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What Technology Wants
What Technology Wants
What Technology Wants
Audiobook15 hours

What Technology Wants

Written by Kevin Kelly

Narrated by Paul Boehmer

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.

This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of proaction and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.

Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 20, 2010
ISBN9781400188857
What Technology Wants
Author

Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly lives in Central New York with his wife, Rebecca, their two kids and a shaggy black dog. Kevin owns a small graphic design shop with a variety of interesting clients, and when he’s not hard at work, he’s usually busy figuring out how to finish one of Rebecca’s famously convoluted projects. Kevin and family spend their free time playing, hiking and vacationing off-the-grid in Coastal Maine—and napping.

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Reviews for What Technology Wants

Rating: 3.726495851282051 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

117 ratings11 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    eye opener!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The basic argument of this book is that technology and the technium have a mind of their own. In many ways we cannot stop the technology from advancing, and we shouldn't because it increases our options. The only thing I didn't like is that he is often streatching the truth. For example he claims that evolution is directional, and that more complex creatures are almost inevitable. I find that hard to believe based on the evidence he provided.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "What Technology Wants" posits that technology, as a whole, as a complex ecosystem, can be considered the seventh kingdom of life. Kelly manages to back this far-fetched claim with prescient examples from history, biology and social science while making astute observations about technology's continuing evolution.The book reads like a long, well-articulated manifesto, which is also its weak point. I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, the buildup to Kelly's main argument and being exposed to a fresh perspective. However, my interest waned during the second half, partially because I was already sold on the main idea and partially because Kelly launches into a series of abstract forecasts. Despite this ebb in momentum, the book is packed throughout with some of the best observations and insights about the nature of technology I've ever read.Excuse the pun.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Was a bit disappointed in this book since Kevin Kelly is one of my favorite authors, going back to "Out of Control". Felt like there were some interesting thoughts and even some insights here, but it felt mostly like speculation. For my tastes, there wasn't enough science to back up those speculations.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I ended up liking this book a lot more that I expected to.

    The first half of the book is dedicated to setting forward an argument that I find interesting, but Kelly isn't the person who can make it convincing. It would have come off much, much better as a thought-experiment instead of a direct assertion.

    Kelly argues that human biological evolution is following a necessary path and that technological development (the technium, he calls it) is also following a necessary path. Technological determinism isn't a new idea, and Kelly's arguments make sense. However, there are a lot of really smart, really informed biologists and technology scholars who can dispute evolutionary determinism and technological determinism. I liked his arguments, but they aren't convincing.

    The beginning of the 2nd half is pure gold. His discussion of the Amish and their methods for choosing which technologies to adopt and which to reject is fascinating and very applicable to our situation today.

    The book closes w/ a techno-spiritual argument that was appealing, but not necessarily convincing. He makes a brief mention of process theology that i would have like to have read developed further. I'm glad I read this bit, but it moved away from the carefully structured evidence-based argument he had been developing into something more touchy-feelie. I'm not opposed to a little spirituality, but it felt out of place, especially since Kelly had been very disciplined and careful in structuring his argument up to that point.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book is full of big, exciting ideas. Maybe a little too big and too exciting. Kevin Kelly is obviously a smart and careful thinker, but he's dealing with multiple disciplines outside of his own, and his enthusiasm goes badly with his ignorance.Kelly argues, not altogether convincingly, against mainstream biological thinking. He glibly conflates technology with social structure and economics, which leads to some bizarre equivocations. He indulges in mystical thinking (despite his protests to the contrary). And he occasionally gets his facts wrong.All that said, I think Kelly's main thesis has some validity and I found the book thought-provoking. I would recommend it with a huge grain of salt.PS: Don't get the audio version. There's a lot of stuff you'll want to skim, especially if you don't need a Science 101 refresher. Also, the audio omits the endnotes.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Although I disagree with many of Kelly's points, my main reasons for giving this book only two stars are its length--was it really necessary to recap the history of the universe from the Big Bang?--and Kelly's almost tautological optimism about technology. He consistently dismisses or downplays criticisms and negative aspects of the evolution of technology, developing from his basic premise--that technology is a self-sustaining and somewhat autonomous system--the tautological proposition that all technology is good because it creates more choices for humans. Kelly asserts that all choices are good choices, equating the choice among 85 different kinds of crackers in the average American supermarket with a young person's choice of vocation, or the choice to use a weapons technology with the choice to use civil disobedience. In the real world, not all choices are morally equivalent or equally meaningful. Not recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    great chapters addressing some of the valid (yes, valid) and contradictory views of Ted Kacyzinski (the Unabomber) and the Amish attitude towards technology...which had me thinking that an Amish steampunk novel begs to be written...if it hasn't been written already. the rest of the book about what technology wants and our techno-fucked world gave me the shakes, made me feel old at 32, and reminded me what JG Ballard said about the future: it's going to be boring.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    in one word disappointing (or to be more fair, i probably expected something better). his argument is suffocated by the excessive amount of examples that he uses. also in my book adding example to example does not automatically lead to a valid theory. i guess that his original insight, that technology (or the technium) has certain characteristics that operate on its own behalf is a fairly important realisation. on the other hand i am not entirely convinced that the technium really operates on itself. to me it seems more like a higher level abstraction of human choices, mixed in with a bit of opaque interaction between algorithms (at least at this moment in time). also i am almost allergic to the cosmic arc pseudo religious undertone that he manages to keep from dominating his book until the completely unbearable last chapter (which should begin with a warning urging people who are allergic to new age hippie reasoning to stop reading)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not entirely convincing about technology wanting anything, but certainly food for though about technology going somewhere very stubbornly.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like Père Teilhard's 'The Phenomenon of Man', Kevin Kelly takes up the sweeping subject of cosmic evolution, both past and future, but this time specifically focusing on the part of the universe that has, in recent times, occupied the forefront of our zeitgeist, technology. Whenever approaching such an all-encompassing and far-reaching topic such as this, one must tread extremely carefully or else risk straying quickly into drivel-laden speculations. Teilhard's treatise is an example of this, as it was wrought with factual errors, anti-scientific biases, and tendencies towards mystical nonsense, and I cannot recommend enough the famous critical review of his book by the inimitable Sir Peter Medawar. Fortunately, though 'What Technology Wants' covers similar grounds, it does not deserve a similarly scathing response. Where Teilhard approached his subject from the perspective of theology, with all the dogmatic baggage one would expect from such a position, Kelly can be seen as a modern day shaman. As our ancestors saw spirits in the natural surroundings of their environment, Kelly, too, can be described as seeing analogous spirits animating the technological environment which we increasingly find ourselves in. Though these stories don't offer us the detail and rigor of a complete scientific explanation, they do give us what the stories of spirits gave our ancestors, a way to connect and live with and within our world. The majority of what Kelly describes as the 'Technium', his neologism for the sphere of technology which comprises all things that were 'made not born', should not bother even the most stringently and scientifically literal-minded among us. Most of what he writes consists of informed observations of trends and thoughtful extrapolations. There is, however, one contentious issue that plays a fundamental role in propping up the more conjectural of Kelly's disquisition, and that is the idea of what I'd call 'strong' convergent evolution. Roughly, because of the way the universe is structured and the way physical laws play out, there are certain inevitabilities which arise through the course of the cosmos' evolution. Most scientists are on board with a weak version of this, accepting that, for example, camera and compound eyes are bound to arise in similar environments to earth's eventually through natural selection, but Kelly ascribes to a much stronger version of this concept, believing that the infinite possible arrangements of how matter evolves are so constrained that biological life, and its offshoot, the technium, will bear strikingly similar forms to what we now see, even if we run back the history of the universe over and over again. This is the exact opposite of how Stephen J. Gould famously explained the process of evolution, and how most evolutionary biologists would describe the process today. I think there might be some room in orthodox evolutionary theory to allow for this, but it is certainly not the consensus, and so his musings of technological progress that are based on this 'strong' version of convergence is not as surefooted as his other ideas, though they may turn out to be prescient. That is the gamble one takes when you overreach with your imagination, but in this case Kelly still might beat the odds.