Technologys epic story Kevin Kelly
and I want to talk about my
investigations into what technology
means in our lives not just our
immediate life but in the cosmic sense
in a kind of a long history of the world
and and our place in the world what is
this stuff what what is the significance
and so I want to kind of go through my
little story of what I found out and one
of the first things I started to
investigate was the history of the name
of technology and in the United States
there’s a State of the Union address
given by every presidents that since
1790 and each one of those is really
kind of summing up the most important
things for the United States at that
time if you search for the word
technology it was not used until 1952 so
technology was sort of absent from
everybody thinking until 1952 which
happened to be the year of my birth and
obviously technology had existed before
then but we weren’t aware of it and so
it was sort of awakening of this force
in our life I actually did research to
fire at the first use of the word
technology that was in 1829 and it was
invented by a guy who was starting a
curriculum a course that bring together
all the kinds of arts and crafts and
industry and he called it technology and
that’s the very first use of the word so
what is this stuff that we’re all
consumed by and bothered by Allen K
calls that technology is anything that
was invented after you were born which
is sort of the idea that we normally
have about what technology is it’s all
that’s new stuff it’s not roads or
penicillin or factory tires it’s it’s
the new stuff my friend Danny Hillis has
a kind of a similar one this
technologies anything doesn’t work yet
which is again a sense that it’s all new
but we know that it’s just not new it’s
it actually goes way back and what I
want to suggest is it goes long way back
so another way to think about technology
what it means is to imagine a world
without technology if we were to
eliminate everyone
a single bit of technology in the world
today and I mean everything from blades
to scrapers to cloth we as a species
would not live very long we would die by
the billions and very quickly the Wolves
would get us we would be defenseless we
would be unable to grow enough food or
find enough food
even the hunter-gatherers use some
elementary tools and so with the minimal
technology but they have some technology
and those if we study those
hunter-gatherer tribes and lean and D
and earth all which are very similar to
early man we find out a very curious
thing about this world without
technology and this is a kind of a curve
of their average age there are no
Neanderthal fossils that are older than
40 years old that we’ve ever found so
and the average age of most of these
hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30 there
are very few young infants because they
die a high mortality rate and there’s
very few old people so the profile of
Servier your average San Francisco
neighborhood a lot of young people if
you go there you say hey everybody’s
really healthy that’s because they’re
all young the same thing is with the
hunter-gatherer tribes and early manners
is is that you didn’t live beyond the
age of 30 so it was a world without
grandparents and grandparents are very
important because they are the
transmitter of cultural evolution and
information imagine a world and
basically everybody was 20 to 30 years
old how much learning can you do you
can’t do very much learning in your own
life it’s so short and there’s nobody to
pass on what you do learn so that’s one
aspect it was a very short life but the
same time anthropologists know that most
hunter-gatherer tribes of the world
without very little technology actually
did not spend very long time gathering
the food that they needed three to six
hours a day some anthropologists calls
that the original affluent society
because they’d banker hours basically so
it was possible to to to get enough food
but when the scarcity came when the
highs and lows and the droughts came
then people went into starvation and
that’s why they didn’t live very long
so what technology brought through the
very simple tools like these stone tools
here Eve
something as small as this the early
bands of humans were actually able to
eliminate to extinction about 250
megafauna animals in North America when
they first arrived ten thousand years
ago so long before Industrial Age we’ve
been affecting the planet on a global
scale with just a small amount of
technology the other thing that the
early man then it was fire and fire was
used to clear out and again it affected
the ecology of grass and whole
continents and was used in cooking it
enabled us to actually eat all kinds of
things it was sort of in a certain sense
and McLuhan sense an external stomach in
a sense that it was cooking food that we
could not eat otherwise and if we don’t
have fire we actually could not live our
bites have adapted to these new diets
our bites have changed in the last
10,000 years so what’s that little bit
of technology humans went from a small
band of 10,000 or so the same numbers
and Neanderthals everywhere and we
suddenly exploded the invention of
language around 50,000 years ago the
number of humans exploded and very
quickly became the dominant species on
the planet and they migrated into the
rest of the world at two kilometers per
year until within several tens of
thousands of years we occupied every
single watershed on the planet and
became the most dominant species with a
very small amount of technology and even
at that time with the introduction of
Agriculture 8,000 10,000 years ago we
start to see climate change so climate
change is not a new thing what’s new is
just the degree it was even during the
agricultural age there was climate
change and so already small amounts of
technology were transforming the world
and what this means and where I’m going
is is that technology has become the
most powerful force in the world all the
things that we see today that are
changing our lives we can always trace
back to the introduction of some new
technology so it’s a force that is the
most powerful force that has been
unleashed on this planet and it’s such a
degree that I think that it’s become our
what who we are in fact our humanity and
everything that we think about ourselves
is something that we’ve invented so
we’ve invented ourselves of all the
animals that we
domesticated the most important animal
we’ve domesticated has been us
okay so humanity is our greatest
invention but of course we’re not done
yet we’re still inventing and this is
what technology is allowing us to do
it’s a continually to reinvent ourselves
it’s a very very strong force I call
this entire thing us humans as our
technology everything that we’ve made
gadgets in our lives we call that the
Technium that’s this world ID networking
definition of technologies anything that
useful that a human mind makes it’s not
just hammers and gadgets like laptops
but it’s also law and of course cities
are ways to make things more useful to
us while it’s something that comes from
our mind it’s also has his roots deeply
into the cosmos it goes back the origins
and roots of technology go back to the
Big Bang in this way in that they are
part of this self-organizing thread that
starts at the Big Bang and goes through
galaxies and stars into life and to us
and the three major phases of the early
universe was energy when the dominant
force was energy then it became the
dominant force as it cooled became
matter and then with vention of life
four billion years ago the dominant
force in our neighborhood became
information that’s what life is this
information process that was
restructuring and making new order so
those energy matter einstein showed were
equivalent and now the new sciences of
quantum computing show that entropy and
information and matter and energy are
all interrelated so it’s one long
continuum you put energy into of the
right kind of system and outcomes wasted
heat entropy and extra troubie which is
order it’s it’s the increasing order so
where does this order come from its
roots go way back we actually don’t know
but we do know that this
self-organization trend throughout the
universe is long and it began with
things like galaxies they maintained
their order for billions of years
SARS are basically nuclear fission
machines that self organize and self
sustain themselves for billions of years
this order against the extra P of the
world and flowers and plants are the
same thing
extended and technology is basically an
extension of life so one trend that we
notice in all those things is that the
amount of energy per gram per second
that flows to this is actually
increasing the amount of energy is
increasing through this little sequence
and that the amount of energy per gram
per second that flows through life is
actually greater than a star because of
the star’s long length a long lifespan
the energy density in life is actually
higher than a star and the energy
density that we’ve seen the greatest if
anywhere in the universe is actually in
a PC chip there’s more energy flowing
through per gram per second than
anything that we have any other
experience with and so what I would
suggest is that if you want to see where
technology is going we continue that
trajectory and we say that what’s going
to become more energy dense that’s where
it’s going and so what I’ve done is I’ve
taken the same kinds of things and
looked at other aspects of evolutionary
life and say what are the general trends
in evolutionary life and there are
things moving towards greater complexity
moving towards greater diversity moving
towards greater specialization set
tudents
ubiquity and most important evolvability
those very same things are also present
in technology that’s where technology is
going in fact technology is accelerating
all the aspects of life we can see that
happening just as there’s diversity in
life there’s more diversity in things we
make things in life start off being
general cell and they become specialized
of tissue cells your muscle brain cells
and same thing happens with say hammer
which is general first and becomes more
specific so I would like to say that
while there’s six kingdoms of life we
can think of technology basically as a
seventh kingdom of life it’s the
granting off from the human form but
technology has its own agenda like
anything like life itself for instance
right now three-quarters of the energy
that we use is actually used to feed the
Technium itself in transportation it’s
not to move us is to move the stuff that
we make or buy I use the word want
technology once this is a robot that
wants to plug itself in to get more
power your cat wants more food
a bacterium which has no consciousness
at all wants to move towards light if
urge and technology has an urge at the
same time he wants to give us things and
what it gives us is basically progress
you can take all kinds of curves and
they’re all pointing up there’s really
no dispute about progress if we discount
the cost of that and that’s the thing
that bothers most people is that
progress is really real but we wonder in
question whether the environmental cost
of it I did a survey the number of
species of artifacts in my house and
there’s 6,000 other people have come up
with 10,000 when King Henry of England
died he had 18,000 things in his house
but that was entire wealth of England so
and with that entire wealth of England
King Henry could not buy any antibiotics
he could not buy refrigeration he could
not buy a trip of a thousand miles
whereas this rickshaw wallah in India
could save up and buy antibiotics and he
could buy refrigeration he could buy
things that King Henry in his all’s well
that’s what progress is about so
technology’s selfish technology’s
generous that conflict that tension will
be with us forever that sometimes he
wants to do what it wants to do and
sometimes it going to do things for us
we have confusion about what we should
think about a new technology right now
the default position about when a new
technology comes along as we people talk
about the precautionary principle which
is very common in Europe which says
basically don’t do anything when you
mean a new technology stop until it can
be proven that does no harm I think that
is really leads nowhere but a better way
is to what I call proaction Airi
principle which is you engage with
technology you try it out you obviously
do with the proaction area precautionary
principles suggest you try to anticipate
it but after anticipating it you
constantly assess it not just once but
eternally and when it diverts from what
you want we prioritize risk we evaluate
not just the new stuff but the old stuff
we fix it but most importantly we
relocated and what I mean by that is
that we find a new job for it nuclear
energy fission is really bad idea
bombs but it may be a pretty good idea
relocated into sustainable nuclear
energy for electricity instead of
burning coal when we have a bad idea the
response to a bad idea is not no ideas
it’s not to stop thinking the response
to a bad idea
I say tungsten light bulb is a better
idea
okay so better ideas is really always
the response to technology that we don’t
like is basically take better technology
and actually in a certain sense
technology is a kind of a a method for
generating better ideas if you can think
about it that way so maybe spraying DDT
on crops is a really bad idea but DDT
sprayed on local homes there’s nothing
better to eliminate malaria
besides insect DDT impregnated mosquito
nets
but that’s a really good idea that’s a
good job for technology so our job as
humans is her parent are our mind
children to find them good friends to
find them a good job and so every
technology is sort of a creative force
looking for the right job that’s
actually my son right here there are no
bad technologies just like there’s no
bad children children we don’t say
children are neutral children are
positive we just have to find them the
right place and so what technology gives
us over the long term over this sort of
extended evolution from the beginning of
time through the mention of of plants
and animals and evolution of life
evolution of brains what that is
constantly giving us is increasing
differences its increasing diversity its
increasing options its increasing
choices opportunities possibilities and
freedoms that’s what we get from
technology all the time that’s why
people leave villages and go into cities
because they are always gravitating
towards increased choices and
possibilities and they are and we are
aware of the price we pay a price for
that but we are aware of it and
generally we will pay the price for
increased freedoms choices and
opportunities even technology wants
clean water it’s technology
diametrically opposed to nature because
technology is an extension of life it’s
parallel and aligned with the same
things that life wants so that I think
technology loves biology if we allow it
to great movement that is starting
billions of years ago it’s moving
through us and it continues to go and
our choice so to speak
in technology is really to align
ourselves with this force much greater
than ourselves so technology is more
than just a stuff in your pocket it’s
more than just gadgets it’s more than
just things that people invent it’s
actually part of a very long story
a great story that began billions of
years ago it’s moving through us is
self-organization and we’re extending
and accelerating it and we can be part
of it by lining the technology that we
make with it and I really appreciate
your attention today thank you