What Technology Wants

September 13, 2010
Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, provocatively argues in this ingenious book that technology can have a positive impact on human life and culture. Kelly traces the origins of what he calls the "technium," or the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. The technium includes culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types, and it is a self-reinforcing system of creation. Kelly carefully avoids anthropomorphizing the technium, but acknowledges that various technologies, much like various systems or organisms in the natural world, express needs or tendencies toward other things; Kelly urges that we benefit the most from our relationship to the technium by learning to work with this force rather than against it. The technium, he argues, provides each person with chances to excel at the unique mixture of talents with which he or she was born or a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds. Thus, the technology of vibrating strings opened up (created) the potential for a virtuoso violin player. Kelly's wise attempts to explain our organic relationship with technology will surely provoke conversations with critics whose discussions of the evils of technology are limited to the negative impact of the computer and the Internet on culture.

September 1, 2010

Wired founding editor Kelly (Asia Grace, 2002, etc.) attempts to balance a clear-eyed overview of the rise of technology and its place with a grand statement about what it all means.

The author's arguments are careful and convincing—to a point. What does he mean by technology wanting something? Is he serious? Yes, he is, and patient readers will find that Kelly has read and thought deeply about this question for decades, beginning with his days as a contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog in the '70s. He cites conversations with several dozen of the best-known thinkers and writers on the subjects of science, technology and cosmology, including Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, Ray Kurzweil, Freeman Dyson, Stewart Brand and Chris Anderson, to name just a few. What Kelly and colleagues have observed is the steady, sometimes exponential growth of what the author calls the "technium" (the sum total of all human technology), the development of which mostly escaped human notice until Enlightenment inventors and engineers put it into overdrive. Kelly argues that the seeds for this critical mass were sown in the very beginning of time, that the technium wanted to be and just needed the conditions, including sufficiently brainy primates, in place for its existence to be met. This argument, plausible as it seems, ultimately must be taken on faith. The strongest part of the book is the author's utilitarian defense of technology against technophobic critics—represented at the extreme by the Unabomber—and he holds up the Amish as an admirable example of a society that approaches technology with the proper mixture of suspicion and respect. No matter how someone feels about technology, however, Kelly claims that it will be what it wants to be, and humans need to understand the role we play in its uses and abuses.

Techno-mysticism aside, a timely and urgent book about the possibly dangerous fruits of human inventiveness.

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