is well written, but I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions. He makes a good case for how wonderful the future will be when every inanimate object is intelligent. But I'm not sure I buy it.

There's no question the Internet is addictive and it's hard to not appreciate its delights. Nobody seems to want to turn it off and head back into reality. At the same time, though, too much time linked in is like too much time in front of the TV: after a while it becomes depressing.

Kelly is not...more This book is well written, but I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions. He makes a good case for how wonderful the future will be when every inanimate object is intelligent. But I'm not sure I buy it.

There's no question the Internet is addictive and it's hard to not appreciate its delights. Nobody seems to want to turn it off and head back into reality. At the same time, though, too much time linked in is like too much time in front of the TV: after a while it becomes depressing.

Kelly is not preaching against the real world. In fact he's been out in it more than most. But he's reached a point in his life where the Internet is the be all for him. He feels there is no problem that the world faces that more intelligence cannot solve.

It's hard to question his conclusion since much of it is based on historical trends. He seems to have the facts and graphs to back up his ideas. But facts and pie charts have a way of being interpreted in ways that support either side of an argument.

He's seen a lot of the world, and is not insensitive to the harm created by technological evolution. Now that we're all connected and everything will soon have "smarts", though, we're not going to need any of that dirty industrial stuff anymore. And we're enlightened now. We respect the world and don't go tromping over the lesser thans. Soon there will be no digital divide. You can see that diminishing already. People in the third world are much more connected than they've ever been in the past.

That's the idea you get while reading this book. And yet just the other day I read somewhere that there is more human slavery on the planet now than ever was before. Which is the true picture of what technology has brought us? A freedom for all to be who and what they can be, or an easier way for ruthless types to dominate the rest of us. There seems to be a disconnect between what is going on in the world and what is being reported about what is going on in the world. An intellectual has access to the reports more than to actual situations around the globe.

Yes, I understand the author has been all over and talked to all kinds of people. But how long has it been and is he really in touch with the results of our tech today? It changes daily and I don't think anybody is really keeping track, so how would anybody know.

Still, a fascinating read and you can see a lot of what he's saying is true. If you think at all about the future, you should read this book.

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Oct 12, 2012 Kyle rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Kyle by: Scot

Although I found a number of interesting and compelling things in this book, I can't say it was a good book overall.

Kelly looks at the inexorable march of technology and seeks patterns. He does a compelling job pointing out how the "technium" (his word for the technological sphere around us) evolves, builds, multiplies choice, and is generally a force for good. Along the way he makes excellent points about the semi-directional nature of advancement and how some technologies may be inevitable as...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kelly is a distinguished tech journalist (former executive editor of Wired magazine) and knows everyone who’s ever been anyone in Silicon Valley. Like all the best techies of a certain age, his roots are in hippydom, as a leading light of the Whole Earth Catalogue in the 1970s. He still sees technology in terms of its wider contribution to life.

Amish communities appear frequently in his writing as he admires their conscious, selective attitude to technology, echoing his own restrictive rules fo...more

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Jun 08, 2012 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mp3

This is one of the most incredible books I've ever read. I would heartily recommend this to anyone. I wonder at the ability of many of my friends to comprehend anything that he puts into this book, but then, at the same time, I don't know how much I actually understood, either. In any case, the case he lays out for the evolution of technology, the process of invention, the timing of invention and ubiquity of multiple-invention, is simply astounding. I begin to wonder at wisdom of our current pat...more

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Dec 06, 2011 Brendan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, digital-era, evolution, history-journalism, multimodal, new-media, non-fiction, philosophy-religion, science, scholarship

Kevin Kelly’s nonfiction treatise explores the question of what we should make of the seemingly-independent course the technological apparatus around us charts daily. This apparatus, which Kelly calls the technium, both depends on and guides us, and our ability, or inability, to ignore its treasures goes only so far as we’re willing to become Amish in some way (even the Amish adopt new technologies, it turns out). A few thoughts:

Like Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Ke...more Kevin Kelly’s nonfiction treatise explores the question of what we should make of the seemingly-independent course the technological apparatus around us charts daily. This apparatus, which Kelly calls the technium, both depends on and guides us, and our ability, or inability, to ignore its treasures goes only so far as we’re willing to become Amish in some way (even the Amish adopt new technologies, it turns out). A few thoughts:

Like Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Kelly describes the “arc of the technium” in evolutionary terms, suggesting that technology is life‘s way of expanding in complexity, ubiquity, and a bunch of other -itys. DeLanda writes his book as a robot in the machine future, describing how humans led us to it. Kelly might not disagree.
At the same time, Kelly is still skeptical of technology en masse. He suggests that each piece of technology should be understood and grappled with on its own terms, and doesn’t seem to be Kurtzweilian in his love of technological progress. That said, chapter 14 is pretty darn optimistic about the possibilities inherent in a technologically-advanced future.
Part of me spent the whole book grumbling that Kelly doesn’t invoke McLuhan more, because the essential argument at the heart of this book turns on the way technology serves as an extension of man, something that drives and is driven by us. McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media made the same argument in less accessible terms decades ago.
I found the chapter on the Unabomber most compelling, since Kelly outlines his debate about whether or not to include Kaczynski’s writing in his discussion of the dangers technology poses for us. Kelly points out how Kaczynski and nearly all the anti-technology crazies like him take full advantage of systemic technology in order to produce and disseminate the screeds they write against technological society. The unabomber could have, Kelly suggests, cut himself off from the grid and actually developed a subsistence lifestyle. Instead, he bicycled into town and bought groceries and other supplies at Wal-Mart.
If you only have time for a little of the book, I recommend chapter 13, in which Kelly lays out the nine trajectories evolving life forms (and technology) tend toward: efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, evolvability. These forces help Kelly make his final argument that technology ultimately helps us more than it hurts us, and that we’ve got a bright future ahead of us.
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Jun 18, 2011 Austin rated it 3 of 5 stars

In many ways What Technology Wants is a good companion to the book The Rational Optimist. Whereas the latter focuses on the economic and sociological implications of progress, the former focuses on the evolution of technology. And evolution is truly his theme throughout the book. Early on, Kelly (one of the founders of Wired Magazine) coins the phrase 'technium' to mean something similar to 'biosphere' or 'ecosystem' in the technological realm. He draws many parallels between the forces acting o...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Nick rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was surprised by how much of this book I actually _dis_liked. 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.

p3: "When the...more

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Mar 12, 2011 Dave Emmett rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, must-read, technology

Wow.

Kelly builds on arguments from Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, showing how technology is a continuation of biological evolution. 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...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Book Calendar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: computers, innovation, internet, philosophy, technology

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly views technology as a natural organic living process. 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...more

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Jan 18, 2011 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 36,000" 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 36,000" -- but, of course, we know what came of that prediction.

I found the opening chapter...more 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 36,000" 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 36,000" -- but, of course, we know what came of that prediction.

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. (less)

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Jan 15, 2011 Craig rated it 3 of 5 stars

The forces that govern biological evolution remain uninterrupted in their progression into the technological realm. In What Technology Wants' first few chapters Kevin Kelly makes a nice case that these forces in combination make for inevitability--a key term early on. Kelly would have done well to stick with this theme. A much slimmer and more captivating volume would have resulted. Alternatively, technological inevitability would make a fascinating premise for prediction--perhaps a more sober f...more The forces that govern biological evolution remain uninterrupted in their progression into the technological realm. In What Technology Wants' first few chapters Kevin Kelly makes a nice case that these forces in combination make for inevitability--a key term early on. Kelly would have done well to stick with this theme. A much slimmer and more captivating volume would have resulted. Alternatively, technological inevitability would make a fascinating premise for prediction--perhaps a more sober five year update of The Singularity is Near.

Instead, in the same way that someone who was sexually abused at a young age, overlaying that past trauma afresh on each subsequent sexual encounter, Kelly fixates on what technology robs humanity of to the point where he delegates an entire chapter to fending off the Unibomber and marauding bands of anarcho-primitivists. The chapter devoted to the Amish's curious relationship with technology was rather interesting and could easily be expanded into its own book, but could serve Kelly's purposes at a far less digressional paragraph.

Simultaneous to his worthy campaign for inevitability, Kelly contrastingly goes to great pains to uphold free will. Being that people might wonder how deterministic he wants to get here, the temptation to address this is understandable. Had he consulted me (he didn't) I'd have encouraged him to remain free will agnostic, leave it unaddressed--it's not necessary for any of his themes. He wouldn't have listened, though; it's obvious that free will is a tenet he'll fight for even at the peril of some of his other claims. Really, there's quite a bit of nostalgia packed into a book that's about expanding possibility and ongoing human evolution ("If the best cathedral builder who ever lived was born now instead of 1000 years ago, he would still find a few cathedrals being built to spotlight his glory"--a fellow endowed with the cathedral builder gene?).

In the end it's not clear whether this book is an exploration of Technology: The Inevitable, or a puzzle with the goal of divulging the malevolent way technology intervened in Kelly's to spell out his current idiosyncratic relationship with it. It's both really, but the savvy reader can readily strip it down to the former, untangling the scientific from the journalistic, by reading roughly the first quarter of the book, then skipping to the second to last chapter (or just watch this presentation he did at Google which omits much of the book's midsection).

Ultimately, my decision to recommend this book parallels Kelly's thoughts on technology when he concludes that the ills it visits on humanity are only slightly (but consequentially) outweighed by it's boons. What Technology Wants is a good book.(less)

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Jun 02, 2011 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Terry by: radiolab.org

That Technology Wants focuses on what the author thinks are the inevitable moves in what he calls the technium, the output of all human creative endeavors which includes technology, culture, and all of the human-generated systems surrounding these really big things.

What I liked:
Author had great skill at communicating the scale of the affects of human technical activity. Listing agriculture as the biggest technology in terms of how it's changed the surface of the planet was something I'd never th...more That Technology Wants focuses on what the author thinks are the inevitable moves in what he calls the technium, the output of all human creative endeavors which includes technology, culture, and all of the human-generated systems surrounding these really big things.

What I liked:
Author had great skill at communicating the scale of the affects of human technical activity. Listing agriculture as the biggest technology in terms of how it's changed the surface of the planet was something I'd never thought of.

Author does a good job of attacking conventional wisdom of how technological innovation happens. He points out that most people are given sole credit as an inventor yet no one says that no one else was working on the innovation that they eventually discovered.

Author dispels myths of simplifying life and exposing how lifestyles like the Amish, the unibomber, and neo-luddite groups depends on the rest of the sphere of human activity to work.

Author talks about science on a meta-level that indicates that it's a process and method that we're not done developing. There will probably be fundamental changes to the methods of science in the near future that will make previous science look shoddy. He's not talking about actual discoveries, but methodological changes like meta-analysis, double-blinded research, and Bayesian analysis that have changed how research is done.

What I Didn't Like:
The author's language was overly flowery sometimes. I recognize that the topic can verge on the religious but I think it was excessive.

The author's language was imprecise. Words like commensualism already have meanings, as do things like convivial, and sometimes he'd switch between the technical, root, and common definition of a word which was messy.

I felt a lot of the material dealing with the development of the cosmos and the mechanisms of life were more the author bending science to lend to his narrative than they actually did. This may have been the result of messy language like using the term "want" but I think it reduced his credibility.

Muddy middle. The tear-down of the logical flaws in the treatise done by Ted Kaczynski was excessive and went too far to make a point. A point that was belabored by the author recognizing that he was belaboring the point.

Ending: I think the book will be enjoyed by anyone who has thought deeply about the role of technology in life.(less)

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Apr 16, 2013 Shea Mastison rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm not sure that I would call this a good book, necessarily. It was thought-provoking. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine and one-time hippy Luddite, offers a few compelling ideas about the nature of technology as a whole; which he refers to as the "Technium." The technium has been around since before the dawn of mankind (acting as primitive tools for our simian ancestors); but it has accelerated its development, and our own, by living in amazingly close proximity to us.

To Kelly, the e...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Curtis Abbott rated it 3 of 5 stars

Here's somebody who is thinking about the big picture, the really big picture. I had a mixed reaction to this book. It has interesting and challenging arguments, facts, ideas. It is fairly easy to read, the style is engaging, although overly energetic at times. Yet I come away from it unsure exactly what his claims are. Kelly gets carried away, probably by his own excitement, and gets so over the top in places that I cringe. Especially at the end, which treats of God and the Future of the Univer...more

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Apr 25, 2011 Nick rated it 2 of 5 stars

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?--and Kelly's almost tautological optimism about technology. 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...more

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Oct 24, 2011 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: tech-bus

Life evolves.

Major transitions:
one rpelicating molecule -> interacting replicating molecules
replicating molecules -> stringing into chromosones
rna enymes -> dna proteans
cells w/o nucleus -> cells with nucleus
asexual reproduction -> sexual reproduction
single cell organisms -> multicellular organisms
solitary indiviuals -> colonies & super organisms
primate societies -> language based societies

Evolution of technology is a continuation of this:

primate comunicatio...more

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Mar 28, 2011 Bill Wheelock rated it 4 of 5 stars

Brilliant and a little scattered as one would expect from the editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue, and Wired Magazine. More in-depth than a TED talk, but yet retaining that positivity that is so inspiring. Kelly proposes we hold our Tech at a skeptical distance. Adopt the new evolutions, but then really consider how it affects our humanity in contrast. The tradition he most seems to ally himself to is the Amish, oddly enough, who don't reject technology, but retain an especially critical awarene...more

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Dec 31, 2012 Toni Moore rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wow! Truly a mind-expanding book, even if you don't buy everything the author says. He describes something he calls the "technium," which he defines as the global, massively interconnected system of technology that connects us. Kevin Kelly sees it as a living system that is, in a sense directing its own evolution. He builds a credible argument to support his claims, and his ideas and writing style are certainly "bold . . . and engaging" as the New York Times Book Review put it. I started this bo...more

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May 02, 2011 Abbey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: infotech-and-programming, science-and-technology, futurist

Technology has goals in the sense that a star has goals: a star "wants" to consume fuel, and technology "wants" to develop toward complexity. Technium (the author's personification of technology) is a selfish, grasping blob that seeks energy, input, development; it's the same as any evolutionary force. It's predatory, too: it eats other blobs of technologies along the way to become mashups of whole new inevitabilities. Technology is an inescapable force. Kelly makes technology seem like it is pr...more

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Oct 29, 2010 David Everling rated it 4 of 5 stars

Kevin Kelly's contemplation of meaning, couched in terms of the "Technium" (all technology and its trends), which includes our minds, life itself, and indeed all the cosmos.

I like Kelly's description of history and the aforementioned contemplation of existence better than I like his assessment of present technology, or his transition to potential futures and proscriptive ways of living, but there were parts from each perspective I enjoyed and agreed with throughout the book.

That said, much of th...more Kevin Kelly's contemplation of meaning, couched in terms of the "Technium" (all technology and its trends), which includes our minds, life itself, and indeed all the cosmos.

I like Kelly's description of history and the aforementioned contemplation of existence better than I like his assessment of present technology, or his transition to potential futures and proscriptive ways of living, but there were parts from each perspective I enjoyed and agreed with throughout the book.

That said, much of the best elaborated ideas are borrowed from contemporaries (e.g. techno-futurist Kurzweil), and what Kelly does try and establish himself is a mixed bag. I found myself alternately nodding vigorously in agreement and then shaking my head disappointedly at vague language, unjustified leaps, occasionally excessive proselytizing. In most cases I wanted Kelly to take the discussion he had built up so well in a different direction, and we diverged more frequently than I had expected to at the outset.

The book feels like it could be so much stronger in progression and thesis if it maintained a steady philosophical position throughout as foundation, but Kelly is still trying hard to reconcile his personal conflict over how to handle technology. He issues statements that fit nicely into prevailing Western scientific thought only to act as if it were never said in a later chapter, letting Eastern philosophical wisdom and personal reflection do all the talking instead. My discomfort doesn't stem from his choosing one way of thinking over the other per se, but in his inconsistency when doing so, and the seeming ignorance of his other voice. It's as if over the seven years that Kelly wrote the book he changed his mind back and forth, writing a chapter or two when his views leaned far enough one way or the other. I don't think he's yet succeeded in deciding on an ideology for himself, let alone the book and the Technium, but if nothing else the discussion makes for a worthwhile read.

So, I liked the book, but I wanted to like it more. Lot of good science, reasonable philosophy, and interesting anecdotes, but if were the editor I'd reorganize and probably trim quite a bit.(less)

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Feb 04, 2011 Danny rated it 1 of 5 stars

In ‘What Technology Wants’ Kelly makes the case that the grand sweep of and direction of technology (which he terms the technium) shares parallels with evolutionary principals. He uses this analogy to suggest that there are universal laws that dictate the trajectory of technology and push it towards a predetermined goal: what technology ‘wants’ to achieve. Along the way, he paints a very happy picture of the thrust of technology – postulating that it will become ever more complex, beautiful, fre...more In ‘What Technology Wants’ Kelly makes the case that the grand sweep of and direction of technology (which he terms the technium) shares parallels with evolutionary principals. He uses this analogy to suggest that there are universal laws that dictate the trajectory of technology and push it towards a predetermined goal: what technology ‘wants’ to achieve. Along the way, he paints a very happy picture of the thrust of technology – postulating that it will become ever more complex, beautiful, free, sentient, integrated, and will inevitably rise above the petty concerns of its primate origins – becoming the most enlightened of the “7 kingdoms of evolved organisms”.

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). Instead, it is the frenetic approach that Kelly brings to his ‘reasonings’, which consist mostly of leaping wildly between subjects with impressive-sounding sound bites. 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 100 pages in). Kelly discusses at length his concept of why the ‘technicum’ should be considered to be like the 7th Kingdom of organisms. 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.g. the environment of human culture and ideas that would provide the selective pressure for technology bears little resemblance to the actual environment of physics and predators), but Kelly displays a thoroughly shallow understanding of biological evolution in this book. So, the evolutionary arguments that Kelly presents to indicate that the technicum is ‘destined towards greatness’ are doubly flawed. Which is too bad, because the remaining 200 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 11: Lessons of Amish Hackers. This chapter is genuinely interesting, insightful, and novel – so much so that I read it aloud to my friends. Nevermind for a moment that the main take-home message from this chapter seems to be that one is shrewd to be extremely wary of technology and adopt it only after decades of carefully observing its’ effects on your ‘guinea pig’ neighbors (which runs oddly counter to the ebullience for technology that Kelly displays in most of the rest of the book). 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. Reading this book had the counterintuitive effect of making me more wary of technology as it made me realize that people like Jaron Lanier (of ‘You Are Not a Gadget’) aren’t joking when they speak of the new generation of ‘technology as religion’. An example, the whole concept of downloading one’s consciousness to a machine (both promoted as possible and advocated for at various points in What Technology Wants), speaks to an astounding lack of self-awareness and understanding of what it is to be human. So when Kelly reaches his eventual novelistic climax, waxing poetic on how technology will become an all-powerful God, you’ll have to pardon me if my shudders are not of ecstasy from my recent conversion.(less)

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Jan 27, 2013 Damon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: quote-unquote

I loved Kelly's perspective on technology in our society, especially since he went from being someone who shunned technology to someone who embraced it. The objective insight about tech's long history is appreciated, too.

For me, the tough part were the very long interludes used to create context. There are whole chapters on evolution, advanced physics, and other fields that are pretty dry. It is more striking when a reader like myself already knows a master at these diverging topics - I studied...more

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Sep 20, 2012 G33z3r rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, science-technology, audiobook

A disappointing pastiche of New Age ideas layered on regurgitated Jacob Bonowski, Richard Dawkins and James Burke, occasionally invoking flawed logic as well. The author enjoys making up new words, such as "technium" for the aggregate of all technology currently in use, as a substitute for actual insight. I think the most interesting chapter by far was on Amish hackers, a seemingly contradictory phrase the author invokes to describe some original research he's done interviewing various Amish on...more

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Jan 30, 2012 Adrian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, history, technology

Fascinating, challenging book, well worth reading if you are interested in technology, and where we might be headed. Kevin Kelly thinks that we are headed in the right direction, even if we have some distinct and powerful challenges, because the number of choices we have are getting more rather than less. The perhaps more disturbing challenging idea, is that the change in technology is happening of its own accord, and has its own direction. He draws many parallels between the evolution of tech a...more

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May 14, 2013 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Just the "big idea" type of book I was looking for. I missed it when it came out a couple of years back.

Kevin Kelly takes a look at technology & society from every angle. It's obvious that he is pro-technology, but discusses the perceived negative consequences of technology to some extent. Ultimately he concludes that technology is just a natural extension of biological evolution, that it is here to stay, and that it 'wants' to evolve with us (whether we like it or not). Ultimately, he sees...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosphy

Major themes: Kelly invents the word technium to designate the global interconnected system of technology. The technium includes simple tools which predate humans and ranges to include the built environment, culture, art, social institutions, software, law, and philosophical concepts.

The technium is almost autonomous, equivalent to the biological kingdoms of flora and fauna. Kelly calls it the seventh kingdom. It evolves in a similar method as its biological cousins. And, although dependent on h...more

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Mar 02, 2012 David Starkweather rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a tough book to finish. Truth be told, I started it last year sometime and had to put it down. It’s not that its bad because it wasn’t, it’s just that it’s a tough book to read - but one that I always came back to and wanted to finish.

What Technology Wants is a fascinating look at technology. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, compares how technology has evolved (from crude tools to the Internet) with how biological evolution evolved over centuries.

The book starts off talking a...more

This was a tough book to finish. Truth be told, I started it last year sometime and had to put it down. It’s not that its bad because it wasn’t, it’s just that it’s a tough book to read - but one that I always came back to and wanted to finish.

What Technology Wants is a fascinating look at technology. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, compares how technology has evolved (from crude tools to the Internet) with how biological evolution evolved over centuries.

The book starts off talking about the most basic elements of biology, how amoebas evolved into small animals and dinosaurs and to more modern creatures. He then starts discussing the evolution of technology and how it has affected today's modern society. He shows that technology and biology follow a similar path of evolution and he states that to fully understand how technology has and will continue to evolve, you must look at the history of biological and see how it has evolved to fully understand the relationship between the two. Technological evolution mimics biological evolution.

Focusing on how technology has and continues to affect our society, Kelly looks at the Amish communities as an outlier group for a case study. The Amish don’t actually abstain from technology, as it turns out are just late adopters, willing to try out any new technologies (They test out the technology and if it interferes with the family/community, then it will be banned). A far different approach than many other cultures take when looking at technology. The importance of technology for the Amish is less on how the technology they use helps them but instead they look at how that technology affects their society. Looking at how the Amish view and react to different technologies can help to see how future technologies both good and bad will affect the greater society as a whole.

Towards the end of the book Kelly continues to discusses where technology is headed and how this will continue to help and change society. Its a fascinating book and well worth the extra effort it might take to finish.(less)

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Mar 20, 2013 Marc rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-society, technology-history, technology-theory

I liked it, but I don't necessarily agree with some of the author's premises or conclusions.

Kevin Kelly was a minimalist during his formative years, an admirer of the Amish/Mennonite philosophy. He eventually succumbed to the allure of what he refers to as the "technium" (the totality of human technology which he interprets broadly to include non-tangible human ideas like software code, accounting, writing/language and the science method).

It is a useful construct that aids in his discussion of...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Antonio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kelly brilliantly describes the nature of technology, its evolution, as well as its profound interrelation. It is a tour de force about the dynamics in which technology are embedded. Kelly defines the so-called technium, a kind of supra taxonomic family. It is analysed by Kelly as a biologist will analyse a biological phenomena, perhaps only with a more mathematical perspective. Three pillars define the technium, accordingly to Kelly: 1. Geometrical and physical constraints (what can and cannot...more

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