Speculist Survey: What Technology Wants

By | November 7, 2010
4 Comments

As I noted on Friday, Kevin Kelly’s new book is called What Technology Wants, and it explores the question of how and whether technology is evolving, and to what end.

My thoughts on the question of what technology wants kicked off some interesting discussion, which in turn called for a response from me. And it got me thinking that what I’d really like to know is what you think about it.

So please, complete the survey and share any additional thoughts in the blog comments.

  • Phil

    My guess is that the response that technology “wants” nothing will take this thing. It may be a mistake to mix a literal answer with metaphorical ones, although (of course) some might well believe that technology literally wants to take over, or to help us or hurt us.

    My expectation is that readers will come out in favor of technology, be more interested in benefits than risks, and say that technology wants nothing. We’ll see.

  • ak4mc.us

    I do think the questions could have been framed more usefully. “What technology wants” is more intelligently asked as, “What is the aggregate intention of technology’s developers all over the world?” And I think the intelligent answer to that is, “To explore the possibilities as far as they will go, and we all hope they cull the harmful ones.”

  • harkyman

    I said “Other (explain)” for “What does technology want?” Here’s my explanation:

    What does the Universe want? It’s pretty clearly (to me) a quantum computer, computing… itself. To what end though? I’m not sure, and I won’t post my private guesses here. However, during the course of that quantum computation that began with the Big Bang, the Universe has managed to compute us. And now, we extend that computation by extracting entropy and replacing it (locally) with order. Technology is a further concentration of this effect.

    So, technology wants what we want, which is what the Universe wants, but in a “twice” distilled form. ??? constructs the Universe. The Universe constructs us. We construct technology. Technology constructs ???.

  • stephentg

    I went with “other” for “What Technology Wants.”

    Toward the beginning of this book the author explains what he means by “wants” in this context. Bacteria “want” things. They eat, excrete, and reproduce by division. Even DNA “wants” to accomplish certain things – hold data and then pass it on.

    So when he, the author, talks about technology “wanting” something, he doesn’t mean that my laptop is (currently) plotting world domination.

    Its a metaphor!

    Things don’t “want” in the same sense that we – being self-aware and aware of our surroundings – want things. But the system that is producing technology (free market system, plus areas of innovation within more structured settings) has built into it a certain direction. This is less than destiny because a catastrophe could happen – or some unseen engineering problem might surface.

    But it is apparent that technology “wants” greater capability.