Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants"

This is a "breathless with excitement" book. Kelly tries to present himself as a sober assessor of the role of technology and our relationship with it. But in reality, this is like walking into a big toy story with a 5 year old. Kelly is all atremble and all aglow with his excitement over technology. I share that. But Kelly goes quite a bit further than I would. He see "the technium" as he calls it, a seventh kingdom of life to place up there with the standard six kingdoms. That will surprise a lot of people. But it gives you a clue of how deep his enthusiasm runs.

The book is full of delightful facts. For those who love to sneak a peek at the width and depth of human knowledge, this book is a good one. It is full of interesting facts about technology, humans, history, and speculations. You won't be disappointed with this book. My interest didn't lag. I confess that about three-quarters of the way through I blinked and realized that Kelly was more of an academic than I realized. He is in love with his ideas. But his feet aren't always on the ground. My realization came with chapter ten (of fourteen) entitled "The Unabomber was Right".

As I read that chapter I realized that Kevin Kelly was an academic. He worries with his argument like a dog with a bone. But he fails to show the one concern which is most basic: the Unabomber never showed any concern for people. He developed his "manifesto" dealing with abstractions about technology and "people" but never about any flesh-and-blood person. Kelly does the same with his treatment of this "argument" from the Unabomber. My view is that you don't waste your time "arguing" with a madman. The Unabomber was lashing out at his own shortcomings and using the world as his whipping post. The Unabomber showed no care for humans.

Kelly is right to point out the deep hypocrisy of the Unabomber in "getting away from it all" but depending on the outside world to feed him. The bit about riding his bike to the little town to rent a car and drive to the city to stock up on supplies is perfect. Here's a guy who hates "the system" but rather than really go out in the woods and do it all for himself, he is hiding out in the woods and using civilization to feed, cloth, and entertain himself (I'm thinking of the shelf of books in his cabin).

I get really tired of anti-modernism. Kelly points out the fatal flaw in all of them: they are like Thoreau, they rhapsodize about their little lake in the woods, but in reality they never cut loose of society and the technological goodies. They simply don't face up to the fact that if you give up technology you will die, alone, cold, and starving. You have to go back to pre-pre-humans to find any creature in our lineage who didn't use technology.

Here's a taste of the Kelly in one of his flights of rapture:

The conflict that technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accpet our nature -- the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.

"We trust in nature, but we hope in technology," says Brian Arthur. That hope lies in embracing our own natures. By aligning ourselves with the imperative of the technium, we can be more prepared to steer it where we can and more aware of where we are going. By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts.

I don't buy into his anthropomorphizing technology. It is lifeless. It is just the stuff we have created and use. It doesn't have a life of its own as a "seventh kingdom". If we have a nuclear winter tomorrow, that is it for us and for the technology. If we have a sudden religious revival and all go "back to the country" then technologies dies. It has no life outside of us.

The one place where I am willing to give it some life is as we develop autonomous tools. But sixty years ago Alan Turing was arguing that our computers could emulate us. He thought they would in maybe 20 years. They haven't yet. The AI folks keep telling us "20 years" just like the fusion energy folks for 50 years have been tellingus "20 years" and it will happen.

I believe there is a future with intelligent machines. But it much more likely that it is 100 years out and not 20 years out. It might even be 500 years out. There is no serious science of intelligent matter. There's a computer "science" of AI and algorithms. But that is light years from a thinking machine able to hold an intelligent conversation.

Here's Kelly getting mystical again, but this I do agree with:

Unlike the Amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. If they don't then their children will. Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

Compare that to this over-the-top anthropomorphic version:

So what does technology want? Technology wants what we want - the same long list of merits we crave. When a technology has found its ideal role in the world, it becomes an active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others. Our task is to encourage the development of each new invention toward this inherent good, to align it in the same direction that all life is headed. Our choice in the technium -- and it is a real and significant choice -- is to steer our creations toward those versions, those manifestations, that maximize that technology's benefits, and to keep it from thwarting itself.

I enjoyed the book, but I don't take it that seriously. It is more poetry than science. It is a visionary cutting lose with a riff that is his fantasy.

The chapter on the Unabomber is where I turned on Kelly. To waste time on the "manifesto" of a homicidal narcissist was too much. The poetry lost its shimmer in that chapter. And the fact that Kelly didn't realize that he was following the Unabomber into the airy-fairy world of abstract "causes" without any humanity really bothered me. I'm sure Kevin Kelly is a nice enough guy, but to buy into arguments about abstract nouns when killing and maiming of real flesh-and-blood people is invoved. That's just too much for me. I part company from Kelly at that point. The book lost its poetry at that point. After that I became obsessed with seeing the ridiculous generalizations in Kelly's arguments. I couldn't get back to the poetry.