Last Class
Kevin Kelly
What Technology Wants
Amish Ordnung
• Farm with horses, not with power machinery in the
field.
No rubber tires on implements or buggies.
No unnecessary lights on buggies except what is for
safety.
No bulk tanks or milkers.
No one shall operate cars or trucks.
No electrical generators except for welding. No
lightning rods.
No sinks or colored tub in the bathroom.
The young people shall not run after pleasure places,
have a radio or TV, or watch movies. No wrist watches,
bicycles, no drinking or tobacco.
Luddites
• Luddites – destroyed looms to protect jobs
– 1811 -1812 England
• Societies have banned certain technologies
throughout history – from Gunpowder to
Facebook
Frank Herbert’s Dune Novels
• Mentats
• Spice Navigators
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
• the good life includes sustainable agriculture,
appropriate technologies, healthy rural
communities, connection to place, the
pleasures of good food, husbandry, good
work, local economics, the miracle of life,
fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the
interconnectedness of life. Industrialization of
life is bad.
What If An Anti-Digital
Movement Formed?
• The Digants
– What would they keep?
Technium
• “the greater, global, massively interconnected
system of technology vibrating around us.”
• “The seventh kingdom of life”
Two Opposing Forces
• Entropy – “is the crisp scientific name for
waste, chaos, and disorder – everything is
headed toward maximum entropy”
• Exotropy – “another word for the technical
term negentropy, or negative entropy.
Exotropy can be thought of as a force in its
own right that flings forward an unbroken
sequence of unlikely existences. “
What Technology Wants
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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
• Technology’s costs vs. its benefits
Infinite Games
• “The technium expands life’s fundamental
traits, and in so doing it expands life’s
fundamental goodness. Life’s increasing
diversity, its reach for sentience, its long-term
move from the general to the different, its
essential (and paradoxical) ability to generate
new versions of itself, and its constant play in
an infinite game are the very traits and
“wants” of the technium.
• Technium creates opportunities for creative
achievements – Mozart, Van Gogh, etc
• Technium creates opportunities for creating
new technology
• Will the time come that technology controls
our lives and we cannot shut it down?
The Unabomber
• “But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn
power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize
power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit
itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it
would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions.
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex
and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines
make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made
decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage
may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system
running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making
them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.
People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so
dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. . . .
Technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete
control over human behavior. “
Your Choices
• How will you choose to use technology?
Final Exam
• 75 points Rather Than 50
• 10 Multiple Choice Terminology Questions
Each Worth One Point
• Remaining Questions Are Short Answer –
– Explaining Concepts
– Applying Concepts
– Contrasting Concepts