TEDxSF - Kevin Kelly - What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelley is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog Kelley was born in Pennsylvania and graduated from Westfield High School in Westfield New Jersey in 1970 he co-founded wired in 1993 and served as its executive editor from its inception until 1999 Kelley has just finished a book called what technology wants he's also authored new rules for the new economy and out of control Kelley's writings have appeared in the New York Times Esquire The Economist and other large periodicals Kelley resides in Pacifica California please welcome Kevin Kelly hello it's very easy to talk about technology because most of us in some way or other are involved in making it buying it selling it consuming it but I wanted to step back a little bit and see if there's another way to look at technology other than the idea that this is just one thing after another so we tend to think of technology as anything it was vetted after we were born but obviously most of what we're surrounded by is more than just that or maybe it's technology that doesn't work yet which is another definition or maybe it's all the stuff that's in our pockets you know cell phones and things like that anything with an off-and-on switch perhaps but these two things you can imagine one was a prehistoric tool that was made that anybody here could probably make and the other one is this thing that nobody here can make in fact all of us here probably couldn't make it it's a technology that actually requires thousands of other intermediate technologies to make it and keep it going and maybe even those thousands have hundreds of sub technologies below so it's actually a representative not of something that stands alone but of a of a kind of ecosystem of technologies maybe a superorganism of technologies and I give that name to that thing that all these codependent interrelated self-sustaining network of technologies they give it the name the Technium to distinguish it from technology Journal because when we have a system of things two things happen one of them is that the whole thing has a behavior that none of the parts have so in the same way that a a B has a certain behavior and a beehive has a behavior that that's not found in the B I'm you can detect the B all you want you're never going to find the behavior of the hive and so in a same sense the tectum is whole exhibits behavior not defined you're set in your iPhone or electrical wires or a vacuum cleaner and so I'm interested in that whole system is in the same way that the ecosystem as a whole has a certain behavior and one of the things we know about systems like that is that besides the fact that they have behaviors that the parts don't have they also always exhibit whether they're man-made or natural they always exhibit emergent tendencies they have biases they want to lean in certain directions they they have what I would call wants and of course I want I don't mean intelligent I don't mean conscious I mean wants in the way they say a plant wants light it's leaning in that direction and so the question I want to ask is what technology once and I begin with the plants because I think that the Technium is in some ways an extension of the same evolutionary forces that produce us ok and so I would say what this evolution want and of course this is kind of a slightly heretical thing in biology there's the orthodoxy is that evolution doesn't want anything there's no direction that it has no trajectories that is completely contingent but there's actually a minority view of some evolutionary biologists who suggest in fact our intuitive sense that there is increasing complexity in the world is true and therefore we can actually begin to you know to look at what the technology wants I mean we see you know 3.7 billion years of evolution and there's a move towards greater complexity now of course if you start off simple you have only one direction you can go so looking at the leading edge of life and seeing it more complex doesn't really tell us much is really what does the trailing edge look like once you're halfway complex you can become simpler and in truth what really happens on average in biology generally things become more complex even when they have a chance to become simpler so they also become more diverse more complicated more variety and I think we can make a list of the kind of general long-term trends in biology and their increasing diversity increasing specialization increasing mutualism codependent upon each other increasing ubiquity and there's increasing mindfulness the the origin of learning of organisms that adapt occurs throughout all taxon and there's increased involve ability which is a key idea the idea that evolution itself is evolving that the ability to evolve is actually evolving that the serves of degrees of freedom that the space in which an early primitive organism could evolve was very small when you invent sexual recombination you suddenly have made it easier to evolve and so we see over again 3.7 billion years of evolution the evolved ability of organisms increasing so that would be fine for evolution but I'm interested in this remarkable awareness awakening that we had maybe about 50 years ago when we learned or discovered that the essence of life was not in wet tissue but in fact was in the information with the discovery of the genetic code we saw the hey the essence of life is actually in the information processing and the the information processing has happened not just within an individual cell but throughout evolution and once you understood that it was actually kind of a lot of information we understood that hey that's what machines do that's what computers do maybe there's an equivalency in fact one of the things that has happened recently is that scientists took the Darwinian neo-darwinian process of natural selection and moved it in to computer system and by the same token scientists have done experiments proof of concepts where they've taken eco I assigned little numbers to the different genes and used the the massive amount of eco lies as a kind of parallel processing computer to solve canonical computer problems like the Traveling Salesman program showing in fact that there's a equivalency often between the living and the born I mean the born in the made between living and mechanical worlds that the distinction is not as great as we think it is in fact there is a continuum between them because they are basically all eventually information based so that I think gives us permission to ask what does technology want and to see that in first that is in some ways an extension of what evolution wants now again when I say once I'm not thinking about an intelligent conscious awareness want but to want that this robot which is in Willow Garage and Stanford I think it's called a PD - it has been programmed to find its own power and so what it does is it actually roams around through the building looking for an outlet and when it sees once it takes his tail don't turn around look around hit it Texas tail and it plugs itself in and I had the the opportunity to stand between it and its plug and I could feel that it really really wanted that electricity again it was not conscious but it was it wanted in a way that maybe a grasshopper wants its food so what technology wants in the long term is basically the same thing that life wants which is it's moving towards it's headed towards there's a drift there's a bias towards increasing complexity diversity specialization ubiquity Seton's and involve ability in fact that's what we see technology is basically increasing or amplifying or accelerating the ways in which things change is actually introducing new ways to evolve evolution is evolving the evolved abilities of the whole system is evolving we see that increasing diversity these are spark catchers from locomotives you know the two centuries ago it's like a little kind of butterflies in them in a museum we see specialization the same thing we see with cells going from a general cell to a very specialized cell you have 250 specialized cells in your body you know muscle cells heart muscle cells brain cells we have hammers and then we have specialized versions of them we have a camera and then we have a specialized infrared camera or an underwater camera or an infrared underwater camera and we see that increasing specialization happen I'm going to skip that one but what we understand is that technology has its own biases we can say it's an agenda we can say it's an urge and an example one of the things that technology wants is more technology it it's also using more of the power to serve itself rather than us so I calculated the 3/4 of the entire power we generate is used by machines not by us like for instance when you drive your car most of the energy is used to move the car and not you you're just a minor component and then you park in a garage and maybe you heat the garage for the car and so there is a sense in which more and more of the of the entire Technium is machines talking to other machines machines care for other machines machines servicing other machines and the other kind of long-term trend we see is this idea that most of the inventions of the world happen and are discovered simultaneously independently and by often multitudes of more than more than one and so in fact everyone from the light bulb which was discovered 23 different times independently and Edison was sort of the last first inventor of the light bulb we find that this is sort of it there's no invention that stands alone it's it's part of a cluster in ecology of inventions and when all the other precursors of engines are in place it's almost inevitable that the next adjacent invention takes place and I almost can't be stopped in some ways so Moore's Law is another example of the a long time urge or trended tendency in the Technium this is this I guess it's a a pattern in which computer chips become twice as fast and half is cheap every year and they were that's me they've been doing that on a kind of unwavering straight-line when graphed on the log chart beginning in the 60s but what's interesting is that that same kind of law occurs in other domains in bandwidth in the growth of performance in hard disks and sequencing of genes there's lots of places in which it happens and it seems to happen independently of whether people are believing it to happen or not and so in that sense one could imagine a different world a different planet it's going to be governed by the fizz of the well physics and chemistry of matter and probably it the slope maybe is dependent on economic regimes but basically this is a urge a tendency within the Technium itself so technologies are inevitable and the web was inevitable however that's the genius of the web that in terms of like a class of things the species of the web is not inevitable so the light bulb as a genius was inevitable but the particular one whether it used twelve votes or was it AC current or DC current weather ahead tungsten or not is not inevitable and the same thing about the web the web is inevitable but not what kind of web that we have that is our choice we have the choice about whether it's transparent or open whether it's a government or nonprofit whether it's something that's based on one protocol or another those are the kinds of contingencies that are open to us and that we do have choice in and that matter hugely to us and so there are lots of things that are coming down human cloning it's inevitable we have a choice of what kind of human cloning we want to do it in what context and what's the environment computer-driven automobiles they're very inevitable they're almost here there's not much choice about whether they're going to come we have a choice about the infrastructure the politics around them and not whether they're going to be here so I like to think of us as both as self created in terms of we've created our humanity we are both the curated and the creator which brings us into tension with technology forever because as both the curated and the creator we are never going to escape the fact that sometimes we are master and sometimes we are the slave and that kind of dichotomy is is going to exist for as long as there is technology which will be forever because we are now dependent on it and we have been from the beginning one of the first technologies we invented was the external stomach this idea of cooking outside and digesting things that we could not digest on our own which this new nutrition changed our teeth changed the shape of our jaw and our enzymes and so we've become dependent on it for long-term fertility but we also changed their bodies from our minds change their bodies making us the first domesticated animal and making us the first technology so we saw incredible explosion of our population very early on the first population explosion after the invention of language which allowed us to finally communicate to ourselves as well as to others and gave us access to her own smartness we use these with very simple tools we actually settled most of the watersheds in the entire globe at the rate of one kilometer per year I mean or two kilometers one mile per year we settled and occupied the entire planet one of the fastest species takeovers there ever were and with a very few set of tools we began to alter the planet we hunter-gatherers eliminated 250 of the mega Fonda's on earth to extinction okay and way way very very early on and those extinctions altered the ecosystems that they're in once you took away the megafauna there all kinds of things happen and so from the very beginning we were having a planetary effect with our technology and by the time we reached agriculture we actually started to climate change the climate so climate change in a very mild form preceded the Industrial Age so so in a certain sense this the thing that we've made with their minds is already on a planetary scale one of the most powerful forces in the world and of course our in terms of cultural there's no there's no K there's no dispute that that most of the changes that we are seeing in the past and we will see in the future are caused by technology ultimately so Humanity is our greatest invention but of course we're not done yet and I think again it's selfish has its own agenda it serves us and so we always have this oops we always have this attention and a lot of people say well I would embrace technology but the fact that well it's having environmental impact but what's interesting about technology is that there's no technology we've invented yet that we cannot think of a more green version of it which suggests that in that it's not it's not inherent in technology to be anti compatible with life in fact it is an extension of life as I suggest then that means it is inherently compatible and I think that's again when we make these computer chips they demand a water that's purer than what we have so we can say in certain sense technology does want clean water I think there is a sense in which what we have to understand is that for every technology is kind of like an idea and if someone has a bad idea or says something stupid we don't counsel them to think less we say have a better idea okay and I think the same thing with bad technology that if you have if there is a bad or stupid technology something that has a lot that does cause harm the solution is not to have less technology the response always just to have better technology and so what we're trying to do is is understand that that what technology gives us in the long term for the long run is it increases the choices that we have the options diversities up possibilities freedoms okay and a lot of people would say well technology is serve neutral you make a hammer you can use a hammer to kill someone or you can use use to build a house but I suggest that just the fact that we have a new option a new choice that we didn't have before is itself a tiny bit of good that's new that's not neutral and that it all it takes is just a little bit of difference to make it to make progress so if we use technology to create 1% more than we use technology to destroy every year that 1% compounded over time is progress so I'm going to go through these and let you know that what technology does give us is is progress ok it's it's that's what it is and it's a cosmic force and what I'm suggesting is while we're maybe all involved in making this stuff more stuff actually we're participating in something really bigger something that has actually kind of a origins in the Big Bang ok it's increasing diversity all self-organized systems back to life or rooted back into these systems like galaxies and and which stars was maintained their equilibrium over many many billions of years and that this self-organization runs through the cosmos runs through life it runs through the tech game it's going to run through past us we're just in the middle of whatever it is and we're in the middle of but that it is bringing us on a long arc and that we can participate by that when we use technology to increase choices and options and opportunities and the reason why that is powerful is because what technology allows us to do is each of us may require a tool to find our genius to have our Jesus expressed and imagined of the world of Jimi Hendrix beef who played the guitar or the amplifier actually he played the amplifier - - great I mean he just entertained us he brought us something new he shared his genius with us but imagine the world in which Jimi Hendrix was born before the amplifier was was invented or Mozart was born before we had invented the harpsichord or the symphony or then go before oil paints or Hitchcock or Lucas before we invented the technologies of cinema what a loss that would be to the world and so there is today a boy or girl in the world genius um Shakespeare equivalent who is waiting for us to invent their technology so their genius could be expressed just as people in the past have invented our technologies for us and so I think we have an obligation in a certain sense to use our invention and creativity to invent new tools to allow those people today and in the future to have their genius shine and shared and I think that's why technology is good and when we do that we're partaking in something a long arc of something cosmic that's bigger than us that's bringing us new choices and possibilities and I thank you for your time

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 59,915

Keywords: tedx talks, ted talk, tedx talk, ted, Kevin, ted x, Kelly, tedx, ted talks

Id: nF-5CMozGWY

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2010