Adumbration

The premise of the author in this interview is that in the large space of technological development, there are growing areas of autonomy that react to the environment independently of direct human interaction, although the discussion touches many related points.  This sort of emergent behavior has application to parts of my day job these days.

Some of what is new technology is developed to mitigate or resolve problems that arose with old technology;  increasing wealth allows better solutions.  Old technology lives on after the advancement of new technology - products from the old Montgomery Ward catalog can still be found today being made new, leading to the suggestion that simply banning undesirable technology will not succeed in that end. 

I remain skeptical as to the usefulness of extending the word "want" to this application, since it implies a conscious volition that technology in its current form simply does not have.  This is not to say that there are not complex interactions at work in the operation of these technologies on their own and with human intermediation, and those interactions can have the appearance of conscious direction that we should think about when setting up the rules under which the technology operates.  The technology no more "wants" an outcome than do individual birds "want" to create the huge flocks that can arise from their individually simple decision logic.

Is it true that technology is neither good nor bad? on balance it may be a (perhaps quite) small good because it creates space for new choices, which aggregate over time to what we call progress.   The discussion here also references a prior interview of Kelly with Robert Krulwich on Radio Lab.

Technology and What Technology Wants (11/29/2010) - Kevin Kelly argues that technology is best understood as an emergent system subject to the natural forces underpinning all emergent systems. He argues that any technology creates benefits and costs but that the benefits typically outweigh the costs (perhaps by a small amount) leading to human progress. This is a wide-ranging conversation that includes discussion of the Unabomber, the Amish, the survival of human knowledge, and the seeming inevitability of the advancement of knowledge. The conversation closes with a discussion of the potential for technology to make an enormous leap in self-organization.