TECHNOLOGY:Technology wants to evolve just as water 'wants' to flow downhill says Kevin Kelly, the wise old man of the internet and founder of 'Wired' magazine, and we are not in charge of its development, writes RICHARD GILLIS
WHEN TALKING to Kevin Kelly, the questions, like the shiny new gadgets we are sold every day, just keep on coming.
Let’s start with that hammer, tucked away in the tool shed for winter. It’s a pretty low-tech solution to the problems life throws at us. But let’s see where we go with it. “You can build a house with it, or you can kill someone with it,” says Kelly. “If more people are killed with hammers than houses are built, should we try to ban hammers? I think the good outweighs the bad merely because of the options presented to us by the hammer’s very existence.”
That’s not bad going, don’t you think? From hammers, to the morality of tools, in two sentences. It’s the sort of intellectual jump that pervades Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants, which is hugely ambitious, very contentious and unlike anything else you will read this year.
“I strongly believe, and argue in my book, that technology is not morally neutral, which is the prevailing wisdom,” he says. “But the invention of the hammer at the very point that it exists, gives us a choice that didn’t exist before. The fact that we have a choice shifts the argument into the positive. It may be that we create only one tenth of what we destroy, but that one tenth compounded over the years, over the centuries, is what we call progress.”
Kelly is the wise old grey beard of the internet generation. In the 1980s he curated the Whole Earth Catalog, a project designed to monitor emerging technologies. Then he was hired to create the first public gateway onto the web, a portal called The Well. In 1992, he co-founded Wired magazine and “hung out on the cusp of technological adoption”. His friends, he says, are the “folks inventing supercomputers, genetic pharmaceuticals, search engines, nanotechnology, fibre-optic communications, everything that is new”.
His relationship with technology, though, is a mass of contradictions. He doesn’t possess a smartphone, his kids grew up without TV and they still don’t have one in the house. He doesn’t have a laptop and claims to be the last in his group of friends to buy the latest must-have. This is at the same time as running Cool Tools, a website devoted to new stuff.
“Our lives today are strung with a profound and constant tension between the virtues of more technology and the personal necessity of less. Should I get my kid the latest gadget? Do I have time to master this labour-saving device?” he writes early in the book. Kelly articulates what many people feel on a day-to-day basis: that technology is “taking over our lives” and that it is a global force “that elicits both our love and repulsion”. He has a lot of questions: How should we approach it? Can we resist it, or is each and every new technology inevitable? Does the relentless avalanche of new things deserve my support or my scepticism – and will my choice even matter?
To help him answer these questions, Kelly uses his own term, technium, which he describes as the “global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us”, extending “beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions and intellectual creations of all types”.
Central to his book is the idea that this technium shares characteristics with biological evolution, and that if we are to understand “what technology wants” we must first know how we have arrived at this point. If not, then technological progress is, as he says, “just one shiny new gadget after another”. The idea of the sole inventor is fanciful, he says, because the big innovations are “in the air” – to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase – and would happen regardless of who had the cherished “eureka” moment.
Technology wants to evolve just as water “wants” to flow downhill. We are playing this game but we are no more in control of it than we control how animals evolve. Extend this thought for a moment and you are in classic sci-fi territory, where the machines have the upper hand, with their own intelligence and moral value systems.
Meanwhile we cling to the idea that human beings are solely responsible for the evolution of technology in the form of the lightbulb, the internet and the aeroplane, for example. This, says Kelly, is a romantic tale we tell ourselves. In Kelly’s view, technology creates itself, using humans to do its bidding. Every great invention was dreamt up nearly simultaneously by many people at the same time around the world. “This can make us crazy,” says Kelly. “The technium is a global force beyond human control that appears to have no boundaries.”
One person who did go crazy thinking about it was Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematician who revolted against what he saw as the destruction wrought by technology, sending mailbombs to targets working at universities and airlines. What Technology Wants posits that Kaczynski shared Kelly’s basic assumptions, that technology was evolving in a way that is not controlled by man. The difference is that Kelly is optimistic about the progress of our world – see his hammer example – but Kaczynski felt compelled to wreak vengeance on the scientists he believed were supporting it.
“We worry when we feel we don’t have control of technology and that technology has its own mind,” says Kelly. “But the technium is not anti-life, it’s part of the natural world, and the best way to deal with it is to recognise that, just as nature is not completely under our control, we can try to anticipate where it’s going and accept that it is inevitable. So rather than retreat from it, we should embrace it and understand it has its own wants. We don’t have to give it what it wants but, if we can understand its eco-system, we can better benefit from it.”
The marketing of technology is another example of this co-evolutionary race, he says. We are aware that we are being persuaded. As advertisers become more sophisticated, so too do our defences, both technological and psychological. Policymakers often make the assumption that the public can be duped into buying things and need to be protected. And while this is true of children, Kelly doubts that the advertisers have the upper hand.
“The systems are working against each other,” he says. “We have the complexity of persuasion and we have increasingly complex technologies that help us to escape. People are aware of how ads work on a much more complex and sophisticated level than they used to be, and much of it is very transparent to people.
“It’s like a magic trick. When we go into a magic show, we’re playing a game with ourselves: we are aware that we can be fooled and, at the same time, we enjoy that. We’re aware of the trick and we say, ‘I’m going to try hard to catch you, so go ahead and try’. Is the advertiser always one step ahead of the general public? Is the lion always one step ahead of the gazelle?
“They both are. It is necessary for both species to survive. Enough gazelles have to be eaten for the lions to live. You ask anyone in the advertising business whether they think they are one step ahead and they’ll say definitely not. It’s hard and getting harder, young people particularly often reject advertising entirely.”
Kelly may pose more questions than he answers. But it is an enjoyable and thought-provoking ride.
