The Nature of Humanity: Technology
Kevin Kelly recently gave a TED Talk on “technology’s epic story”, the first 7 minutes of which I think provides an excellent description of the nature of humanity as the technological species. On Kelly’s account, humanity itself is a concept of our own invention, which we continue to develop as part of an overall technological ecology that he calls “The Technium”.
Although I love Kelly’s idea of The Technium and it being an extension of (our) life, and even the defining feature of our condition, I disagree with his teleological interpretation of technology in general having it’s own wants. After we develop some real independently thinking technology, then it will have intention, but up until now — sorry, not so.
My hopes for technology in the near to long term future are probably on the extreme end of the scale, when compared with average views of where technology is going. For example, I think that many of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions on the merging of technology with our own biology will probably come to pass, and I look forward to it. However, fantasizing about The Technium’s intentions, treating it like some sort of ephemeral galactic life force, is akin to worshiping gadgets.
After his story of technology as an extension of humanity, Kelly’s talk is at best confusing and at worst incoherent. For example, he defines technology as a human invention, and then goes on to describe it as predating humanity by billions of years.
My working definition of technology is anything useful that a human mind makes (7:17)… the origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang (7:37).
Kelly makes some very loose connections between energy, information, entropy and order, and somehow draws conclusions in cosmology and biology from it. This involves some dubious claims about the “energy density” in life being greater than that of a star, and that of a microchip being greater than everything else in the universe.
I’m not sure how this is calculated, but I suspect that if my Mac used as much energy per gram as the Sun outputs, my power bill would be more than the power bill of the entire planet combined.
Even if we accepted the numbers about the flow of energy per gram per second through stars vs microchips, what can we conclude from it? Kelly sees a general trend, placing our technology into a “7th Kingdom of Life”, which is evolving from entropy into greater order, and has been doing so independently of us from the beginning of time.
While we can all agree that technology is progressing, I prefer the simpler explanation that it is progressing from and due to human effort alone, and not a mysterious, cosmological-scale life force. In any case, Kevin Kelly’s talk is thought provoking, and well worth your next 17 minutes!
Dan Rizzuto on February 20th, 2010 @ 18:14
Hi Brent, I think the point is this: you can’t separate “human effort” from the rest of the Universe. The Universal system evolves holistically and human effort is a part of it, but humans are only capable of operating within and in relation to the rest of the universe. In fact, the primary cause of all of our technology can be traced back to the big bang (if not further). The difference between your approach and Kevin’s is basically the difference between reductionism and holism. And in the end, both “isms” are true…
Brent on February 20th, 2010 @ 18:33
Perhaps both are true, but one can say that the primary cause of *everything* can be traced back to the big bang (or [insert first cause here]). The epic story of everything.
Dan Rizzuto on February 21st, 2010 @ 09:03
Speaking of the Big Bang, Neil Turok answers the question, “What Banged?” at TED: http://bit.ly/9FqRWv
Turns out the Universe may be eternal after all…