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>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim
Ricketts, and I'm here to introduce and welcome Kevin Kelly, who is visiting us
as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series.
Kevin is here to discuss his new book, What Technology Wants. Technology as a
whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal, but a living, evolving organism
that has its own needs and tendencies. By listening to what technology wants,
we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable
technologies to come.
Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine and was the executive editor for seven
years. He's written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Economist. And his previous books include Out of Control, and the best-selling
New Rules For a New Economy. Please join me in welcoming Kevin Kelly to
Microsoft.
>> Kevin Kelly: Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. Actually, I
haven't been in this building before, but I have been to Microsoft Research in
times previous. It's great to be among people who are all smarter than me. So
I'm looking forward to some great questions.
I'm here to talk about my book, What Technology Wants, although I'm also very
eager and happy to talk about other things, Wired-like stuff, because what this
book does is it basically steps back and takes a look at the long-term trends
in technology and looking -- long, meaning like hundreds of years, whatever -and that may not be as useful to everyone here. The Wired view is sort of like
the next six months, the next couple years, the next few years. Again, I'm
happy to talk about that as well.
Let me just give you a sense of what this book is about. I take the idea that
all of us collectively are engaged in making all of this kind of stuff. Every
day we're tweaking this, we're creating that, we're making these large systems,
and we're filling our world with a lot of constructed things that originated in
our minds. As far as I can see right now, almost everything in my view has
been made by us, and we're making more of it.
The question that I have been asking myself is, well, what is this stuff that
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we're making? What is it in the realm of the cosmos? What does it mean? Is
it good? Should we make more of it? How should we feel about it? And when
something new comes along, should we embrace it or question it? That's sort of
the framework.
As I looked at that, I realized that there really wasn't a good theory of
technology. There's no framework. We have the theory of natural selection.
We have a theory about evolution, which gives us kind of a framework to
understand the natural world, but we don't really have a good theory about
technology. The kind of reigning theory was, oh, it's a product of our minds,
and it's whatever we think it is. That didn't really ring true to me as I
looked at the history of it.
I think the premise that I began through looking at this was to realize that,
well, we might make -- the first technology we made was kind of a little stone
hammer, stone ax, a little handheld thing, and one person could make it. But
if you think about the mouse, the little mice that Microsoft makes, it's about
the same size, fits into your hand the same way, but this is an artifact that
might require thousands of other technologies to create, and nobody here could
make a mouse. In fact, even us collectively could probably not create it. So
it's an embedded thing. It's actually a network and cluster of ideas in
technologies.
In fact, if we examine most of the things we make today, none of them could
stand alone. They all require a web of other interdependent technologies. And
I began to view technology, not again as a single set of artifacts, but a way
in which all those connects -- all these things, co-dependent upon other
technologies, form kind of a super organism of technology, and I call that the
Technium. The Technium is that large system of stuff that we're making.
And if you look at systems of any sort, either natural systems or the systems
that we have made, all of them exhibit certain inherent tendencies. That's the
nature of anything that has a recursive loop in it. And you guys are all
familiar with recursive loops. So when you have a set of chromosome with
genes, where some genes turn on these -- genes A turn on genes B, genes B turn
on genes C, C turn on genes D, and genes D turn on genes A -- whenever you have
these recursive loops, and you have them wherever you have very large systems,
you start to have these systems exhibit recurring patterns, covergent bases of
attraction, things that will exhibit a certain inherent tendency in that
system.
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And that's true from computer simulations to the internet, ecosystems, you name
it. Wherever there's a very large high dimension of connectivity and recursive
connection, we see these things exhibit some kind of a bias, meaning that, if
you run them again and again and again and again, they tend to converge on
certain behaviors.
So here we have a system, the technological system, and it too -- because of
its recursive nature and self-creation, it too exhibits certain biases. And
the question I asked in this book was what are those biases in the Technium?
What are the biases in this system? If we keep running it again and again and
again, if we could rerun it again and again, what are the things that would
come out? Where does it tend to go?
Now, one of the chapters in the book is called The Unabomber Was Right. The
Unabomber was Ted Kaczynski, who was a serial murderer, who was blowing up
advocates of technology as his -- I guess, as his rage against the Technium.
He didn't call it the Technium. He called it the industrial complex of some
sort. But he argued that this whole thing had an agenda, that there was an
inherent agenda in the elaborate economic, technological thing that we've made,
and I think he's right in that.
He's wrong in that he concluded that its agenda was to rob individuals of
freedom because, in my analysis, as far as I can see, and looking at the course
of it through history, the agenda of the Technium is actually to increase
choices, opportunities, and freedoms for us. So I disagree with his
conclusions, but I do think he's right, and some of the other critics of
technology are also right in saying, hey, this whole thing that we've made has
a bias -- has an agenda. There are certain things it's favoring versus other
things that it leans away from.
Just to be clear, when I talk about the Technium having an agenda, having
wants, I'm not saying that it's conscious or intelligent right now. I'm saying
that it is leaning in certain directions and has urgencies and wants and
tendencies in the same way that a plant would lean towards the light. A plant
wants light. It's not conscious that it wants. It's not an intelligent want.
It's a survival want. It's a need. And I'm saying that the Technium as a
whole, this whole complex of interrelated things that we've made, exhibits a
want very much like a plant. So it's leaning in certain directions.
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So the assignment I used for this book was to try to look at the world through
the eyes of technology as if it was a living organism and to see what it was
that it wanted. Okay. So I can talk about what I see as those kind of trends,
those long-term trends.
But before I do, I again want to just put in the context of what it is. Yes,
it's a system that has -- that we've made over time with, you know, several
million different species of technological inventions that are all co-dependent
on each other, but I want to put that in context of something even larger. So
we ask what is technology? What is this thing?
So one of the ways I use to describe the Technium, this thing, is as the
seventh kingdom of life, and I do that because the trends that I'm going to
outline to you are remarkably similar to the same trends that we see in
evolutionary biology. So what I'm suggesting is that, in a kind of Marshall
McLuhan way, in which he said the wheel is an extension of your foot and the
microphone is an extension of your ear and the camera's an extension of the
eye, and, of course, you know, the internet and Google and all those things are
kind of some extension of our brain, that this Technium is in some sense an
extension of the processes of life.
So we know that the inherent essence of life is really not in the molecules,
the wet stuff. It's much more in the informational pattern that is animating
life. That's really what life is. Life is -- it's not the wet tissue. It's
this process of information as it's being replicated through evolution and
replicated in the genes and replicated in organisms in a set that flow in
structuring of information that really is the essence of life. That essence of
life is information. Basically, it's information processing. We kind of
understand that. But it turns out that the long-term information processing
that life does is very similar to the information processing that the
technology does. So that's the basic point.
Kind of maybe as an example of that two-faced nature of what we're talking
about, there are evolutionary programs that can actually -- by evolutionary
programming, I mean, you take programs, and you evolve them. You give a kind
of criteria for what you want to accomplish. You actually evolve the software
code to accomplish that objective. And your former head of research, Nathan
Myhrvold, told me -- and I have to believe it's true -- that parts of Microsoft
Office have certain sections of code that were actually evolved rather than
just programmed by humans in the same kind of method.
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So here you have true evolution, true biological process in a mechanical
system. Now, at the same time, about ten years ago, Adleman -- the "A" in RSA
encryption, Leonard Adleman -- took some DNA in E. Coli and used DNA to
actually calculate a traveling salesman problem. So they assigned -- they had
a code that would transfer numbers into genetic sequences, you know, 1 to 1,
and they used that to program a number with DNA, and they had another DNA, and
they used that to actually -- the DNA would self-replicate and try and match.
And then they had a problem set, and they would actually evolve against that
problem set to solve -- and that problem set would give a DNA sequence as the
solution, which they would then translate into numbers.
So here was DNA doing computing. So we have computers that are doing
evolution, and you have DNA computing, and you can see very clearly that
there's really the same process involved.
So what I'm suggesting is that, in a certain sense, this -- even though we
think about this as sort of -- it's about material science, and this is about
making objects, physical objects, and we have all these wires connected, and we
have these built-up structures that really in the foundation, this is really
much more about information processing. It's about structure. It's about the
order in the structure of these things rather than the materials, and that what
we're involved in is ordering and arranging these atoms with information.
So if we look at the long-term history of the cosmos, start with the Big Bang
and you go forward, it's very clear that there are -- that the universe is
running down, entropy is increasing over time. That's the one universal law we
think is true throughout everywhere in the universe. There are no exceptions
that we know about. There's entropy, every process increasing entropy.
But at the same time, there's portions of the universe where there's order
increasing, and they start with things like a galaxy. A galaxy persists in
this order. It's actually a self-organized entity that's increasing entropy
around it, but it is an exotropic system. It is actually building up order
over time and maintaining this order over billions of years as it circles
around very slowly, and you have this self-organized structure, very large
scale. Within that are billions of stars, and each one of those stars is also
a self-sustaining, self-organized system.
So it's a very complicated way.
They actually generate -- they go through
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phases. They have life cycles. They're basically engines that create heavy
atoms from light atoms, and it too exhibits a certain exotropic,
self-sustaining, persistent equilibrial order. And around those, maybe planets
with atmospheres that are self-sustaining, self-governing, self-maintaining.
And then in little -- at least in our corner of the universe is life, which is
itself another self-created, ongoing, increasingly ordered system.
So we have -- in a certain sense, we have kind of an unbroken thread back to
the Big Bang of increasing order over time in the face of entropy around it,
and life is the most manifest of it, and then we have our minds. And the
Technium is the further evolution, the further acceleration, the next stage in
that kind of ordering that follows all the way back to the Big Bang.
So what that means to me is that, while we think of technology as something
that is actually just coming from humans, something that humans have invented,
it is that, but it's also the latest iteration of a story that goes back to the
Big Bang. Okay. It's a long arc of increasing order over time that the
Technium is just the latest visible iteration of and that we, when we kind of
align ourselves with the Technium and the technology and the stuff that we
make, we're actually aligning ourselves with something that goes back 3.7
billion years, and it's a big story and will go on beyond us.
So that is the larger context, the larger cosmic meaning of technology. So
when we are sitting in front of our computers working on the next thing, the
next iteration of something, whatever it is, while it is true that we're just
doing that -- and maybe it's something, a game, or maybe it's an office
productivity tool, whatever it is -- we are actually engaged in something
bigger, I believe. And that is that we are engaged in increasing this thing,
this exotropic thread of life. It's an extension of life and mind, and we are
increasing what -- I think what technology is bringing us, which is increased
options, opportunities, freedoms, and choices. So that's what we're doing.
And I think that that's important to keep in mind, because I think at times,
when we're involved in making these things, sometimes they don't maybe even
sell. Sometimes they're not ever produced. Sometimes, even when they are
produced, everybody has them for a while, and they go on to the next thing. I
think sometimes we're disheartened by that, but, in fact, I think we can take a
certain amount of joy in it because we're part of something that is running
through the universe and going on beyond us. It's not just making junk. It's
not just making other stuff. It's actually increasing the opportunities,
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choices, and possible species of everything in the universe.
So I think there is a positive meaning. I think there's actually a moral
dimension to technology. It's good. It's bringing us those good things. We
can talk about the negative things. There is a cost to that. But I think in
the end the positive outweighs those costs and that in the end we have, like
life itself, life is a positive force, mind is a positive force, technology is
a positive force in the universe, and it's the most important force here in the
world.
So the question I'm sure you're asking is, okay, what do all these things -what does technology want? What are these trends? Where is it going? And
I'll just kind of give you some idea about those, and I would really -- you
guys are so smart, I really want to hear questions and learn from you, and then
we can also talk about things that are going to happen next year, next couple
of years.
Well, what does it want? I already mentioned one thing. The primary thing
that's moving through the universe, the primary thing that's sort of moving
through technology, the Technium, is this push, this urge, this tendency, this
drift towards increasing possibilities and options and choices and freedoms,
freedom of actions. And every new technology, when it comes along, will create
new problems. In fact, most of the problems that we're solving today in our
world are technogenic. They're actually problems that have been created by
previous technologies. So there is a large amount of the consequences of
technology or problems, but at the same time, what it's also giving us is
choices, opportunities, and possibilities. This is sort of inhabiting, or
populating, the universe with these new species.
And one of the ways to think about technology is that it's a way for evolution,
as an extension of evolution, to create species of things that the DNA tissue
system could not. So one of the things that sort of technology wants, in
addition to increasing choices, is it wants increasing complexity. There's a
move throughout biology from the simple to the complex, and not just because
it's the only direction it can go. Even when we examine things that have some
complexity, things never become simpler in evolution, in terms of on large
scale. They don't ever devolve. Just simple. They always go in the other
direction even though they could become simpler.
There's a long-term trend from the general to the specific.
We have the first
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cells were general purpose and then became more and more specialized over time.
So we have 250 -- in our own bodies, we have 250 different cell types, skeletal
cell, muscle cell, brain cells, bone cells, they're all different. They're all
specialized cells. The same thing in technology, of course, as we invent a
camera, and then we specialize into underwater camera, panoramic camera, and
then those panoramic may have specialized, or underwater may be the deep
underwater or shallow underwater, UV underwater. So we constantly are more and
more -- making things more and more specialized. That's the general trend,
which says, basically, you want to know where it's going? It's going to become
more specialized. Whatever it is you can imagine right now, you can imagine
more specialized versions of it in the future.
We go from the increasing diversity. I did a count of the number of species of
things. In our household, my daughter and I counted everything in our
household. We were approaching a total number of species of objects as King
Henry VIII, and King Henry VIII's objects, they did an inventory when he died,
and his stuff in his household basically doubled as the wealth of England. So
in a certain sense, in our typical American household, we have almost as many
species of things as England did several hundred years ago.
However, despite that fact, there are many things in our households that the
wealth of King Henry never could have purchased at all, like a dollar's worth
of antibiotics, refrigeration, flush toilet, a comfortable ride of 100 miles -those things were completely out of his reach. So in many ways, all of us are
much, much wealthier than King Henry ever was. And that's showing us that the
number of choices, species of stuff we've made continues to diversify and
increase.
And the other trend is increasing energy density. So energy density is a very
interesting thing. I mentioned these galaxies and the stars, which are kind of
self-organized, and we think of the sun as being extremely dense in energy, but
actually, if we take the energy density, which is ergs per second per gram, so
the amount of energy passing through per gram per second, a sunflower is
actually more energy dense than the sun is, and that's because of the longevity
of the sun.
And what -- and, actually,
the most energy dense that
the chip in your PC. It's
than anything that we know
technology is even more energy dense than life. And
we know about in the entire universe is basically
sending more energy per gram per second through that
about. Of course, that's the challenge for PC
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designers is the thing is just going to melt or explode if you make it any more
dense than it is right now.
So, again, that's the general trend in cosmic evolution is this move towards
energy density, the processing of energy through a very small amount of matter
and time.
And another long-term one is a move to ubiquity. Things want to be ubiquitous.
And whenever we think about a new technology, the real question is what happens
when everyone has it? What happens when it's ubiquitous? That's when the
second and third order effects kick in. 1 million cell phones is interesting,
but 6 billion of them is an entirely different thing. You know, 1 million cars
is interesting, but 6 billion cars is an entirely different thing. So what we
see, again, is a trend towards ubiquity. That's another long-term trend.
And there's also a trend towards increasing structure in emergent systems. So
what do I mean by that? In life we went from cells, and a bunch of cells
gathered together and made an organism. That organism is a new structure. So
the behavior of the organism does not reside, or is not captured in the
individual. So I'm the beekeeper, and we can talk about the behavior of a
beehive. There's nothing about the behavior of the beehive that is actually
inside the bee. I mean, you look at a bee, there's nothing that would ever
tell you how the hive is going to behave.
So we see the same thing with technology is that small units can coalesce into
larger units, and those larger units, those new structures have their own
behavior, exhibit their own level of reality, and are an emergent level of
existence. That is also another example. We see that with biology and
technology.
So those are some of the kind of trends, long-term trends of what technology
wants. It wants increasing diversity, increasing complexity, increasing
emergents, increasing power density, and a few other things, and those are
running through this system, and they're going out beyond us. And whenever we
make some new technology, we can fairly confidently bet that it's going to be
more complex, not simpler, it's going to have a higher energy density. It will
increase specialization, and it will have increased diversity. And all these
things are trends that are -- exist and have operated long before us and will
continue long after us.
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So there's a lot more to say about the evidence for that, why we seek trends in
evolution. That's kind of a controversial idea that actually in evolution
itself we see direction in trends. And if we have these trends, it also means
another significant point, which is that the sequence of technologies are
inevitable. So let me say that again. What it means is that, because there's
this channeling through evolution in nature, the sequence of technological
development that we see are inevitable.
So the technologies coming down, the larger macro level, not the minor level,
but the macro level, kind of like at the level of, say, making the internet.
The internet was inevitable. We have a choice about what kind of internet we
want to make, but the fact of connecting everything to everything else, that's
an inevitable process of what happens basically on any planet. It would happen
again if we rewound it. No matter what political regime we're under, we're
going to make -- connect everything to everything else. That's an inevitable
step in evolutionary progress.
And our freedom and our choice is about what kind of internet we would make,
what kind of an expression of it. And so the fact that there are certain -the fact that a lot of technologies are inevitable, we should see as an
opportunity because it means that we can prepare and educate ourselves and
acquire the literacy to maximize their gifts and to minimize their harm upon
us. Rather than kind of run and deny and say, well, you know, we're going to
resist this as long as possible, we actually can use it to our benefit.
So one of the things we could be involved in is trying to ascertain the things
that -- the forms -- the macro forms of technological advance that are
inevitable. So let me -- I think I've said enough interesting things that I'd
like to start to have a conversation about it. I'll start with this guy here,
who I don't know how you do this, whether you introduce your names or what.
>>:
I'll just ask the questions.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Okay.
It'll be anonymous then.
>>: So just spinning off of what you just said, I think in the book you talk
about the Amish.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Yes.
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>>: And how they make very considered choices about the technologies they
adopt. So that's a little bit in contrast to the idea of technological
inevitability. Technology is rushing at us. We have no choice but to accept
it.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Sure.
>>: In their case, it seems they're very conscious about what technologies
they accept or reject.
>> Kevin Kelly: So I have great admiration for the Amish because they're not
Luddites. They're actually kind of hacker types who love technology. What is
special about the Amish is that, while we all kind of make technological
decisions about what we're going to have in our life and not have, the Amish do
it collectively. So they decide as a group which technologies to embrace. And
secondly, they have a very clear articulation of the criteria that they use for
selecting. And that criteria is, very briefly, will this new technology help
us to work at home in our backyard as a family, and does it bind our community
together?
So they aren't at all anti-technology. They use disposable diapers. When you
go shopping with them, they've got boxes of Cheerios and all this other kind of
junk food, and they've got -- they use genetically modified crops. They burn a
lot of diesel oil. They have solar cells, LEDs, and they seem to be adopting
cell phones. But at the same time, they have horse and buggy, and they may
use -- and they use pneumatics. They have pneumatic air hoses to run machines
and stuff instead of electricity. And they may have a diesel -- they may use
horses to pull their diesel powered combine. So the horses are pulling this
diesel combine.
And it seems all very strange, but what they're trying to do is they discovered
that the horse limits them to 15 miles, and so whenever they go shopping, it
has to be locally within their community. If they go out on a picnic on
Sunday, they'll do it locally, or they can visit the sick locally. So the fact
that they don't have cars forces them to maintain their community. It has
nothing to do -- it's not against cars or the technology of cars. It's just
this is forcing them to develop their community or to find jobs where they can
work at home.
So I stayed overnight with one Amish family.
They had bonnets and horse and
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buggy and church in the morning, but in the backyard they had a $500,000
computer controlled milling machine that their daughter in a bonnet was
running. It's like, oh, yeah, because that's good stuff because we can work at
home and it's in our backyard, and because industry is in our backyard, we keep
it really clean because it's in our backyard. So they are not adverse.
So they actually aren't resisting technology either because, in my mapping out
of the Amish, they are basically kind of like 50 or sometimes 75 years behind,
they're slowly taking it but in a very careful and judicious way. So they
are -- as I said, there seem to be -- some of the churches are adopting the
cell phone.
So when I say things are inevitable, I'm not talking about locally. I'm
talking about globally. We don't have TV. Our kids grew up without TV in our
house. So in our little area, it's not inevitable. We can carve out things.
I'm talking about globally, that this thing in a global manner is certainly
inevitable. We can all make or deny or refuse the technology locally, and that
may be a good thing to do. It's not going to stop the fact that it's going to
appear on a planetary scale elsewhere. In fact, most of the prohibitions, most
of the people -- most of the nations, in an attempt to install prohibitions on
technology, were never successful globally. They were able to temporarily
postpone the adoption in a certain small area, and that was about it.
And so, yes, you can do that. You can prohibit in a certain small area, a
certain local locale, and that may be good for identity reasons, it may be good
for the community, but that -- it's not affecting the global adoption of
things.
Yeah?
>>: What metric do you use for really looking at the rate of evolution of
technology? And have you compared that to the rates of genetic evolution?
>> Kevin Kelly:
>>:
Yes.
How do they compare, and is there a shaped curve?
>> Kevin Kelly: So one of the ways to judge the speed of evolution in the
biology world is to look at mutation rates. What's interesting is that, for a
long time, biologists believed that humans -- that there are -- biological
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evolution had ceased when cultural evolution took over. There was this idea
that we were kind of evolving very fast, and then we have cultural evolution
which takes over, and we kind of stop evolving.
But it turns out actually, in looking at mutation rates in our DNA, that
actually from the invention of civilization or so 10,000 years ago, our genes
are actually now evolving faster, 100 times faster than they were 10,000 years
ago. So in a certain sense, our technological innovations, lactose, and when
we domesticated the milking animals, we invented cooking, which changed our -cooking allowed us to digest certain things that we could not before. And that
new nutrition changed the shape of our jaws and our teeth. So basically,
something we invented changed our bodies permanently. We are kind of a
technology. We are one of the first domesticated animals ourselves.
All these things show that actually the speed of change in biological evolution
in humans has accelerated. So we have that measure.
The measure for technological advance is a lot less agreed upon, a lot less
certain. One of the proxies that people use are things like number of
inventions -- excuse me. Number of patents. And so that doesn't really make
any sense until we have a patent office, but that is one proxy used for the
speed of innovation. And that curve looks like one of those, you know,
exponential single curves. It's just going up very, very fast.
And I think -- can we prove that this is happening? I mean, in information
terms, I did an analysis of how much total information there is in all the
genomes of all the living organisms on earth by species and the total amount of
information that's stored on all the storage available, which is several
exabytes, 20, 30 exabytes or something. And it doesn't compare. The amount of
information being processed by DNA in species is much greater than what the
Technium is doing. However, the thing about the Technium is that that is
doubling every 18 months, sort of a Moore's law, while the biological
processing is not. It's not processing at that speed.
So we can look at kind of the species as information processing, but they're
just -- you know, with probably 5 to 30 million different species on the
planet, we're still not anywhere near the amount of processing power that
biology is doing.
Yeah?
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>>: I noticed you referenced hundreds of books for this, and you talked to a
lot of interesting people. I'm just curious, what surprised you the most?
>> Kevin Kelly: That's a good question. That's a great question. There were
several things. One, I was not -- I would not have believed that technologies
do not go extinct. That was a surprising finding, that actually in the book I
talk about kind of an exercise to establish that. I took an 1894 catalog of
Montgomery Ward and went through some of the pages where there was archaic farm
implements, and I was looking to see how many of those I could buy brand new,
not antique versions, how many of them we're still making. Every single one of
them was still being made. They were things I had no idea what -- for like
what is it called? Corn knob shuckers or something, this very obscure thing.
I couldn't believe they're still being made brand new.
And Robert Krulwich, who is the host of Radio Lab and a science journalist, I
was talking to him about this, and he couldn't believe it. He said, you know,
I'm going to prove you wrong. So he actually set two interns and a researcher
to go through the rest of the Montgomery Ward catalog from 120 years ago to
find something that was not being made new today, and they could not. He wrote
me just the other -- last week saying, I have to admit I can't find anything
that they're not making new somewhere.
You can buy a brand new flint antler handled knife that is made exactly the
same way that knife was made 100,000 years ago. You can buy it for $50 brand
new. They are still making that.
There are more people -- there are more blacksmiths alive today than ever in
history. The number of people who are knapping -- they call it knapping flint.
They make these little points by pressure points. There are probably more
points being made now than at the time of the Indians, just in terms of
population. There's weekend knapping festivals, and they generate huge amounts
of these points. What's interesting is they cannot -- even the experts can't
really tell the difference between the two.
So somewhere in the world, they're still making a technology that existed in
the past. Things don't really go extinct. They go obsolete, which is not the
same thing. So that was surprising. I had no idea about that.
And the other thing that sort of surprised me was the inevitability. I didn't
set off with that idea in mind. I didn't even like that idea. I found -- in
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the literature they called it technological determinism, and I thought that
was -- you know, I didn't want to be one of them, but now I am. And so that
idea -- again, I looked at prehistory at a time when there was very little
communication or travel between the continents, and I looked at the sequence of
inventions of technologies in like Africa, South America, North America, when
there was no connection, no travel between them, and the sequence of how
technologies came out was basically identical, or statistically very close to
being identical, and that surprised me.
I was really surprised that, which suggests, because simultaneous invention is
the norm, that was another surprise. I had heard about those occasional things
where people invented things at the same time, but if you go into the
literature, every single invention was simultaneously independently invented
more than once, more than twice.
You know, Alexander Graham Bell submitted the patent for the telephone within
three hours of Ashley Gray. Within three hours. Okay. And the hypodermic
needle was invented six times. The incandescent light bulb 23 times
independently. Edison was the last first inventor of the light bulb. It just
goes across. And in modern times as well as ancient times.
I did -- there was a study looking at -- this was a really great control
experiment. There's -- during World War II, when they were developing the atom
bomb, they had lots of different groups working on this, and they were
separated by country, of course. And even the U.S. had four different teams
working on it that were also separated by need to know, meaning basically they
didn't know what the others were doing. And, of course, within U.S. and
Britain and Germany and Japan, they didn't have any knowledge. And going
through, six of those -- no, five of those six teams discovered the equation
for the chain reaction, or one part of that chain reaction.
So independently they all -- and the reason why we know this is we have a
complete record because they're very good at recordkeeping -- we have a
complete record of them independently coming to the same invention -- same
creation, invention, discovery at the same time independently. They all did it
a little differently. They all had a slightly different notation and
interpretation of it, but it was the same idea done, again, absolutely, 100%
independent of each other without any knowledge of it at about the same time.
That is the norm, and it's the norm because, whenever you have all the
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precursor technologies sort of settled, the next adjacent step is absolutely
there. It's just going to happen. It's inevitable. And the reason why we
have a patent office is everybody knows that, if they don't discover it today,
someone else is right behind them, and that's because these things are just on
a progression where it's like in ecology you get all the other steps. This is
it. That's what happens. It happens in the arts too. I go into that in my
book.
In the back.
>>: I think that the idea of looking at technology as a system and following
the complexities and noticing biases and stuff is a fantastic metaphoric way of
approaching the subject. What I find challenging is the idea that it actually
has an independent momentum and that it is a bit [inaudible], and one of the
obvious differences, at least to my mind, at least in biology, is biological
evolution happens independent of human agency.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Sure.
>>: Whereas technology really requires human agency. To me a lot of the
examples you bring up, particularly just now, are so related to human culture
and unification and the mechanisms by which we work together. This
simultaneous invention is actually a creature, as much as anything else, of
having the ability to communicate ideas throughout society in different ways
over a longer period of time. People are on similar pages because they can
talk more. That's technological, but it's also cultural, and I think it's the
cultural needs that really drive these things.
>> Kevin Kelly: So what would persuade you?
need to be persuaded?
What kind of evidence would you
>>: I don't know. I find it hard to imagine that technology can function
independently of human agency.
>> Kevin Kelly:
So I couldn't persuade -- no evidence would persuade you?
>>: It's hard to imagine what would persuade me.
convinced.
>> Kevin Kelly:
I think that's the issue.
I'm not saying I couldn't be
Because we are involved, it seems
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almost definitionally impossible to satisfy that, saying that there is an
aspect of this -- because, again, I'm not saying this is wholly autonomous.
I'm saying autonomy is a continuum. It's not like a binary thing. It's not
like you're autonomous or not. You have increasing degrees of autonomy. What
are some of the -- we have self-repair, we have self-direction, self-creation,
self-governance. All these things are the self, or aspects of it. None of
those are binary. So even ourselves. Are we fully autonomous? We have a
bacteria in our gut that we depend on to digest our food. Does that -- so we
know that we're not fully autonomous.
>>: We also can't operate independent of a culture system.
people.
There's other
>> Kevin Kelly: That's right. So if I make the claim that there's some
autonomy to this, what evidence would persuade you that it was?
>>: I guess I understand the point, particularly when it comes to degrees. I
just think, when it comes to the idea of technological determinism and whether
you fall into that camp or not, I think one of the dangers, and I think
probably where people who espouse the term technological determinism and so
forth may be coming from, is what it does is it takes the human element out of
the equation to some degree or another and makes it about kind of a machine
that's just going to go on regardless.
It's quite possible -- there have been periods of history, and granted you can
look at it from a distance, the momentum of complexity continues. But take the
Dark Ages. Massive step backwards. There were technologies discovered back in
classical times that we're now rediscovering, and people are going, wait a
minute. Actually, this was done before.
So there are places where the needs of human culture and the way that people
interact with objects and technology go in a certain direction, and then that
can get put off track, and a lot of that has to do with the way people are
interacting with one another and what's going on in economics.
>> Kevin Kelly: So just to be
agency at all involved in it.
agency itself, that we -- that
So we are both the creator and
clear, I'm not saying that there is no human
I'm just saying that the Technium itself has an
we're co-existing with it, we co-work with it.
the created. All right.
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Because we have actually created humanity, it's our creation, we are the
created. At the same time, it's us who created it, so we are the creator. So
when you have self-creation, whenever you have self-creation, you have -- that
thing is both the created and the creator, and you have this ongoing tension
between the fact that technology is selfish to some extent and also under our
service. And so that tension is always going to remain.
As long as there is technology, which there will be 3,000 years from now,
because we cannot live without technology right now. If you stripped every bit
of technology from the planet entirely, humans would die in six weeks. Took
all the tools away and everything, we are just not capable as animals of living
without technology. We are already symbiotic. We are already cyborgs in a
certain sense. And because of that, that tension between the selfish nature
and autonomy, the small autonomy of the Technium, and our own mastery and our
own ability to direct, those two will always co-exist. And in the year 3000
we'll still be wrestling with the fact that we can make the stuff but it also
reacts against -- it has its own response.
And what I'm suggesting is that those two things -- it's not as if technology
only exists with its own agenda and that's all there is. I'm saying, no, it's
like -- it's like something that, while we are creating it, it's also
responding back. We make our tools. We shape our tools. Tools shape us.
It's a co-evolutionary, symbiotic relationship.
>>: And I think that I'll leave it alone and let other people go on from here.
But I think that, to my mind, what you say about symbiosis is, to me, the key
element. It's a way of looking at it as an extension of human culture. To
some extent, whether or not it's completely independent is somewhat irrelevant
in terms of all the great points you make in which terms of the direction it's
going, the interrelationship, and the necessity of technology to human life.
But thinking about it as an element of human culture at least allows us to put
people at the center.
>> Kevin Kelly: I guess I have no problem -- I normally think of it as people
at the center. So I'm not sort of emphasizing that side because that is sort
of the default. People say, oh, we're in control, and it's only making what we
want. I'm saying, yes, it's true, but we want to go a little beyond that to
understand that the thing that we have made exerts its own little bit of
autonomy, and we have to kind of understand that.
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In a certain sense, it's like Dawkins selfish gene. If you just view biology
entirely as the selfish gene account, you miss a lot of what biology has to
offer. However, that's a very productive way to look at it. It's not the only
way to look at biology as just the selfish gene, but it's a very productive
way. So that's what I'm trying to do here is say let's look at the world
through the eyes of technology itself and see what it sees through the world.
Yes?
>>: I would compare it's almost like, as I was listening to Kevin, to me it's
nonorganic matter, organic matter, and then technology. So at some point,
right, we used to have just nonorganic, chemical elements. At some point,
organic life began. So to me, it's at the new point when technology, the
organic life turns into the completely new types of technology, that it then
takes off its own individual ->> Kevin Kelly:
It's kind of like dry life.
>>: And my question would be, because of the speed of technology development
is so much faster than biological, so what do you think the consequences are?
In our lifetime or ->> Kevin Kelly: Right. So this is where the idea of the singularity, Ray
Kurzweil and others idea, where we have this acceleration and this acceleration
is accelerating, and we have this kind of takeoff where we will produce chains
so fast that we cannot even see beyond it. And that -- while I don't believe
the framing of the singularity is actually for me very useful, I'm not going
to -- that's a separate issue.
However, the idea that we are accelerating is true, and there's undoubtedly
that it's accelerating much, much faster than the human cycle can accelerate.
So we may see a change, 100 years change in a year. What do we do about that?
That's kind of a common question and a legitimate question. If the Technium is
accelerating, can we as humans even deal with that? And I think the answer -my answer is that like other things, the answer is more technology. The answer
is that we can actually devise tools to help us dealing with the fact that
things are accelerating.
So an example would be, okay, you have this increasing expansion of choices,
well, you invent recommendation engines and collaborative filtering to help us
deal with the fact that choices are expanding faster than we can normally
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handle. And if there are things that are increasing speed in other ways, we
can actually invent tools that help us slow them down, to help us match the
rhythm of our own selves.
So in general, I subscribe to the idea that the solution to any problem, even a
technogenic problem, is more technology. Just as I would say to you that, if
somebody was spouting some really stupid ideas, your response should not be to
think less, but to think more and have better ideas. And so the response to
the problems caused by technology is not less technology, but better
technology. And the response to the kind of problems generated by the
acceleration of change is not less, but to actually make tools and technologies
that can solve those problems. And I believe we can do that.
>>: Talk about what some of the drivers of technology are, what drives
technological change. Technology is really reflected in how we see the world.
The notion of technology is really defined through the human experience.
>> Kevin Kelly: So what drives technology? And I'm suggesting, in a very
strong way, that the drivers of technology are the same drivers that propel
evolution through 3.4 billion years of life, that there is an exotropic
self-organizing bias in the universe that is moving -- that we're connected to
that's moving through the galaxies and the stars and through life itself and is
pushing through the Technium.
>>:
Does that mean the technology is independent of human evolution?
>> Kevin Kelly: Yes. In other words, am I saying that technology might occur
on other planets in the galaxies? Yes.
>>:
Would it look all the same?
>> Kevin Kelly: Yes, it would, and that's the remarkable thing.
that there are constraints, there are ->>:
I'm saying
Constraints of the physical world?
>> Kevin Kelly: That's one -- there's two constraints. There are the
constraints of the physical, physics and chemistry, that also work on
evolution, that narrow evolution through certain channels. Evolution can't
produce any possible thing. It has to be bound by the fact that cells are
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three-dimensional and have weights and all this kind of stuff. So there's a
physical thing that constrains evolution and technology, and there's internal
constraints. I talked about them earlier, the recursive nature, when you have
these networks that are recursive, and they're very highly interdependent, that
you get constraints in recurring patterns.
>>: Can you give an example of that? Where you think it doesn't really have
this reflection of the way the human organism works.
>> Kevin Kelly: So in -- let's start in biology. In biology, they have
something called covergent evolution, which means that you have similar
structures that occur -- for instance, flapping wings, flapping membrane wings,
in four different, very, very different -- the pterodactyls and bats and birds,
and there's another one, I forget. And eyeballs and eyes independently arose
multiple times. 30 different types of eyes, three different kinds of camera
type eyes throughout evolution. Then the stingers.
There's a long, long list of all these things that, again, evolution keeps kind
of coming back to again and again.
And I would say in technological evolution, I was just giving you the example
of the prehistoric parallel sequences of technological inventions on different
continents that weren't connected together, and I would say simultaneous
invention. Now, someone else would say, well, humans were involved in
simultaneous. How do we subtract it out? As long as humans are involved in
technology, how can we prove that there's any kind of inherent biases in it?
So all I can say is tell me what kind of evidence would persuade you, and I'll
provide the evidence.
>>: I was going to be persuaded, but I think it's really the blending of the
rules of the physical world and the structure of the way human beings see and
interact in that world [inaudible].
>> Kevin Kelly:
>>:
Right, so --
So a separate entity, a separate organizational entity.
>> Kevin Kelly: So the separate continents was one experiment, where they were
separated. They were separate. That's kind of a control thing. So until we
have, say, another world where there's entire civilization going on in
parallel, it may be very difficult to convince the most skeptical person. So
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we have on life -- here's the problem with the studies of evolution. We have a
case example of one. There's one life on earth, only one. So whenever you try
to look at something with evolution, it's really difficult.
However, Stephen Jay Gould, who claimed that there was no direction in
evolution, said we can't rewind the tape of life. However, we actually did -we are able to do that. There are experiments with bacterium that take a
sequence of the bacterium and make clones of the same bacterium so they're
absolutely identical genetically. They set them in these very controlled
containers that have absolute uniformity, and they can find that the same kinds
of sequences will be evolved in 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 generations later. So
there actually is -- there is channeling happening in biological evolution.
So now, if we could do that experiment in the Technium, if we could run
parallel -- as far as I could see, every example where I could see of
independent parallel work of the kind I just showed you about the development
of the H-bomb, they were completely independent and parallel, the advance of
invention in prehistory on independent parallel continents always shows that
the same things come again. So I don't -- so that's my suggestion. Yeah?
>>:
So I'm not sure quite how to phrase this question.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Take your time.
>>: I think to comment about the force of choice, and you've used the term
like exotropic force in the universe [inaudible]. It's the term that's used
when the trains that are associated with seven different forces of -- you know,
the biological evolution. But somewhere in there, there's this concept of
choice.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Sure.
>>: When I say the word choice, I mean it at a very kind of fundamental level.
I get into this discussion often with people where -- let me just give a brief
example. Like where there's a rabbit on the side of the road and you're
driving at night, and you see the rabbit. Does that rabbit have a choice of
whether to cross the road and actually get hit or not? I maintain that it
does. People choose whether they're Democrats or Republicans. I maintain that
being gay is a choice. For me, choice defines -- kind of defines how we
interact with the world.
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>> Kevin Kelly:
>>:
Sure.
And I'm kind of associating that term choice with this exotropic force.
>> Kevin Kelly:
Yes.
>>: But at the same time, I think what you were just introducing is there
isn't choice. It's predictable. So, again, not sure how to phrase my
question.
>> Kevin Kelly: I deal with this -- let me say some things about choice and
free will. There's a great conundrum in physics, in quantum physics about the
decay of particles, and John Conway, the guy who invented the cellular
automaton, Game of Life, mathematician, did a great paper recently where they
examined the decay of spin particles and other quantum particles. And they
said from their analysis this is definitely not a predictable -- it's not
predictable. It's not like kind of the two-way work that most physics go.
They're reversible. It's not that. It's not random. From their analysis of
how these things happen, they're not random.
They actually said the only explanation they could come up with was those
particles were actually choosing, it's a free will choice whether to decay or
not, and that that free will was actually the foundation of all the higher free
wills in our own organisms. And I think that the fact that one of the trends
in technology is increasing the space for freedom of choices, it's actually
increasing free will in that sense.
So how does that square with the talk of inevitability? Because, in fact, what
I'm suggesting is that there are kind of bottlenecks in which things go through
but that going through them are -- is inevitable. So in a certain sense, life
is inevitable, but it may be -- it's sort of like -- it's an improbable
inevitability, if you can understand that. So what's happening with life is
that the more variety they are, the more improbable a particular species is,
the more highly evolved it is, the more improbable it is. But it's also
inevitable that there be some, when the right conditions are present,
recurrence of life or whatever it is, is inevitable.
So we have both of those things operating at the same time. We have the fact
that, when you have made something, you constrain where the future of that
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evolution will happen. The more further along you go, the more improbable
statistically that is. That's the definition of exotropy. That's improbable.
That's the relation between information and entropy. So the more highly
evolved something is, the more improbable it is, but at the same time, the more
inevitable it is that something will go through that bottleneck because it's
channeled. You can't be everything.
So I spend some time in the book talking about DNA. Let me just give you an
example. So DNA. Scientists took a whole survey of all of the different kinds
of molecules that might do the same thing DNA does. And what they discovered
was, in fact, there are very few that could do that. But we could imagine
other alternative processes to DNA we could make with our mind. But what we've
not been able to find is a molecule that could self-assemble and do all those
things at the same time.
So it may very well be there's only a few molecules in the entire universe that
can do both everything DNA does and create itself. So some -- a lot of
biologists and some astrophysicists think that in other galaxies and other
places where there is lifelike things, that those molecules will be DNA-ish,
that it's the most remarkable molecule in the universe. It could be we have a
lack of imagination. We just can't imagine it. We can certainly imagine other
kinds of molecules that can do all the things we could invent that might do all
the things DNA does, but finding one that can make itself? There may only be
one or two.
And so in that sense, while life may be inevitable around the world, it may
have to go through a very narrow few molecules to do it, and that's the kind of
thing I'm talking about.
>>:
Maybe one more question.
>> Kevin Kelly:
So you've been quiet up till now.
>>: So are you in any way trying to marry the sort of rational scientific
method and, to some extent, emotions like destiny and spirituality in a
benevolent fashion versus like, you know, evolution versus -- there's been like
rationalism versus irrational. A lot of what you're saying seems to be a very
sort of benevolent way of looking at spirituality and destiny.
>> Kevin Kelly:
So I'm not suggesting about supernatural forces, first of all.
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I'm really trying to say that these are all not supernatural forces, that these
are measurable, quantifiable, falsifiable forces at work. When I talk about
the exotropic force, it's quantifiable. We don't even know what it is. We
don't even know what information is. Part of it is we have to have good
definitions of information, but I think it's an information-based thing.
In the sense that information is spiritual, I would say yes. It's spiritual in
the way that information would be spiritual in the sense that it's intangible.
It's a force that we don't know what it is. It has some power.
But I am suggesting, though, that we can see this as an alternative story. We
can see this a grand story in the universe that does have a moral dimension,
that does have a direction. And I think, if people find that spiritual, I
think that's fine. But I think it can represent the same kind of a thing.
So that was a really great last question.
attention, for hanging out this time.
I thank everybody for your