Every new invention creates almost as many problems as solutions, such that most problems we face today are 'techno-genic' — caused by previous technologies — and future problems will largely be caused by the technologies we are inventing today to cure past technological problems.

The Technium has developmental stages like an organism: the dirty, selfish, self-centered technologies of the Industrial Age were like the 'terrible twos,' while complex communication technologies like the Internet reveal a more mature, organic, biophilic facet, which is the direction the Technium is drifting and which we can help accelerate.

Like convergent evolution in biology, technological evolution is channeled through bottlenecks shaped by positive and negative constraints, so the large macro-forms of technology are inevitable (the Internet would arise) while the specific expression or 'speciation' (open vs closed, commercial vs nonprofit) is unpredictable and dependent on human choice and genius.

People migrate from romantic rural villages to miserable, foul-smelling cities because cities offer more degrees of freedom — chances to educate their kids, get medicine, and do something other than subsistence farming — demonstrating that what people value is increasing choices and possibilities, the opposite of the self-sufficient shack life.

Technology should be understood not as a series of separate gadgets but as a single interconnected system (the Technium) because any single device depends on thousands of other technologies, much as an orchid depends on a whole rainforest ecosystem.

Techno-literacy — mastering how the Technium works as a system rather than individual gadgets — is an essential skill, including practices like taking sabbaticals and jubilees and maintaining a 'permanent newbie' mind, and its core is upping our ability to say no.

The Technium possesses an emerging 'sliver' of autonomy that increases over time, evidenced by systems that self-repair, self-direct traffic (the Internet), and self-identify intruders (immune systems against spam), though it is not fully independent of humans.

Many smartphone-sized devices today are the same size as the ancient stone axe, which was made by one person, but require thousands of supporting technologies to exist.

Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty.

We are more willing to accept emergent behavior in nature than in our own artificial systems, because having made these things we project our own intentional design onto them and fail to realize they can exhibit emergent behaviors not put into them by any individual.

Any sufficiently complex system exhibits emergent behavior at the system level that is not present in any of its parts (a beehive has hive behavior found in no bee), and such systems exhibit inherent biases or 'leanings' that are independent of the behavior of the individual parts — this is what Kelly means when he says the Technium 'wants.'

Humans are part of the Technium not only because we are its reproductive organs (it cannot reproduce without us yet) but because we have engineered our own biology: inventing cooking gave us an 'external stomach' that changed our teeth, jaw, and enzymes, making us biologically dependent on cooking and effectively the first domesticated animal.

Technology is not neutral: inventing a tool like a hammer creates a brand-new choice that did not exist before, and that new choice is itself a tiny new good that moves the balance very slightly toward good — and that fractional surplus, compounded over time, is precisely what we call progress.

A technology is not truly powerful and revolutionary unless it can be powerfully abused; the Internet's full destructive potential has not yet been seen, with distraction being a more significant abuse than crime.

Technologies almost never go globally extinct (unlike biological species); old technologies are still being manufactured brand new today — flint axes, steam-car valves, and every farm implement in the 1898 Montgomery Ward catalog — because technologies are idea-based and can be easily resurrected.

Because technologies essentially never go extinct, attempts to prohibit or eliminate harmful technologies are doomed; the proper response is not to get rid of them but to do something else with them.

Technology generally adds options rather than replacing them; most technology around us is ancient and persistent (concrete, fired brick), so the Technium operates like an ecology that infills new species while old ones are usually supplemented rather than displaced.

Taking a regular Sabbath from technology is healthy for non-religious reasons because, like resting from work, it is not a declaration that the activity is bad but a recognition that it is so good you need rest from it — yielding greater attentiveness to family during the disconnected period.

We are attracted to simpler technologies because they do not challenge our identity, whereas every new technology — from robots to gene therapy to social media — nibbles away at our sense of self and forces us to keep re-deciding what a human is, which is scarier but ultimately more attractive to most people than the fixed identity offered by the Amish-like path.

The Amish are not anti-technology but highly selective adopters who reject some technologies (cars) while embracing others (disposable diapers, chemical fertilizer, genetically modified crops); their refusal of labor-saving devices buys them leisure, strong identity, and community, but at the cost of self-sufficiency and of eliminating the range of life choices available to their members.