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.

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 ???.

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.