What Technology Wants

By: Kevin Kelly

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.

This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants, we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come; by adopting the principles of proaction and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles; and by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.

Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.

©2010 Kevin Kelly (P)2010 Tantor

Poor Science to Back a Solid Thesis

"If there's justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize." --Seth Godin
"Nuh uh." -- me
I was suprised at how many scientific errors Mr. Kelly commits in laying out his thesis for this book. His thesis is solid, but he frequently and unnecessarily distorts scientific theory to support it. He clumsily argues that evolution has direction, citing prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, despite that Dawkins has long asserted that any perceived destination for evolution results simply from our own narcissistic perspective. Kelly also uses several erroneous cliches about the history of human evolution to support his thesis. By the end of the book, I was disappointed that Kelly so poorly argued such an important thesis. For lack of better editors, this book ends up stuck between popular psychology and scholarly thought.

Sprawling scope, an ambivalent thesis

Kevin Kelly's contemplation of meaning, couched in terms of the "Technium" (all technology and its trends), which includes our minds, life itself, and indeed all the cosmos.

I like Kelly's description of history and the aforementioned contemplation of existence better than I like his assessment of present technology, or his transition to potential futures and proscriptive ways of living, but there were parts from each perspective I enjoyed and agreed with throughout the book.

That said, much of the best elaborated ideas are borrowed from contemporaries (e.g. techno-futurist Kurzweil), and what Kelly does try and establish himself is a mixed bag. I found myself alternately nodding vigorously in agreement and then shaking my head disappointedly at vague language, unjustified leaps, occasionally excessive proselytizing. In most cases I wanted Kelly to take the discussion he had built up so well in a different direction, and we diverged more frequently than I had expected to at the outset.

The book feels like it could be stronger in progression and thesis if it maintained a steady philosophical position throughout, but Kelly comes across as trying hard to reconcile his personal ambivalence over how to handle technology. He issues statements that fit nicely into prevailing Western scientific thought, only to act as if it were never said in a later chapter, letting Eastern philosophical wisdom and personal reflection do all the talking instead. My discomfort doesn't stem from his choosing one way of thinking over the other per se, but in his inconsistency. Perhaps over the seven years that Kelly wrote the book he changed his mind and mood back and forth, writing a chapter or two when his views leaned enough one way or the other. I wonder if he's not yet confidently settled on an ideology for himself, let alone the Technium, but if nothing else this informed self-discussion does make for a worthwhile read.

In sum, I liked the book... but I wanted to like it more.

Questioning 'What Technology Wants'

I think you should read What Technology Wants and decide for yourself if Kelly is saying anything new or interesting.

For me, Kelly's idea of "the technium", the overarching theme of the book, never quite came together. In describing all of technological change (in the broadest sense of the word) within a unified framework, Kelly, to my ears (I listened to the book from Audible), ends up explaining very little. The saying, "all models are wrong, but some are useful" is only half right in describing Kelly's "technium."

If I didn't like the theme of 'What Technology Wants' (or maybe didn't get it) - I really enjoyed many of its parts. The description of Amish technology was fascinating and thought provoking. Kelly's observations on the digital divide (he is not worried), the benefits to society of early adopters (they use expensive and bad tools so everyone else can use cheap and excellent tools), and the benefits of appropriate technology (Kelly does not Tweet, own a TV, or use a laptop or smart phone), are consistently challenging and smart.

I wish that Kelly spent more time talking to more people (say people who work for technology companies, or even toil in post-secondary education) and less time in his own head. Too much is made of the Unabomber manifesto, too little is made of the history of technological change and the shifts in material, economic and social life.

Despite these complaints, I see What Technology Wants as a good companion piece to my other recent books. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires; The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves; Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed; I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted; and Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation are all better books, but each is made more interesting by thinking about What Technology Wants.

Brilliant

Encompasses why we do what we do within an infinite game linking past knowledge to the bridge of discovery and repeat. Loved it!

What Technology Wants is

Made rather benign by the author. I don’t share his optimism, but I hope he is right. I really enjoyed the book and plan to listen to it again.

Really great insight

A sobering look at the evolution of technology, who we are as humans, and the movement of “God”

Intersting, but....

...he does get out over his skis sometimes. This title has the feel of a work where the author took a bunch of semi-random, tangentially-related thoughts that have been bouncing around in his head for years, dumped them all out on paper, and then tried to weave a coherent narrative thread through them.

One "out over his skis" example: late in the book, he says that when a user tags a photo in Flickr with the names of people or places, that he is teaching the software how to do that on its own. That is manifestly untrue, unless the software has been explicitly written in such a way as to learn that, and he provides no evidence that it has been. He just asserts that it's true.

He does give some interesting history--such as his lengthy list of things that are available to the poorest among us today, which were unavailable to the richest plutocrats of history. And he tries to tie broad and seemingly disparate areas of knowledge together, generally succeeding in ways that are interesting. Whether it would hold up to deep scrutiny is more of an open question.

His discussion of risk and the precautionary principle is particularly good--his mention of Perrow's "Normal Accidents" is apt, and his description of the implications of increasing complexity is well-done, even if it will be familiar to anyone who has done much reading on complex systems.

It's not required reading, but it was pretty interesting.

Mind-Opening

What did you love best about What Technology Wants?

Kevin Kelly's book is a mind-opening look at technology as an extension of the complex, upward-spiral of life and ecology. This book truly broadened my definition of technology and, indeed, life itself.

An excellent read; I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in technology but perhaps, even more so, to biologist, ecologist, and system theorists.

interesting

What did you love best about What Technology Wants?

The novel ideas about what may be driving the evolution of humanity.

What did you like best about this story?

How Kelly's ideas have a root in evolutionary biology.

Have you listened to any of Paul Boehmer’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No. At times it was difficult to tell if he is a robot or not. This is appropriate for the content.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The last chapter. If you listen to nothing else in this book. Get it from the library and read the last chapter.

Technology Philosophy

Many insights into the characteristics of technology. Mr. Kelly does a superb job of depicting technology as it's own beast, of having it's own direction. His comparisons of similiar independent inventions and parallels with biological convergent evolution were fascinating. I read this book shortly after reading Nonzero, by Robert Wright, and I felt like the two books were lines exploring the same phenomenon from different angles. The narration was a little strange, it didn't really distract from the ideas in the book, though I think I would have liked it more in print version, or even if the author had read it himself.