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

Technology meets philosophy

Excellent book. I would have chosen a different narrator, but that's a minor complaint. The book is fantastic.
Thank you

Listened twice, I get a lot out of it.

I've listened to this twice in the last year, and made notes from which i've explored half a dozen interesting subject lines. Like rhodopsin, and, even though this was written 10 years ago, investigating the number of computers on the internet, or how smart phones have changed over that time.

Kelly is Brilliant

if you want to understand life and technology and where we are potentially going, then you should listen to this

Outstanding Insightful Foresight

Kevin Kelly, having earlier written the wide-ranging, insightful books - Out of Control and The Inevitable - here sets his deep mind to show us our future. Out of the enormous noise in which most of us find, embrace and cling to our local realities, Kevin Kelly, with genius rises above the ubiquitous noise and having found the signals draws the vision for those of us on search with him to see our way forward. Likening himself to an Amish Farmer / Futurist, Kelly ends up speaking of God and technology. If the technology surrounding us that we so eagerly embrace and is so thoroughly changing us, while getting smarter all the time, if this is not the hand of God, then what is?

Going on a Tangent

It was interesting how technology has adapted over the years, decades and centuries, but Kevin Kelly goes on and on where you tend to forget his thesis. It seems like he just wrote this book just to ramble on his thoughts on the subject. If he was defending his thesis in a PHD setting, the thesis would be rejected because it's just too much random ideas with no collaboration on one thought. You really get lost in the read because one minute he is talking about how Microsoft Windows and it's million lines of coding and the next chapter, he is explaining about evolution and cells and trying to tie everything together. Very awkward to understand the complete process. The only redeeming part of the book is about the Amish and technology. This could had been a really good personal commentary, but it was poorly edited and badly executed.

Horribly haphazard

Has What Technology Wants turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes - this genre is uselessly speculative, uncritical, and not analytically rigorous.

Any additional comments?

This book might make you dumber if you take its style of reasoning seriously. Facts are inaccurate (he blatantly misunderstands how humans and chimps are evolutionary related, for example), words are defined as to be meaningless, causal connections assumed and not defended. This books is an intellectual joke.

Interesting but Extreme

Interesting book with a lot of food for thought about how technology shapes us, as we in turn shape it. In essence, technology is part of human evolution, and we could no more stop technological process from happening than we could stop the sun from rising tomorrow.

As food for thought the book is a good read, but he lays out so many questionable ideas as fact that his overall judgment is necessarily in question. A sign of wisdom, and prudence is when someone can hold strong beliefs on questionable ideas, and not lose sight that despite their own conviction on the matter, it is still a questionable idea to others. This is the only way to avoid confirmation bias and thus turning ourselves into our own worst intellectually enemies. Once we’ve given ourselves over to such biases, we lose the ability to self-monitor our ideas for soundness.

In context to the “Golden Rule” of treating others as we would like to be treated, he flatly declares that including non-human species into this realm of “others” is moral progress. This isn’t just up for debate still, but Kelly places himself on the true outer fringes here. The logical conclusion to this line of thought is that killing an animal for food is equal to killing a human for food. Bringing such ideas to the table for discussion is all well and good, but again, he doesn’t present it as something to be considered, but states it as settled fact.

So the book itself is interesting, and I don't regret getting it, but Kelly is so sealed up within his own ideas that they all take on a rather surreal aspect, and so it's hard to take as seriously as I'm sure he expects it to be taken.

New Age logic + recycled popsci = disappointment

Would you try another book from Kevin Kelly and/or Paul Boehmer?

no

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I think the most interesting chapter by far was on Amish hackers, a seemingly contradictory phrase the author invokes to describe some original research he's done interviewing various Amish on how they decide whether to use or reject a particular portion of technology.A disappointing pastiche of New Age ideas layered on regurgitated Jacob Bonowski, Richard Dawkins and James Burke, occasionally invoking flawed logic on pop-science as well. The author enjoys making up new words, such as "technium" for the aggregate of all technology currently in use, as a substitute for actual insight. Ultimately, there really isn't much of a conclusion beyond "think about what technology you decide to embrace".

How did the narrator detract from the book?

I'd also like to say... that I found the narrator... especially annoying,... speaking slowly... with lengthy pauses between phrases... in a tone that suggests.... an overdose of Valium. Like daddy reading patiently to a small child. I had to crank the playback up to 2x speed just to avoid falling asleep between sentences.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment

Worst narrator ever

What disappointed you about What Technology Wants?

The narration. I really want to listen to this book, I'm a big fan of Kevin Kelly and the topic, but I can barely stand listening to this narrator.

What was most disappointing about Kevin Kelly’s story?

That it was read by Paul Boehmer.

How could the performance have been better?

If it was read by anyone else. Of the hundreds of books in my library, this is the absolute worst narrator ever.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Probably great content, if you can get past the AI narration.