Kevin Kelly What Technology Wants Last Class Kevin Kelly What Technology Wants

Amish Ordnung Farm with horses, not with power machinery in the field. No rubber tires on implements or buggies. No unnecessary lights on buggies except what is for safety. No bulk tanks or milkers. No one shall operate cars or trucks. No electrical generators except for welding. No lightning rods. No sinks or colored tub in the bathroom. The young people shall not run after pleasure places, have a radio or TV, or watch movies. No wrist watches, bicycles, no drinking or tobacco.

Luddites Luddites – destroyed looms to protect jobs 1811 -1812 England Societies have banned certain technologies throughout history – from Gunpowder to Facebook

Frank Herbert’s Dune Novels Mentats Spice Navigators

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. Industrialization of life is bad.

What If An Anti-Digital Movement Formed? The Digants What would they keep?

Technium “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” “The seventh kingdom of life”

Two Opposing Forces Entropy – “is the crisp scientific name for waste, chaos, and disorder – everything is headed toward maximum entropy” Exotropy – “another word for the technical term negentropy, or negative entropy. Exotropy can be thought of as a force in its own right that flings forward an unbroken sequence of unlikely existences. “

What Technology Wants Increasing efficiency Increasing opportunity Increasing emergence Increasing complexity Increasing diversity Increasing specialization Increasing ubiquity Increasing freedom Increasing mutualism Increasing beauty Increasing sentience Increasing structure Increasing evolvability

Technology’s costs vs. its benefits

Infinite Games

“The technium expands life’s fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands life’s fundamental goodness. Life’s increasing diversity, its reach for sentience, its long-term move from the general to the different, its essential (and paradoxical) ability to generate new versions of itself, and its constant play in an infinite game are the very traits and “wants” of the technium.

Technium creates opportunities for creative achievements – Mozart, Van Gogh, etc Technium creates opportunities for creating new technology

Will the time come that technology controls our lives and we cannot shut it down?

The Unabomber “But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. . . . Technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human behavior. “

Your Choices How will you choose to use technology?

Final Exam 75 points Rather Than 50 10 Multiple Choice Terminology Questions Each Worth One Point Remaining Questions Are Short Answer – Explaining Concepts Applying Concepts Contrasting Concepts