What does technology want?

I’ve been researching technology on a philosophical level and came across this TED talk by Kevin Kelly. Kelly is an editor at WIRED magazine, but more relevant to this conversation, he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. The WEC was originally published in printed form, but quickly moved online when the Internet became a thing, and was concerned with various DIY, counterculture, or pro-environment product reviews and essays. It never actually succeeded in containing the whole Earth, but as a sort of philosophical precursor to the World Wide Web it encouraged sharing, openness and democracy (that the Internet is any of these things is a myth [possible paywall], but that’s another discussion).

Some interesting takeaways from this talk are how Kelly equates technology’s evolution to biological evolution. Tech, like biology, moves toward diversity and complexity.He even goes so far as to name technology the Earth’s 7th kingdom (the official six kingdoms are plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaebacteria, and eubacteria). Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene posits that the idea that genes have a “selfishness” to them in that they look out for their own best interests, and technology could be seen to have that same selfishness; It wants to proliferate.

Technology cannot be destroyed, only slowed down. Everything from a random page in a mail-order catalog from a hundred years ago is still available today in some form or another. To conclude, Kelly suggests we have a moral obligation to continue advancing and creating new technologies because it allows humans to reveal their best qualities (also worst, but again that’s another discussion). Imagine Van Gogh without the invention of oil paint, or Hitchcock without the invention of film. Where would our culture be without technological progress?

We’ve cooled considerably in our technological optimism in the past several decades; we’re a long way from viewing human progress through the rose-colored glasses represented by Walt Disney’s ever hopeful and wondrous Carousel of Progress.

And that makes me a little sad. Speaking of Disney, I remember growing up in the 1980s and visiting Epcot for the first time. I couldn’t wait for the future of automated home and robot butlers. Well, now I have Nest and Hue to automate my home, and Roomba to vacuum my floors. So now what do I look forward to?