Technology. It’s Good. Really.

I’m just getting around to finishing the latest edition of The Edge.

Headlining is an article by Kevin Kelly, still the Senior Maverick at Wired, and currently editing a slew of other interesting things. Someone recently pointed out to me, during yet another installment of “What Should Amy Really Do With Her Life?” which should be a game show with vacation packages to the Netherlands and biodiesel powered vehicles as prizes, that Kelly doesn’t have a college degree. (I don’t either, for those of you haven’t been following along.) While I did know that both Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs were college drop-outs, I wasn’t aware of this, from Kelly’s Edge biography:

“Instead of going to college he went to Asia as a photographer. His photographs have appeared in Life and other national magazines. He has no college or university degrees.”

Ok, /digression. The article is “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life,” and it’s, of course, written from Kelly’s futuristic viewpoint, but he remains right there with us, constantly reminding the reader of his awareness of our, and his own, fears.

Because I think a lot about definitions, and feel that the lack of clear ones is often the biggest impediment to productive thought- both individual and collaborative- I appreciated when he addressed the problem of defining “technology” right up front:

“…we still don’t have a good sense of what technology is or how we should define it. Technology in its modern sense is a term that wasn’t even invented until 1829. We had been making technology for centuries, but didn’t have a word for it. I suggest we still don’t know exactly what it is. Is it anything that we make from with our minds? Or only certain things?”

After the obligatory acknowledgment that we don’t even have a good working definition of technology, the first interesting idea presented is an argument against the typical thought process that technology is something generated by science, replacing it with the idea that technology is actually a type of thinking that generates science, citing the history of the scientific method as an argument.

But it starts to get really interesting when Kelly introduces his idea of the “technium,” which is also the premise of his latest book project. When Kelly refers to “the technium,” he’s thinking about, as he puts it, “what we define as Technology with a capital T,” but not as a general concept, rather in terms of an ecosystem of individual technologies. This is and of itself makes a lot of sense, and the terminology has already been employed elsewhere intuitively, if not definitively. For example, the startpage webtool Netvibes quite logically named their repository of compatible modules the Netvibes Ecosystem. It’s very intuitive indeed.

Now, it starts to get, as Kelly self-admittedly describes, “scary” when he proposes that, like any other large and complex system, or, (eek! scary alert) even life itself, the technium has it’s own inherent agendas and urges.

“That is, an individual technological organism has one kind of response, but in an ecology comprised of co-evolving species of technology we find an elevated entity — the technium — that behaves very differently from an individual species. The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself. That’s the part that is scary and interesting.”

He then goes on to address what he feels are the high-level problems we need to address as we deal with technology going forward, using the analogy of child-rearing.

One of the reasons it took me so long to get through this edition of the Edge is because at that point, I had a sudden urge to go find and re-read Borges’s “The Circular Ruins,” probably because it came up in another discussion earlier this month. (It’s in Ficciones, and online here.) Basically, it’s about a wizard whose goal was to create a man in his imagination, but not as an imaginary being, with the intent to bring this being into reality. Philosophically, Borges is apparently exploring the theme of idealism, which wikipedia defines as “the doctrine that ideas, or thought, make up either the whole or an indispensable aspect of any full reality.”

So, what the hell does all that have to do with Kevin Kelly’s scary AI sounding stuff? Yeah, I was sort of asking myself that too, because I honestly had stopped reading the Edge, and wandered off to “The Circular Ruins,” without any particular reason. It certainly wasn’t consciously deliberate; I’m not that bright. After getting distracted by at least a dozen other things (I’m trapped in reading ADD right now, I can’t seem to settle down to anything) I came back to finish the Edge, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a completely appropriate supplement.

One of Kelly’s most interesting/scary/relevant points, at least in my opinion, which I’m basing on the concerns and opinions most people whom I speak express when discussing the future impacts of technology, came next:

“There’s a tendency to believe that while the culture around may be becoming more technological, human nature remains intact. In fact, we have to admit that our own human natures are being reformed, redefined, and remade by technology. This is a scary too.”

Seriously, I JUST had that discussion, about human nature in the context of new technology, last week at Bar Louie. I’m sure the bartenders will remember the two idiots raving on at last call while consuming chocolate cake at a disturbing rate. But really, the philosophical doctrine of idealism becomes more and more relevant and the paragraphs march forward.

“What is the difference between fake and reality? Who are we? Are we many or one? Where do we begin and our minds end? These are old themes, but with new answers and alternative story lines, and it’s not just the artists that are asking these questions.

We are reaching down deep into the culture so that everybody has to ask these very big questions. It’s no longer the job of philosophers, nor avante guard artists — but ordinary citizens. With each new headline in USA Today, everyone is being asked, What is a human? A vernacular theology, in a certain sense, is one of unanticipated aspects of this technological culture.”

In other words, we don’t have to be reading Borges or studying George Berkeley for this to come up, and a big reason for that is technology. And this is good, in my opinion. I think the growing need for everyone to ask these questions in their own ways, to begin taking an active role when forming their theological beliefs, is a huge positive.

Eventually, Kelly discusses his beliefs in extropy- according to the dictionary, the idea that “human intelligence and technology will enable life to expand in an orderly way throughout the entire universe”- which, humorously, my Firefox spell check plugin keeps insisting is not actually a real word, and suggests that one might think of the technium as the 7th kingdom of life to round of the 6 we learned about in grade school science class. It’s all very interesting, but in truth, I zoned out for a section or two, until the conclusion, where Kelly does a beautiful, job of very simply expressing what I try to (and fail at) in every discussion I have regarding technology from a big picture perspective.

“I don’t think technology is neutral or a wash of good and bad effects. To be sure it does produce both problems and solutions, but the chief effect of technology is that it produces more possibilities. More options. More freedom, essentially. That’s really good.”

I don’t buy into every line of the article by a long shot. But I don’t think that’s really the point. Next time I end one of those aforementioned discussions about technology by shoveling a forkful of chocolate cake in, shrugging, and saying with my mouth full, “I dunno. Those are all great points, but… I think it’s basically good. I really do,” I am not going to feel quite so idiotic.

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Updated to say, because I don’t remember if I blogged about it before, that the making the Borges/technology connection, although genuine in this case, is certainly not original. At all. Douglas Wolk wrote Web Master Borges on Salon back in 1999. Lev Manovich (who is doing very interesting work, by the way) used the title “New Media from Borges to HTML.” Etc, etc.

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Updated again to note that yesterday Tim Madigan, US editor of Philosophy now, put out a short, sweet, light piece with a positive look at a specific aspect of technology, “Aristotle’s Email – Or, Friendship In The Cyber Age.”