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