What Technology Wants is in my top five most provocative books in the last year. Mr. Kelly argues that technology should be thought of as an emergent system, that, while it is not conscious as we define conscious, it seems to have behavior that supersedes that behavior which we give to it. While there have been crazier notions, surely few of them have been so effectively argued.
It is difficult to nail down the criteria by which to judge whether or not technology is an emergent system. We can't communicate with it; it has no centralized brain; and it has no parents. Nonetheless, Mr. Kelly has assembled some interesting lines of inquiry that speak to the question. For one thing, how does invention actually come about? Mr. Kelly points to numerous cases where similar theories and technologies were simultaneously invented completely independently of one another and, in some cases, invented repeatedly before they gained widespread acceptance. Could it be that technology can will itself into existence and that its human inventors were merely discoverers of the inevitable? If that hasn't shaken your faith in the universe, try this. Mr. Kelly claims that an exhaustive search through every kind of technology ever invented has unearthed the startling conclusion that, of all the thousands of devices we have created in the span of human history, only one or two are no longer in circulation. Items as aged as a flint knife, as obscure as an arowhead, are still in circulation. More than that, the knowledge of how to make them is readily available, enough that exact replicas are produced for retail on various websites. And one cannot even make the case that all these thousands of technologies still have utility. After all, a gun is far more useful than an arrowhead for hunting. And yet people still make arrowheads. What other explanation satisfies than the will of an emergent system?
Typically, I am harsh with authors who make inductive leaps on the basis of shaky and unprovable theories, but the sheer audacity of Mr. Kelly's argument has, if not won me over, made me question my assumptions about the world around me. In making his case, Mr. Kelly discusses the approaches various human cultures have taken towards technology, spending considerable time with the Amish who appear to take the most cautious approach to technological advancement. This leads us to perhaps the most fascinating part of this book, a discussion of the Unabomber, his fears of technological dependence and the role those fears played in his crimes.
This is highly compelling work and will take some time for me to digest. (4/5 stars)
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