>>presenter: So, Kevin Kelly is not only one of the foremost innovators and writers about
technology, but his personal story is an equally interesting one. He rode his bike across America
and back, and wrote a haiku and drew a drawing for every day of that journey. He spent seven
years walking across Asia and he published a beautiful book of his photography from his
travels, called "Asia Grace." I first met Kevin when I was five or six, when my dad
took over the role of editor from him at the Whole Earth Review and Kevin Kelly was a founding
executive editor of Wired. He helped design and launch the WELL, the famous, prototypical,
virtual community, as well as HotWired, the first commercial web scene. He is one of the
founders of the Long Now Foundation and he also creates and publishes the website Cool
Tools. He's also a regular contributor to the New York Times magazine, publishing features
on digital culture and one of the last ones was an education issue about homeschooling
his son and the role that technology played. His books include "Out of Control," "Rules
for a New Economy," several editions of the Whole Earth Catalog and today, he's going
to be talking his latest book, "What Technology Wants." So, please help me in welcoming Kevin
Kelly.
[applause]
>>Kevin: Thank you, Mimi. That was great. It's great to be back here. About six years
ago, I actually gave a talk in thinking about this book, in this very same room on the history
and the future of the scientific method. And that talk is now two pages in this larger
book, which is about the long term trends in technology. And there's lots of things
that I feel I could talk to you about this afternoon, but I think, or I could talk about
the future of media, the future of the Internet and the Web and those kinds of things; all
of which you probably know a lot more about than I do. And I think I'd rather, instead,
like to step back and talk about what technology means and where it, where its place in the
world, where it wants to be in our minds as we make all this stuff. So, everyday, you
folks are involved in creating new things and the problem is we don't really have a
very good theory about what it is that we're making. And so, the current idea about technology
is basically one thing after another. All right? We produce one thing after another
and there's no larger framework about whether these are good things, whether we want more
of it, where it fits into the cosmos, how it relates to nature and what I'm trying to
do is basically, make a first draft for a theory of technology; so you can think of
it in those terms. And so, that sounds kind of really esoteric, but here's a definition
that most people think about what technology is, is about anything that was invented after
you were born; it's all this new stuff, the stuff that's coming out of labs here. And
if you're maybe a little more sophisticated, you might think of it as stuff that doesn't
work yet and, or maybe it's the stuff that's in your pockets. Or maybe anything that has
an on or off switch. And, I think, of course, all those gadgets and all those things are
the stuff that technology is, but it's actually something more than that. We can take two
pictures, these two artifacts that are approximately the same size and shape and one of them can
easily be made by any of us here--not maybe as well-- and that's the tool of the hammer
and that's prehistoric. Or the one on the right, the mouse or the iPhone or whatever
you wanna look at, that one not only could not any of us do, but even the group of us
here could not do. And, in fact, even everyone in this building could not actually produce
that. And that's because that device requires maybe a thousand intermediate technologies
to create it and maintain it and operate it, and each of those technologies might, in turn,
depend on another hundred intermediate technologies. So, what we have is the technology we have,
like on the right, is actually representative of an ecology of technologies. It's a whole
set of interrelated, interdependent and codependent artifacts and that that entire ecology, or
if you can like, if you wanna think of it as a super organism of technology, is actually
what I'm most interested in. And to distinguish that from the individual technologies or artifacts;
I call that the "technium." So, the technium is this huge, super hive, super ecology of
all the technologies that we have as they are related to each other and codependent
on each other. And what we know about systems, that have that degree of complexity, there's
two things. The one thing that we know about those kinds of systems is that, first of all,
they exhibit behaviors that are not present in any of the parts, ok? So, you can look
forever into a tin-, into a bee or an ant and you'll never see the hive or the colony.
So, that behavior is not present in the individual components. And so, the pres-, the actual
behavior, the technium, is not present in any of the devices; it has a larger system-wide
behavior. And secondly, those behaviors have inherent biases and tendencies. That's what
we know about systems, ok? And the more recursive circuits there are in this, the more tendencies
there are, and so, recursive circuit is the idea here, the infinite loop or recursive
loop, where we see this in biology. We have genes. A lot of the genes in our chromosomes
are turning on other genes; they're not expressing protein, but they're turning on other genes
and some of those genes are turning on other genes, and some of those genes are turning
on the first genes. And so, you have this recursive loop. We have technologies that
make; technology A makes technology B, technology B makes C, and C is involved in the creation
of A, so we have recursive loops within the technium and whenever you have those, you
have biases, tendencies. And so, when I talk about what technology wants, what I'm talking
about is what the technium is biased towards. So, it's, I don't mean "want" in terms of
the way in which an intelligence or conscious being would want, but I mean "want" in the
way that plants want light. They're leaning towards light. The tomato plant on your windowsill's
leaning towards the light; it's not conscious, it's not intelligent. It has a bias in its
system, an urge and need, to move towards light. And so, we have plants that want light
and that is what the technium has, is certain wants. And the question I'm asking is, in
general, what are the biases in the technium? And I begin, if, going back to plants, because
my premise is that, in fact, the technium is an extension coming from us. It's not just
from our minds, it's also from a biological past; from our evolutionary past, that the
technium is actually extending and accelerating those same forces. And so, I ask what does
evolution want? Now, I have to say right away is that there are some evolutionary biologists.
Among the most prominent was the late Stephen Jay Gould, who argued very, very forcefully
that there are no trends in evolution at all; that it's trendless. That there's no trajectories,
there's no directions. And that is the orthodoxy in evolutionary biology right now, but there
is, there are minority view and there are other evolutionary biologists and many of
them young, who actually have more experience with computational and computer simulations,
who actually make a different argument and have evidence to show that there are trends,
directions, in the long course of evolution. And, and the foremost of those is the ones
that we all intuitively feel, which is that over 3.7 billion years of life that life has
gotten more complex. Now, the reason why that's maybe not an obvious trend is, Stephen Jay
Gould would say, "Well, if you're starting off simple, you have nowhere else to go but
more complex." And so, the fact that the leading edge is getting more complex is trivial; it's
not important. The question is about the trailing edge. And so, we can show, in fact, that when
you have moved along some evolution and you are somewhat complex, is there any bias in
which direction you go then? And we can show that there's a mild drift towards increasing
complexity, even at the trailing edge of evolution; say bacterium. So, what does evolution want?
Well, again, there is a trend. We have evidence that there is a trend in greater complexity
over 3.7 billion years of life; that's one trend. But there's also trends towards more
diversity; increasing numbers of different species. And again, that increasing diversity
happens not just when you're starting off with simple, but even wants to have some diversity;
it rarely goes to less diverse. It generally, on average, goes to more diverse. And we can
actually make a list of these things including increasing complexity, increasing diversity,
increasing specialization. The first cells are general. There's one kind of cell that
does everything. Over time, they evolve into specialties and so we have 250 different cell
types in our bodies. We can show the number of cell types increases over time in evolutionary
history. Increasing mutualism, codependency on other organisms as for your life, increasing
ubiquity, increasing mindfulness, sentience. We see the mind and the kind of learning that
a brain does and neurons, even happens in plants. We see it erupting throughout the
kingdom of life many, many times independently. There's increasing learning and evolvability,
which is the ability to evolve and so we forget the fact that the evolution process itself,
is not a singular, fixed process, but itself has evolved in complexity and it actually
has made things easier to evolve over time. So, it's actually, organisms can evolve faster,
quicker and more degrees of freedom now than they could two billion years ago. So, there
is actually the evolution of evolvability over time. And exotropy, which is increasing
order, increasing self-organization and increasing structure. So, those are the kinds of things
that we see and the reason why that's important is because, I think, one of the most amazing
discoveries in the last 50 years has been the realization that the essence of life was
not water or some vital spirit or some mystical force in the world, but actually was information.
We saw that with the discovery of the DNA code; we can understand that the essence of
life was actually information processing. And, of course, that's the essence of technology
and it wasn't too long ago, for the first time, that we actually exported Darwinian
evolution and moved it in to a computational world and they, for instance, we used it to
evolve computer code. Microsoft Word has parts of its code that was evolved and not actually
programmed by humans. So, we moved evolution out of biology into computers and at the same
time, we could take E. coli and assign numbers to its genetic sequences and in parallel,
as a proof of concept, used it as a parallel processing machine to solve a travelling salesman
program. So, we used the parallel processing of E. coli genetics to solve a computer program.
So, we have evolution moving in computers; we have life and evolution moving from life
and doing computation, showing that in some senses, that there's equivalency between life
and the technium--that the division that we normally think of them, as a gulf, is not
there. In fact, there is a continuum between the two. So, that means that when we look
at things like this, this 17, 1800s, this diversity of smoke catchers is almost like
a museum collection of different species of butterflies and we see specialization, of
course, happening in the technium in mechanical things. We make a computer or a camera, and
then we might make this specialized underwater camera and infrared camera and a high-speed
camera and then we can specialize that to make a specialized infrared camera, and then
a specialized infrared underwater camera and so it goes on and on; that specialization
is happening. And we can even map, in some cases, the genealogy of different inventions.
And I think that's, the parallels are so steep that, in fact, we might even think of, these
are the six kingdoms of life: plants, animals, fungi and three kinds of bacteria. We might
think of these six kingdoms of life as actually producing the seventh kingdom, and I think
of the technium as basically the seventh kingdom of life because it shares so many of the attributes
as a system, again, as a technium; not the individual artifacts, but as a system, it
exhibits so many of the same self-organizing forces that life does that we, that I think
of it as the seventh kingdom of life. So, when I ask what does technology want, what
are the biases and the long-term trends in technology, I get a very similar answer. And
again, I wanna go back to the idea that "want" is not conscious, but is real that even unintelligent
systems can have wants. So, this is the Willow Garage PD2, I think, robot which has been
programmed to find its own energy; to recharge itself. And so, it will roam through its building
looking for outlets and then takes its tail plug and it plugs in by itself, it plugs into
the outlet until its recharged and then it takes off again. And I had the privilege of
standing between it and the outlet and it very definitely wanted energy. You could feel
it. And it was gonna find it somehow or another and it was not conscious, it was not aware,
it was not very intelligent, but it definitely wanted electricity. And so, if we again ask
what the technium wants, what it wants is the same thing. It wants to head towards;
it's a general bias to drift towards increasing complexity, increasing diversity, increasing
specialization, increasing mutualism, ubiquity, sentience and evolvability, among other things.
And so, what does that mean? Well, here's one example of a long-term trend in technology.
If you take the power density--the energy density-- of living, of systems that are in
disequilibrium, like a galaxy, like a star, even planets with atmosphere life, you find
that the amount of energy per second per gram, so erg's per second per gram, flowing through
this system for the duration of the system that the highest energy densities are actually
increasing over astronomical time. And that, in fact, there's more energy flowing through
the cells of a sunflower than there is in the sun over its entire lifespan. And so,
the most energy dense entity that we know about in the world is actually the chip in
your PC, in your computer. In fact, that's the problem for engineers is that there's
so much energy flowing through here and it's so dense that it's near explosion or meltdown.
I mean, it's incredibly, incredibly energy dense state and yet we can actually say that
where its gonna go is actually gonna be even further in that direction. So, these systems
have their own agenda of some sort, and the question is what is the agenda? And one of
the agendas is, of course, to increase itself. I did a calculation that most of the power
in the technium is using to serve the technium rather than us humans. When you're driving
your car, three quarters or more of that energy that you burn is to move the car, not you.
You're a minor passenger, literally, in this thing and we have, your car then has a garage,
which may be needed to be heated as well, even when you're not there. And so, we have
this thing in which the technium is trying, is increasing, at least servicing more of
itself. It's, there's more technology and the more technology is, the more it needs.
So, that's one sense. And the other one, and another sense of having an agenda would be
Moore's Law. So, a great question that I tried to answer was, "Was Moore's Law inevitable?
Or, is Moore's Law inevitable?" And Gordon Moore and Carver Mead, who developed this
in the 60s, and this, of course, is this unwavering line over decades of research, independent
of the fact that people are constantly trying to accelerate it by putting billions into
a fad or whatever, or trying to ahead of it; it still doesn't work, it's just very, very
straight. They believed it was actually just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, of course,
the problem was is that this curve translated into like, say operations per second, has
been going on way before they were aware of it and we see similar kinds of curves in bandwidth,
storage, DNA sequencing and all these curves are on the same kind of unwavering, fixed
slope and they start long before people believed them, even when they deny they are there,
and so it's not just self-fulfilling prophecy. It is built in to the mechanics of physics
and chemistry and the slope may be something that depends on the economy, but the fact
that it's straight does not. And another example of an agenda is that most inventions throughout
history and currently now, are independently, simultaneously invented. There were 23 other
people who invented light bulbs before Edison. When Alexander Graham Bell filed the patents
for the telephone three years, three hours later, Elisha Gray submitted for his idea
and neither, and both had been preceded by an Italian years before. And in every case,
we, and we even, in places like, I looked at the studies of work during the Manhattan
Project, when there was six different groups working on things that were absolutely separated
because of secrecy and wartime division. Even the three groups in the US were on a need
to know basis and were not aware of the others' work, they kept very meticulous records, so
we have absolute proof, laboratory experiments of people inventing things completely independent
and coming up with very similar things and in the near at the same time. So, whenever
the precursor inventions are in need, or excuse me, are in place in this ecology, the next
adjacent space is inevitable and it will happen at that time whether someone is, I mean, that
the person who actually receives it is just those who are putting themselves there. It's
not really dependent on the lone genius. And this is the work of Stephen Johnson, showing
the same thing. The idea of the lone genius is just incorrect. It comes from an ecology;
an ecosystem of codependent inventions and that the steps in these things are inevitable
and the progression is even inevitable. And I showed that, in this book, looking at the
pre-history inventions on different continents when they were separated and without any kind
of communication between them, the sequence of inventions in pre-history were on the different
continents were very close to being the same in each case, showing that, in a certain sense,
that the technologies that are coming are also going to be inevitable. And so, the Web
was inevitable. Now, what was not inevitable was what kind of Web we have. I think we,
the expressions of it are like the genre, the genius level is inevitable, but the speciation
is not. So the light bulb, incandescent light bulb, was inevitable, but the actual, whether
it was tungsten or not, whether what voltage, whether it was AC or DC; those were not inevitable.
And the same thing with the Web. The expression of it, whether it's centralized or decentralized,
transparent with the actual protocol is, those are not inevitable and those differences actually
make a huge difference to our experience of it. Ok, so, so, and I would say that as we
look to the future, human cloning is inevitable. Now, in what arena, how is it done? That's
not inevitable; we have some choices about that. Computer driven cars, as you guys know,
they're inevitable, but not what the regulation is, not how we experience them, not the cultural
infrastructure that we built around them. Those are things we do have choices about.
And so, humanity, I think, is something we've self-created. And whenever you have self-creation,
that means that you, which we are; we've created ourselves. We are both the created and the
creators, so there's a tension that we have about technology from the very beginning.
We are self-created in the sense that very early on, we started doing things like creating
an external stomach to cook our food, to cook food that we could not digest ourselves and
that external stomach actually changed our nutrition sufficiently that it actually altered
over time the size of our teeth, the position of our jaw, the enzymes in our body, and so
we're now dependent on cooking, but it actually has changed our genetics. So, we've modified
ourselves, through our brain, through our technology, we have modified ourselves. We
have remade, or made, or created ourselves. And a lot of what we identify with humanity
is, in fact, from our laws, through our sense of justice, to maybe even our language, are
things that we have made with our minds. And we have, we're self-created. And as, again,
self-created, that means that we are both the creator and the created. We are both masters
and the servant. That happens when you are self-created. That invention of language,
about 50 thousand years ago, changed the population dynamics. We were only eight to ten thousand
in total maybe in the world and as soon as we had language, we had a tool that will,
gave us access to our own minds. I think the Neanderthals were probably pretty smart, but
didn't have any kind of control over that because they didn't have language. Language
is not just for communicating with others, but communicating with ourselves and so, with
language, we are suddenly, we had tools, we had technology, we could deliberately make
things rather than just encounter them and we spread very fast. In fact, we spread across
every watershed in the planet at the scale of one mile per year. That's how fast the
expansion of humanity was around the globe. One mile per year, we settled the entire globe
in a couple thousand years. And so, with this technology alone, for a long time, we actually
modified the entire planet. We, the early hunter-gatherers eliminated 250 mega-, 250
species of mega fauna to extinction long before, I mean, these were the kind of, the people
living in harmony, supposedly. These people completely altered the whole mix of, because
once you eradicate the mega fauna, it changes all the speciation of the ecology. And even
by the time we got to agriculture, ten thousand years ago, agriculture started to change the
climate, so climate change actually preceded the industrial age. So really, from the very
beginning of our tools, technology has become a planetary force. And, in fact, I would say
that it's now the most powerful force in the world. Most of the things in our lives, we
can draw back its origins to something that we invented. And most of the change in the
future, of course, will all come from things that we invented. And what I'm saying, of
course, is that the greatest invention that we made is our own humanity and, of course,
we're not done yet and that's the whole point of this. So, technology is selfish in the
sense that it has its own agenda. We are the created, so it's selfish in that sense. But
also, at the same time, it serves us. We are the creators and that tension between being
created and being the creator, being the master and the slave to technology is never gonna
leave us and it's the cause of all our constant tension. And a thousand years from now, with
new technology, we'll still be wrestling with the fact that we are both the created and
the creator, that technology is both selfish and serves us at the same time, and that duality,
that tension, is never gonna leave. And, of course, most people would embrace technology,
I think, but there's concern about is there any limit to it? Is this gonna take over,
become the techno planet and wipe out the biology? And what's interesting, if you take
my assertion that, in fact, the technium is an extension of the evolutionary force, that
it's a continuation and acceleration of evolution in life, that means actually that, what, so
far, what we know is that there's no technology that we discovered yet that cannot be made
greener, more compatible with life. And so, while there's much about the technium that
is not compatible with life, that's grimy and dirty and inhumane at scale, there's nothing
inherent in the technium about that. That's not inherent, so we can make more green stuff
that is compatible with life and living. In fact, when you make these chips for the computers,
they require a purity of water actually exceeds what we're drinking. And so, in a certain
sense, you can say, "Well, yeah, even technology wants clean water." So, there is a sense in
which that's necessary for technology, just like for us. And so, I think, it's, the technium
inherently is not compatible with life, but is compatible with life. And I like the way
to think of it, if we have a technology that is not green--maybe it's actually very harmful
to the environment-- I think of that as a bad idea. So, what's the proper response to
a bad idea? Well, if somebody has a bad, if somebody here had a bad idea, we're not gonna
say to them, "Think less." We're gonna say, "Come up with a better idea." And I think
that's the response to a bad idea, is a better idea. So, when we have a bad technology, maybe
you're spraying DDT across cotton crops on plantation scale in millions of pounds a year
and that's an environmental disaster, so the response to a bad technology is not less technology;
it's better technology. So, we can reform. We take the same technology, the same chemical,
DDT, and we, if we apply it around households, it is the most effective eliminator of malaria,
saving tens of millions of lives a year. And so, we can relocate a technology. So, most
of the problems in the world today are technogenic. They have, they're caused by previous technologies.
Every new technology will make new problems. In the future, most of the problems of the
world in the future are gonna come from the technologies that were invented today or in
the future, so we're all gonna be technogenic as well. And so, so there's a tendency because
so many problems are technogenic is to say that we need less technology, but in fact
we just need better technology. Understanding, of course, that the better technology is gonna
generate its own problems in the future. So, I think our jobs as humans is to move that
DDT into a better job; to find the best jobs for our mind children. And they're, just like
we have our children, we want to guide them in the right thing; make sure they have the
right friends, put them in the right context and the right environment and really try to
look for what it is that they want. And I think there's, just as there's no bad children,
there's really no bad technologies. There's just technologies looking for the right place.
And I think that even that's true about lots of technologies that are weaponized. I mean,
it's not inconceivable to me that there might be some place in space where you might want
to have nuclear bombs. They are a terrible thing for killing humans, but they might be
useful for other things and as long as we're on Earth, we probably don't want them. So,
what technology wants, it wants increasing diversity, increasing options, choices, opportunities,
possibilities; that's what technology gives us, ok? So, I acknowledge that technology
and new technology will often produce as many problems as solutions, ok? So, people will
say, "Well, that means that technology is just neutral." That's the orthodox view of
a lot of technologists. It's a neutral tool; use it for good, use it for bad. If it's a
hammer, it can kill somebody or build a house, ok? And in a certain sense, that is true,
but there's one difference is that when that hammer was invented, it presented you and
the world and us with a new choice we did not have before. And I say that that new choice
itself is a good. Just the new choice itself is a good. That tips the balance slightly,
very, very slightly in the favor of good overall, ok? So, every new technology itself, while
it can create new problems, the fact that it is increasing our choices and our possibilities
is itself in the good. And it turns out that you don't need it to be a whole lot better;
it can be a little bit better. So, if, through technology, we can create one percent more
than we destroy every year, compounded over years and centuries, that one percent difference
is civilization. That's progress, ok? So, we don't need to have that. Maybe it's only
a tenth of a percent, so 49.5 percent of the world could be crap and terrible and horrible,
but if 51, or even 50.5 percent is great and good and increases our choices, that is progress
in my eyes. That's how we get progress. So, that's why it's not just neutral. I think
the long, there is a moral dimension to technology; it's not neutral. And we are increasing our
options and possibilities. I did with my daughter; I did a count of the number of objects in
our house. There were about ten thousand different objects. If you look at the inventory of the
king, King Henry the 8th of England, when he died, they did an inventory of everything
in his household which doubled as the Bank of England, ok? And there was 18 thousand
objects; so basically, the wealth of England was 18 thousand objects. And so we say, when
sometimes we're approaching the wealth kings of old in our normal, everyday life, but actually
it's even more interesting because the wealth of King Henry, all his wealth in total could
not have purchased a tube of antibiotics ointment that could have saved his life or someone
he loved. I think its Rothchild, the wealthy, the first multimillionaires in America died
of an abscess that could have been cured with two dollars worth of antibiotics, but his
wealth could not have bought that. And this guy, this rickshaw wallah in India could have
so many things that King Henry and all his wealth could not buy, which was, King Henry
could not have a flush toilet and his wealth could not buy refrigeration, could not buy
a comfortable ride for a hundred miles; all these things. And this guy could afford these
and so, in that sense, he and us are far wealthier than King Henry ever was. That's what progress
is. That's what this stuff brings us and it gives us not just progress, but choices, possibilities,
opportunities, longevity, increased education; all these things which are pointing up over
time. And I want, it's, what I want to emphasize is that it's, when we spend our time making
new things, it's not just, I mean, we're sometimes dismayed because we make things that people
forget very easily, or they throw away; we seem like we're involved in just selling more
stuff and it's consumerism. And so, there is a sense in which we're just creating lots
of stuff and we say, "Well, why are we doing this? What's the value in it?" And I'm saying
what it is, there's a larger thing, which is that we are actually increasing the choices
and possibilities and options of the world. And the reason why that's good is because
we're actually partaking in something that is larger than us. That this, this force itself
organization of increasing diversity began at the Big Bang and it's been running through.
This, this, the rest of the world, the universe is running down and entropy is going down,
but there are places where we can accelerate the creation of entropy and increase local
order--exotropy--and that's, one of those neighborhoods is this Earth and this life
on Earth, which is being increasing its order by accelerating the creation of entropy. And
that self-organization is running through the galaxies, which are maintaining the order,
or stars, which are machines for building up heavier atoms from lighter atoms and they
maintain themselves for billions of years. And that self-organization is running through
life and into the technium and so, we are actually, we can align ourselves with something
much bigger than us, ourselves. It goes back to the beginning and it's gonna run from the
beginning of the universe and actually beyond us, go beyond us, even as humanities in the
middle of something. We're not the end of anything. And so, that long arc is actually
bringing increasing choices and possibilities. And the reason why that is important is because
I think that we often need these new tools for each of us to express our inherent special
mix of talents and abilities. We all have different faces because of the different mix
of genes and things we have. We all have different niches of talents and abilities and the technology's
often required for us to find and express that. So you can, I like to think of Jimi
Hendrix and the fact that the invention of the amplifier--he played the amplifier and
not the guitar--so, the amplifier actually allowed his genius to be shared in the world.
And then I think about, "Well, what a hole in us we would have if he had been born before
the amplifier had been invented." Or if Mozart had been born before the technology of the
piano had been invented. Or maybe Van Gogh before oil paints, or Hitchcock before the
invention of the technologies of cinema. What a loss that would be to us. And so, in a certain
sense, I think there are today, somewhere in the world, a boy or girl, a genius of some
sort who's waiting for us to invent those tools and technologies that would allow their
genius to be shared. And so, I think we actually have a moral obligation to create those things,
those possibilities, to maximize those possibilities for everybody in the world so they would have
some chance to really find and share their genius with us. And because we actually had
been benefitted by others in the past, who had been making new things for us, and so
we have, we're here to make more technology to increase those possibilities and that is
part of this long, cosmic evolution; this long thread of self-organization that's moving
through us and beyond us. So, I thank you for your time and if you wanna look at the
book, Amazon and others have it. That's the general thesis and I think we have time for
a few questions. I'd be happy to answer them. So, thank you.
[applause]
So, total agreement; I love it.
[member #1 clears throat]
>>member #1: Hi. Two questions of--
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #1: clarification, I think. In the middle of your talk, you were talking about
things being inevitable.
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #1: Do you mean literal, like logically inevitable, or just overwhelmingly probable?
>>Kevin: Tell me the distinction between those two.
>>member #1: Logically, the logically thing that I was trying to get at is that there
is no way that it could have been prevented; it would just follow as a course of almost
mathematics versus probabilistically inevitable means, yeah, sooner or later it's likely enough
that sooner or later it would happen.
>>Kevin: I think the universe is basically probalistic. I think everything about the
universe is probalistic. So, I would side with probablistic rather than logically.
>>member #1: Ok. So in that sense, arguably it could have happened that we had bombed
each other back into the Stone Age, in the 50s, and there were no iPods. There would
have been no iPods for some period of time. That's still consistent with what you mean,
inevitable is that yeah--
>>Kevin: Sure, sure. I mean inevitable in a sense that there's inevitable progress in
human development, meaning that you start off as a fertilized egg, you grow into a fetus,
embryo, fetus, toddler and stuff. Now, and so, it's inevitable that a human become a
teenager. Now obviously, there's lots of humans who die before they ever become a teenager,
so is it inevitable you become a teenager? Well, if you die, then you say, logically
you can't. So, yes, there is, so probabilistically, it's inevitable.
>>member #1: Ok. The other question I was gonna ask to clarify is that I think you used
the word technology in a couple of different senses--
>>Kevin: Yes.
>>member #1: at least over the course of the talk.
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #1: The main thrust of it is when you seem to be talking about as if it's something
that has some kind of existence in itself--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #1: in the way that society does. Is that--
>>Kevin: Yes. Right.
>>member #1: what you were trying to--
>>Kevin: So, I use the word, in the book, I'm a little bit more consistent, I use the
word technium, but that's a word I've coined so I was not trying to-- I was trying to ease
people into the idea, but the technium, as I said in the very beginning, is the system,
the interdependent system of things. It's not the collection of the individual artifacts.
It is a system, an ecosystem, you might think of it as super system of all the things that
our minds create together.
>>member #1: Right. Would you, you also used the phrase that technology was a force.
>>Kevin: Yes.
>>member #1: Do you, so you view it as a system and a force?
>>Kevin: Right. I think that the force of it is actually, it's the exotropic force.
So, it's a force in a way that you would say a big truck coming down the road is gonna
hit me. That's a force, it's a force created by an artifact. So, the force, in that sense,
is not, it's, you're actually talking about the energy of it and in my case, when I talk
about the force of technology, I'm talking about the exotropic force that is within technology.
>>member #2: Thanks for coming to speak here.
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #2: A lot of what you say really rings deeply true to me and I'm struggling
with what the implications are to take it back down--
>>Kevin: Sure.
>>member #2: because I feel that has a moment of enlightenment reading what you've been
saying, but the fact is that on one hand, a lot of these trends are inevitable and I
think we, like--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #2: if you work at Google, you realize like, on the one hand, we're trying really
hard to move ahead on it--
>>Kevin: Sure, sure, sure.
>>member #2: and the wolf's on our back the whole time, right? So, I think it's pretty
clear. But that in any kind of short meaningful period of time in terms of product cycles
or competition or what people are working on, it's totally not inevitable; in fact,
totally contingent on what we choose to work on or what other people choose to work on
and--
>>Kevin: Sure, sure.
>>member #2: so, I was actually fascinated to hear, and I forget if it's in your book
or in other writings that you actually have a lot of very specific ideas about what technology
you do and don't use and keep near your house and keep in your family. So, even--
>>Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>>member #2: though we're all here bullish about this, do you think you can actually
intervene--
>>Kevin: Sure.
>>member #2: in lots of meaningful ways?
>>Kevin: Sure, sure, sure.
>>member #2: And it may be the longer term trends, are they appropriate for government
policy and things like that, or, in other words, how do you bring it back down for you
and for others?
>>Kevin: Sure. So, one thing I would say about inevitabilities is that there's a certain
sense which, and if you use the word inevitable, they're fighting words. It brings up lots
of reactions and I think rather than flee from inevitabilities, I think I would use
them as like a helpful signal; the fact that we can prepare for them. We can prepare our
education, we can prepare our businesses, our models to anticipate and maximize their
good when they come and minimize the harm. And so, if you knew, I mean, if you went back
to the – say, Moore's Law, in the 1960s, you believed Moore's Law and realized that
this was inevitable. Think of all the things you could do in the following 50 years, if
you really knew that every year, computers would get twice as fast and half as cheap,
you wouldn't have to know anything about IBM or Apple or Google to make a lot of money
first of all just on that one simple acceptance, but there's also lots of things you could
do for culture and education, really understanding that it was inevitable. So, the question you
asked, though, about how do you go back and how do we make into our own lives, is yes.
One of the things that's interesting is that while I'm preaching, in a certain sense, if
you want to actually increase the amount of technology in the world, I, myself, am actually
trying to minimize it in my own life, ok? And the reason why is that what it turns out
to be is to find that place that those tools that are best for your genius, you, it's not
all technology; it's gonna be a very select amount of technology and those other technologies
are actually distractions. And so, in a certain sense what you're actually trying to do is
find that small set of technologies that are appropriate for you and ignoring the rest.
And so, what, that's what the Amish do in a certain sense. There's a chapter in the
book about the Amish, which I hung out and I was in great admiration of them. They're
very, very selective, they're not anti, they're not Luddites, they're just very selective
in a curious way. I mean, they have horse and buggy and bonnets and stuff, but they
still, they use disposable diapers, they're really into chemical fertilizers, they use
genetically modified crops, ok? So, they're very, very selective, but the reason why I'm
not Amish is for, because they only do one half of it. They're trying to minimize the
technology in their lives, but they're not trying to maximize the technology for others.
They're actually dependant on us to do that. I think we have to do both. I am interested
in minimizing my selection while I maximize the larger pool for others to choose from,
ok? So, I think that tension, again, is also going on and I think we have, there's more
technology that's being invented and there's more of it every year that we could possibly
ever ourselves adopt. So, we have to have some criteria. I mean, we can't just randomly
try stuff; we have to begin to cultivate some kind of criteria, narrow it down while we
encourage the increasing choices for others. Yes.
>>member #3: So, earlier in your talk, I was really struck by something you said about
our expectations about technology, the rules--
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #3: and the purpose. For me, my belief is that someday the universe is gonna kill
us all, right? I mean, a supernova or a comet strike or eco-catastrophe or whatever.
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #3: And nothing lasts forever and I see technology as our best bet for postponing
that day as long as possible.
>>Kevin: Ok.
>>member #3: Do you, would you say that's the way to bet?
>>Kevin: Well, I'm gonna bet on technology; yes. I mean, I think, I think, what I'm trying
to suggest is that the difference, I mean I think that we becoming more technological,
that we are part of; the technium is not something that's out there, it's something we're part
of and so I don't see much distinction as we go along between us and technology. We
are already cyborgs. We're already there. So, so, and it's not just, I think we may
have multiple species. I mean, that's the real question. There are gonna be people who
say under no circumstances am I or my children ever gonna manipulate our genes, and there
are other people who say yeah, sign me up tomorrow. And we may become multiple species
and so, I think the very definition of what humans is, is we are in the process of redefining
it. Every time there's a new innovation in robotics or AI, we have to redefine who we
are. We thought we could do this, and what humans are. And it's not just what we are,
I think there are huge problems out there. The huge challenge we have is that we can
define who we can be and we don't even have any kind of process for that, for collectively
deciding what humans wanna be. So, I think we're at the beginning of this in terms of
even defining who we are. Yeah?
>>member #4: So, I guess one of the underlying principles here is that culture and technology
are evolutionary systems--
>>Kevin: Yes.
>>member #4: as for share a lot of interesting attributes with the evolutionary systems that
created life.
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #4: I think this is a very interesting area of study, but something that's hard for
a lot of people to swallow--
>>Kevin: Sure.
>>member #4: just because I think our general understanding of evolved systems is still
very weak.
>>Kevin: Right. We have the problem with evolution is we have a case of one, which is really
to journalize about.
>>member #4: Exactly.
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #4: Now we're getting more of these cases, but what can we do to enhance this
understanding, or further the study of evolutionary processes in general and what they, what they
could mean and how we could use them?
>>Kevin: Actually, I changed my mind about evolutionary systems when I realized we could
actually make another form in computers. We could do evolutionary studies and we can let
Darwinian evolution run in computers. And I think simulations and other things we actually
make more powerful systems and we let them go and we let them invent things; I think
will teach us more about evolution than studying more stuff in the field would be. So, that's
what I would say. I think the power of simulations, as a tool of science, has just begun. And
again, referring to my earlier talk on the evolution of the scientific method, I think
that's one of the big things that we're looking at in the future and the scientific method
is a role that simulations will play. So, yeah?
>>member #5: Great talk, thanks for coming. Lots of interesting ideas that provoke tons
of--
>>Kevin: Yes. Then I'm useful. That's the whole purpose of the book.
>>member #5: So, I have a question, though, about doesn't this actually reduce to something
else and this is a half measured [ ]?
>>Kevin: Ok.
>>member #5: Technology, you know you talk about simulation and--
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #5: indeed, we can simulate evolutionary systems, but as soon as we pull the plug or
the power supply no longer has coal--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #5: it's done. It will not self-perpetuate.
>>Kevin: Right, right.
>>member #5: And so, at some point it may be inevitable that it will self-perpetuate,
but I kinda doubt it at this point.
>>Kevin: Right, right, right. Right now, we are the sexual organs of technology. We're--
>>member #5: Right.
>>Kevin: necessary for it to reproduce.
>>member #5: So, when you say what technology wants, that personification makes me think
actually we are the creators of technology, so it's what we want and even the supporting
technologies that are necessary to support other technologies--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #5: are just back chaining the complexities and dependencies, but it's still ultimately
what we want and if we're driven by the selfish gene, which is driven by some even more primitive,
prokaryotic--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #5: bacterial messaging--
>Kevin: Right, right.
>>member #5: or whatever, then ultimately doesn't this reduce to what does information
want?
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #5: And so, does this bias and why are you framing it this way?
>>Kevin: No, I mean, I think it's a really good question if you trace back and say, "What's,
how did life self-organize? Where did that want come from?" It's a huge mystery. And
that's not even the beginning of the mysteries. If you go back and say, "Well, it's all about
information", we have no idea what information is. Ask any cosmologist, any astronomer, "Is
information being conserved in the universe or not?" And they say, "Don't know." What's
the definition of complexity? "Don't know." And so, the mysteries in this are profound
and I'm not suggesting that there's, this isn't gonna solve any mystery, I'm only suggesting
that in fact, we can place technology in this frame of reference to these other mysteries.
Maybe that's the best way to say it.
>>member #5: Ok. Is there like a key, take-away piece of utility you get from that?
>>Kevin: Yes, and I think that is that the distinction between life and between technology
and life is very thin. That, basically, think of the technium as an extension, an acceleration
of evolution and that we will do, we'll have much better understanding where technology
is headed if we understand that it's actually closer to an evolutionary force than it is
something that we're just inventing with our minds.
>>member #5: Thanks.
>>Kevin: Yeah,
>>member #6: So, to me it's surprising and also encouraging that you take such an optimistic
view of what technology wants--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #6: with respect to creating more choices, possibilities, making people's lives
better, because if, so, I mean technology is this extension of evolution and it is this
sort of by-product of this process that we are just one part of--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #6: our subjective experience and our feeling of good versus bad is independent
of this in some sense, except in that it causes, at the system level, these things to continue
happening. To me it seems like, I mean, if you look at, for instance, the evolution of
multicellular life, right? This was a tremendous win for life in general, but for single cells--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #6: for instance, this may have actually been terrible. Now you've got things that
need to--
>>Kevin: Sure.
>>member #6: spend their entire existence as a stomach cell, say.
>>Kevin: Or – well that's the same kind of thing with the invention of oxygen--not
the invention-- but the creation of oxygen, which killed off all of the previous, a lot
of the previous life was killed by oxygen, which of course was necessary for the other
life. So, yeah.
>>member #6: Exactly. So, I mean, you have this thing where actually the individual actors
instead give rise to this next level of evolution, tend to not always get the best deal out of
it.
>>Kevin: Right, right. So, one of the things that actually, I think, that evolution is
moving towards and this may speak to it, but I didn't put it on this list because it wasn't,
this list was not complete, is actually, we actually, is making increasing choice and
freedom of choices and degrees of freedom. And so, as individuals, we actually have right
now, compared to say, ten thousand years ago, we have far more free choice than they had
ten thousand years ago. We, cause there's this, we actually have more free choice, both,
I mean, in terms of our minds because we're more aware than say, someone who had no language
at all. And so, I think that even as individuals, we do have increasing free choice. So, it's
that and in the fact that we realize that our choices are part of something larger and
I think that dichotomy between being masters and servants will never leave us. It's not
gonna be nature/nurture. You can't unravel the two. Master/servant, you can't unravel
the two.
>>member #6: Thanks.
>>Kevin: Yep.
>>member #7: So, I'm wondering how this, how you take, say, security technologies into
account in this. I think there's a situation where, let's say, in a video game, for example,
if you just give everybody more power--
>>Kevin: Yeah.
>>member #7: and they become, so everybody is a superhero, then we can all essentially
attack each other and it becomes not very interesting anymore because everyone is just
ridiculously overpowered.
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #7: And it seems like by giving people more choices, you're giving more power to
interfere with other people's choices.
>>Kevin: Well, there's something, Barry Schwartz has talked about the tyranny of choice; this
idea that if you give people too many choices, they become paralyzed. And so, here's a solution.
Again, I'm -- this is my techno-centric view. I think the solution to overwhelming number
of choices is more technology that helps us make those choices. And that's what Amazon
recommendation is, that's what those collaborative filtering is. And so, the solution to like,
more choices is another choice to use choice filtering, choice aiding technology. And I
think the same thing with what you're suggesting is if there's all these choices, well, the
solution's gonna be--sorry to say it-- more technology, better technology.
>>member #7: Well, I guess my question is when people have different ideas about what
they want to do--
>>Kevin: Right.
>>member #7: and they can interfere with each other, then having more choices isn't this
benign thing. It affects, it can negatively affect other people. And one of the things
that you wanna see created are these like--
>>Kevin: Right. But the only other solution, I mean, if it isn't a better choice or better
technology for choices, is less choices and I just don't think that--that's what I'm saying.
That goes against the entire arc of evolution, so I would not bet on that. I would always
bet on better technology for making choices than less choices.
>>member #7: Uh-huh. Fair enough.
>>Kevin: Ok.
>>woman moderator: Do you have time for one more?
>>Kevin: I have a last question and then, I guess, you're almost seven minutes after.
I guess it's time to move. Yeah?
>>member #8: So, you said humanity was the sexual organs of technology?
>>Kevin: Yeah, well. Ok.
[Kevin laughs]
>>member #8: Do you think that'll--
>>Kevin: That's not my line; by the way, I think it's from Kluun.
>>member #8: Will that continue or do you think that'll change eventually?
>>Kevin: No, that's, so right now I'm arguing that we are giving the technium a little bit
of autonomy. So, autonomy is not binary, it's not like you're there or you're not there
or you have little bits of it, including us. We're not totally autonomous. So, I think
we're going to increase the number, the amount of autonomy. Can the technium ever be autonomous?
Well, in the sense that we're part of it, not really. I mean, we will always be part
of the technium. So, it's not as if we're gonna be separate from it, or ever separate
from it. So, can it, I mean, yes, I think there's gonna be certainly increasing amount
of technology, of excuse me, of autonomy in the technium. Will it need us to not reproduce?
I don't know, I don't know, I can imagine different scenarios; lemme put it that way.
I think there's multiple scenarios. Yeah, it's inevitable that it would in some cases,
but there may be other cases, other things that we do where it isn't. So, I, in the sense
that you want to have, it wants to have multiple possibilities, I think, what I'm saying is
I don't think it remains one species. I think we see a divergence. So there's some possibilities
where it will be completely without us and there's others where we're still essential.
Those, most of the time, the future is not a single, I'm not talking about a ladder where
we climbing up a single race. These, these trajectories are not, these trajectories are
like explosions. They're not like going along a series on a ladder. So, again, I, thanks
for sticking around. I really appreciate the questions and I hope you enjoy the book. Thanks
for having me here.