What Technology Wants

Dec 06, 2011

Brendan rated it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Feb 12, 2012

Curtis Abbott rated it

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

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

Shelves: science-and-nature

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

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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May 02, 2011

Abbey rated it

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

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

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

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 30, 2012

Adrian rated it

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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Apr 30, 2012

Bob rated it

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

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 27, 2011

Antonio rated it

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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Dec 21, 2010

Gavin rated it

A very clever premise.

Kevin Kelly defines technology as everything that living things do to alter their environment. This includes language, civilization, law, art, bird's nests, and yes, gadgets.

Technology with this broad definition is simply an extension of biological evolution. It tends to evolve toward certain things such as autonomy, sentience, complexity, and diversity. Technology "wants" these things in the same way that genes "want" to perpetuate themselves.

Technology makes life better...more

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Nov 06, 2010

Hans de Zwart rated it

Shelves: favorites

In a sense this is my ultimate book: it touches on all the topics/themes that I find compelling and argues a case that is in full alignment with my take on technology and on life.

It is by no means a perfect book: Kelly is no great literary talent and even though the book reads much better than his posts on the Technium it still could have used some heftier editing. That said I do think that Kelly is a great philosopher. Every page is brimming with ideas and there is so much stuff to follow up o...more In a sense this is my ultimate book: it touches on all the topics/themes that I find compelling and argues a case that is in full alignment with my take on technology and on life.

It is by no means a perfect book: Kelly is no great literary talent and even though the book reads much better than his posts on the Technium it still could have used some heftier editing. That said I do think that Kelly is a great philosopher. Every page is brimming with ideas and there is so much stuff to follow up on that I would gladly reread the book in a little while.

Some quotes that I want to remember (mostly because they relate to my current job):

Page 251: "Because of the inherent uncertainties in any model, laboratory, simulation, or test, the only reliable way to assess a new technology is to let it run in place. An idea has to inhabit its new form sufficiently so that it can begin to express secondary effects."

Page 264: "A convivial manifestation of technology offers: Cooperation [..] Transparency [..] Decentralization [..] Flexibility [..] Redundancy [..] Efficiency."

Page 270: "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"

Page 351: "As technology expands the possibility of space, it expands the chance that someone can find an outlet for their personal traits. We thus have a moral obligation to increase the best of technology. When we enlarge the variety and reach of technology, we increase options not just for ourselves and not just for others living but for all those to come as the technium ratchets up complexity and beauty over generations."

Page 352-353: "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."(less)

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Jan 28, 2012

Hong rated it

Summary:
This book is about the long term trajectory of technology development. The emerging of technology is embedded into the framework of increasing complexity and self-organization of universe– big bang, galaxy formation, planets formation and life evolution. To make this view compelling, Kelly uses convergent evolution and abundant examples of simultaneous inventions to illustrate the inevitability of technological development. It thus follows naturally that technology has a long term tenden...more

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Jan 10, 2011

Matt rated it

· review of another edition

I liked this book but it didn't totally blow me away. I appreciated that the author (Kevin Kelly) doesn't take the unbridled 'technology is the best' approach I expected. He discussed upsides and downsides evenly. I also liked the notion that he expanded the definition of technology to include items not usually considered: thought, language, writing, communication in addition to things we normally think of (iphones, etc.)

The most helpful insights for me related to his analysis of humanity and te...more

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Nov 19, 2010

Arnav Shah rated it

This review was originally published on my blog

It's rare to come across something that touches the very fabric of our existence in such profound ways - it's mesmerizing. So it is the case with What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly. In one of the most insightful books I've ever read, Kevin Kelly weaves together thoughts on the journey of technology (which as a whole, he calls the technium) and ties it in with all other parts of life, the universe, and everything (quite literally). This is of cour...more This review was originally published on my blog

It's rare to come across something that touches the very fabric of our existence in such profound ways - it's mesmerizing. So it is the case with What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly. In one of the most insightful books I've ever read, Kevin Kelly weaves together thoughts on the journey of technology (which as a whole, he calls the technium) and ties it in with all other parts of life, the universe, and everything (quite literally). This is of course through a broad interpretation of the definition of technology, going beyond just gizmos - to inventions and knowledge. It's quite similar to the a crucial perspective I take on my blog and hence I welcome this understanding. With this, Kelly connects technology with the very birth of the universe and the increasing complexity that has emerged from the universe itself - from simple hydrogen atoms to energy-dense microprocessors. He likens technology to a sort of unstoppable force and considers it another kingdom of life. As strange as that seems, it's very plausible in my eyes. His incredible comparisons between technology and evolution fit well in presenting such arguments - these comparisons are so thoughtful that I felt my deep background in evolution was strengthened with his discussion (and there is no question that he blew away my understanding of technology).

Kelly reconciles two opposing concepts - ordained-ness and free will - in an a strangely convincing manner. He states that technology, to elaborate that it's an unstoppable force, builds upon itself and that its agents (we humans) inevitably bring it to greater life. This is the basis for his explanation of why similar ideas and invention seem to appear simultaneously from different areas of our globe. He shows that such convergent "evolution" is very much the regular case in the technium as it is in the [other] kingdoms of life. At the same time, he assesses the free will of technology and goes down to the very level of the seeming free will that appears in the random noise of subatomic particles.

There is a practical element to Kelly's discussion as well. Kelly provides a framework by which to consider technology - new and old - providing guidance as the world around us is increasingly transformed by technology. For example, because he believes that the emergence of any technology cannot be indefinitely thwarted, he presents some rules on how to approach any technology in a manner that beneficial for the global human community. He discusses such rules in the seemingly extreme case of the Amish. Interestingly, many groups of Amish are not quite the luddites we typically perceive them to be. Rather, they're extremely mindful of the technology they use: they take care to consider the potential community problems arising from inventions and often experiment and observe with a small adoption - one can't help but respect such mindfulness. (In fact, this discussion is so striking that I suggest that you check out Kevin Kelly's blog post on it.)

There are a couple of points where Kelly is off. Well, not quite off, but rather he's missing a level. For example, he states that advances in human communication - such as the inventions of language and writing - were the cause of our uniquely human power. Based on the research of folks I work with, these communication technologies were instead a consequence of a more precise cause of our rise to dominating the planet - solving the conflict of interest problem on larger scales thus facilitating greater level of human cooperation. This Human Uniqueness Theory that I work with does well to explain the Behavioral Modern Revolution of 40,000 years ago and the Neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago, among our other technological revolutions that Kelly mentions. It's understandable why one would assume that communication tools were the catalyst for human advancement, especially given how closely they relate to our uniquely human trick of cooperating on large scales to do incredible things. Still despite these minor details, Kelly's insights are very telling and completely appropriate.

As someone entrenched in technological and humanistic disciplines, I've had a real pleasure reading this book. Some of Kelly's thoughts are sure to raise a few eyebrows, but it seems he accomplishes his goal to get us to step back and think over the technology our lives are intertwined with. At the very least, you'll see how thoroughly he has put together his thoughts, and so eloquently too. I recommend this engaging book deeply to anyone with an interest in technology and to anyone that wishes to learn more about the world around them. I especially encourage those in technological fields to consider Kelly's points.(less)

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Apr 03, 2011

Desiree rated it

According to the author, we are powerless to resist technology! "We continue to amass vast doses of gadgets and things because we can't help it." Minor glitches can turn into massive unstoppable waves until they reach catastrophic proportions!

"The technium is also pushing the increased mutualism among machines. The majority of telecommunications traffic in the world is not between messages flowing between humans but messages between machines."

An interesting, but not the easiest read! Would defi...more

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Nov 15, 2010

Rex Hammock rated it

An incredibly thought-provoking book. I've never read a book quite like it -- a mix of history and philosophy, as much as it is a book on technology.

I wore out the highlight feature of my Kindle app marking dozens of ideas I plan to go back and ponder.

Biggest surprise: Kelly's fascinating deep-dive into the Unabomber's manifesto. Most fascinating: His exploration of the technology adoption curve of the Amish. Most refreshing: Kelly is optimistic about the future.

Only downside: I believe that hi...more

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Dec 27, 2010

Sarah added it

Shelves: oops-never-got-around-to-finishing

I'll be honest: I want to like this. But I'm reading the blurbs on the back, and wondering how on earth Brian Eno had time to get through this. This is the kind of book that in my idealized, fictionalized version of my life, I'd have time to read thoroughly, reflect upon, and have fabulous conversations with other readers about. In reality, 'is there a point that I can uncover before he goes through the entire history of every invention' and 'I wonder if this would be better if I wasn't sober' c...more

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Dec 24, 2011

Nicholas rated it

Shelves: professional-development, audio-books

I ended up liking this book a lot more that I expected to.

The first half of the book is dedicated to setting forward an argument that I find interesting, but Kelly isn't the person who can make it convincing. It would have come off much, much better as a thought-experiment instead of a direct assertion.

Kelly argues that human biological evolution is following a necessary path and that technological development (the technium, he calls it) is also following a necessary path. Technological determin...more

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Dec 15, 2010

Jim Collison rated it

So often we have a difficult time deciding what exactly technology means to society, and whether it is good, bad, etc. Kevin Kelly's exploration of this subject quite literally goes from the beginning of time to the a proposed far-off future in noting that technology isn't merely a component to our lives, but entirely separate ecosystem that exists alongside our current kingdoms of life. His writing is incredibly insightful, and leaves much for the reader to consider. I'd easily recommend this w...more

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Apr 30, 2011

Pam rated it

There are some interesting ideas here but some of the discussion was too abstract for my liking. I'd prefer more tangible data to back up the author's thoughts. There were enought cases cited to explain what would lead him to come to some of his conclusions, but I think the world is still lacking in some of the data that describe exactly what he predicts. I also read this a few months ago and have the memory of lint, so if I'm not being clear here it's because I don't actually remember fully wha...more

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