What Technology Wants [Hardcover]

WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS offers a highly readable investigation into the mechanisms by which technology advances over time. The central thesis of the book is that technology grows and evolves in much the same way as an autonomous, living organism.

The book draws many parallels between technical progress and biology, labeling technology as "evolution accelerated." Kelly goes further and argues that neither evolution nor technological advance result from a random drift but instead have an inherent direction that makes some outcomes virtually inevitable. Examples of this inevitability include the eye, which evolved independently at least six times in different branches of the animal kingdom, and numerous instances of technical innovations or scientific discoveries being made almost simultaneously.

Kelly believes that technological progress has a symbiotic relationship with human population growth: technology makes increased population possible, while also relying on it to create both new minds that can be applied to further innovation and new consumers for those innovations. The book suggests that population is likely to peak and perhaps decline as global living standards rise and women choose to have fewer children, and it offers a number of possible scenarios under which it may be possible to decouple future progress from population growth.

One of the most interesting chapters delves into the possible dystopian side of advancing technology. The book quotes at length from Theodore Kaczynski's "Unibomber Manifesto." Kelly is willing to acknowledge the obvious logic of many of Kaczynski's arguments, even as he bemoans the fact that some of the most "astute analyses" of these issues comes from a mentally unbalanced murderer. Kelly rejects Kaczynski's pessimistic belief that technology destroys freedom, arguing instead that technology should make it possible for us to make better decisions.

The book offers a list of ten universal tendencies that give technology direction. Interestingly, one item on this list is "sentience." Kelly believes that some forms of artificial intelligence are inevitable and suggests that AI may be likely to evolve out of the internet.

I found it somewhat surprising that the book does not include more on the broad economic implications of progress. The technologies that Kelly describes -- especially artificial intelligence -- are certain to have a dramatic impact on employment markets, the concentration of income and wealth, and perhaps the overall structure of the economy. For an in depth look at these issues, I would highly recommend this book:

The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (Also has a Kindle Version).

"What Technology Wants" argues for a broad definition of technology that includes the arts, culture and social institutions. "The Lights in the Tunnel" makes an essentially similar argument that the structure of our economy also needs to be considered technology and will need to evolve as progress continues. Both books offer strong evidence that technology is likely to continue advancing exponentially for the foreseeable future, and both should be read by anyone who wants to gain insight into the likely impact of that incredible degree of progress on society and the economy.

If you like this sort of thing (from the chapter "Ordained Becoming")
"I make the case in this chapter that the course of biological evolution is not a random drift in the cosmos, which is the claim of current text-book orthodoxy. Rather, evolution - and by extension, the technium - has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy."
Then you'll like this book.
If however you find this a bit overblown and begin to get bored by phrases such as
"The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness"
or
"...we stand at the fulcrum of the future"
(both quotes from p 357)
then you won't.
Personally I found the book like being forced to listen to the ramblings of a pothead and just wished the author would go and raid the fridge to give me a break.
This is a pity, because Kevin Kelly's thesis is fascinating. Knowledge (what he portentously calls the technium) grows and as it grows it becomes more like life; self organising, self reproducing and co-operative.
This has profound teleological and social implications, which sadly don't really get thought through. Instead, we get a mess of anecdotes from evolutionary biology and sociology to support the idea of the existence of this "technium". There is also a book within the book, a discussion which quotes the unabomber so extensively that one suspects a case of copyright infringement. Lucky for us, and lucky for Kelly, the unabomber is serving 1,000 years in jail so probably can't sue.

You'd think it impossible to write a boring book on such a subject as the "technium". Kelly proves that on the contrary, it's easy. He credits his editor, a certain Paul Tough, with rescuing the book from verbosity. Maybe it was even worse before, so we should be grateful for small mercies. God, mercifully for Him, is absent until the last pages, where he is permitted a small walk-on part by the author.

The product is great but after purchasing the kindle version I could not get page numbers and therefore had to buy a paper copy.