杏吧原创

In What Technology Wants, tech guru Kevin Kelly sees the 鈥渢echnium鈥� as a seamless extension of complex biology, evolving by the same rules

A FEW years after Desmond Morris laid bare our animal nature in The Naked Ape, Alvin Toffler鈥檚 1970 book Future Shock questioned our species鈥� ability to adapt to rapidly changing technology. Forty years later, the question remains. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, considers it from the viewpoint that technology accelerates human evolution, creating order and complexity in the face of entropy鈥檚 rule.

A former writer for the Whole Earth Catalog, Kelly spent much time among the Amish. Because they harvest maize using choppers and threshers, rather than massive vacuum-generating machines, the Amish prefer to plant maize resistant to the borer beetles that can eat through stems and force harvesting to be done by hand. Borers are killed by a toxin produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, the genetic code for which is now in 鈥淏t鈥� maize, the genetically modified strain that the Amish swear by, so to speak.

The Amish, Kelly argues, are 鈥渁nything but antitechnological鈥�. Instead, they give careful thought to the social impact of adopting or rejecting particular technologies. Kelly shares with the Amish more than just this reflective stance on technology. He, too, sees the meaning of life and the emergence of technology as potentially united on a spiritual plain.

According to Kelly, technology is an emerging state of cosmic reality. We cannot reject it, so we need to understand it. His descriptions of the way technology indelibly permeates everything we do, whether or not we are aware of it, are potent. But, as a prehistorian, I believe the story has a missing piece.

Kelly sees technology as having effected change only gradually in our species, overlooking the fact that apparently simple tools, like chipped stones or slings for carrying infants, might have had a dramatic impact on early human evolution. These early technologies compensated for our species鈥� physical inadequacies, creating the conditions under which we evolved, rather than the other way round.

As in his earlier book Out of Control, Kelly sees the evolution of technology as a seamless extension of complex biology. Now his 鈥渢echnosphere鈥� becomes the 鈥渢echnium鈥�. Not only do the biosphere and technium overlap in Kelly鈥檚 conception, biology and technology evolve according to the same rules. Those rules are explicitly teleological, and as such seem to demand a type of religious comprehension.

As technology is an 鈥渆xpansion of evolvability鈥�, it must be part and parcel of the mystery some call 鈥淕od 鈥� the paragon of autocreation鈥�, Kelly says. The possibility that the concept of God might itself be a kind of technology we created 鈥� a reflex of our ability, evident from the Palaeolithic, to design complex things 鈥� is not considered.

More problematically, the possibility that the technological realm has its own autonomous, non-Darwinian logic is ignored. Kelly presents diagrams of artefact change over time as akin to biological taxonomy, a view long since rejected by most anthropologists, archaeologists and materiality theorists.

If What Technology Wants is not always theoretically sure-footed, it is certainly a great read. Kelly writes with the engagement and grace of a mature provocateur. The future is technological, whether we like it or not. And Kelly鈥檚 key message 鈥� that not liking it may give our species fewer options, and perhaps fatally weaken us, as we face social and environmental crises on a global scale 鈥� is surely correct.

He argues that we must accept that the things we have created now have their own demands. The specifics of these demands are a bit nebulous, but the point highlights the powerful inertial force of our vast, interconnected, technological infrastructure. Ignoring technology鈥檚 鈥渨ants鈥� may lead us to an impossible future, while meeting them intelligently may open up new horizons.

鈥淲e must accept that the things we have created now have their own demands鈥�

This is a fascinating and enjoyable book packed with insight, which should be read by everyone concerned with how technology is shaping humanity. That ought to be all of us.