Kevin Kelly on Technology and What Technology Wants 11/29/2010
What this covers
Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, joins Russ Roberts for a wide-ranging conversation about technology as an evolving system rather than a collection of separate tools. Kelly argues that the Technium — technology viewed as an interconnected whole — operates like a self-organizing extension of biological evolution, exhibiting emergent behavior and inherent biases independent of any single inventor's intent. The conversation traces how this framing reshapes familiar debates: whether technology creates more good than harm, whether key inventions are inevitable or contingent on human choice, and what it means to say technology "wants" anything at all.
The discussion moves across several territories where Kelly's framework generates unexpected claims. He contends that progress stems not from rejecting technology but from grasping its biases well enough to steer the fraction of outcomes we actually control — and that attempts to eliminate harmful technologies fail because, as idea-based systems, they never truly disappear. He examines the Unabomber's critique of the Technium's autonomy, finding it partly right but wrong in its conclusion about human freedom. The conversation also covers why simultaneous independent invention is common, why the Amish are selective rather than categorical in their adoption of tools, and whether a plausible weak form of singularity might look less like machine takeover and more like permanent human-technology entanglement. Throughout, Kelly and Roberts test whether small net positive gains from individual innovations, compounded over time, truly constitute progress, or whether this logic masks real costs that remain unaccounted for.
Kelly argues that technology, taken as an interconnected system he calls the Technium, is a self-organizing extension of biological evolution with its own emergent tendencies ('wants'), so progress comes not from rejecting technology but from understanding its biases to steer the small fraction we can.
- The Technium is a system that exhibits emergent behavior and biases not present in its individual parts, paralleling biological evolution.
- Technologies expand choices and compound a small net positive of good over harm into what we call progress.
- Many inventions are inevitable when precursor technologies exist, but their specific expression depends on human choice.
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Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty.
“self-sufficiency as the road to poverty is I like to say”
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.'
“you have a system like a bee hive the hive itself has hive behavior and that hive behavior cannot be found in any of the bees and the Technium behavior cannot be found in the iphone”
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.
“when you invent a hammer you suddenly invent a brand new choice that didn't exist before ... and that choice which design exists before is in itself a good a new good a tiny new good and tiny no-good moves the balance slightly very very slightly in favor of the good”
The Kurzweilian singularity scenario — where machines recursively make ever-smarter machines until an intelligence solves all problems including mortality — is implausible because it rests on 'thinkism,' the erroneous belief that thinking alone (without empirical data and experiment) can solve problems, and it functions as a new religion promising a rapture and resurrection of ancestors.
“this idea that just thinking about things will solve problems is completely erroneous ... this an extreme case of think ism”
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.
“our invention of cooking which is a way to have an external stomach to digest foods that we would not ordinarily have been able to do biologically and that additional nutrition that we gained actually changed the size of our teeth and the shape of our jaw and the enzymes we have in our body”
In the face of price controls, sellers can degrade product quality to effectively evade the control and actually gain customers, whereas in an unconstrained market degrading quality would lose customers.
“in the face of a price control he can gain customers by doing that because he can effectively evade the price control”
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.
“they're making flint axes exactly the same way it was using exactly the same tools to the point where they're almost indistinguishable from the original archaeological artifacts they're making them in huge numbers today”
Simultaneous independent invention is the norm: nearly every invention was discovered at roughly the same time by multiple people working independently, because when all the supporting precursor technologies are in place the next adjacent invention becomes almost inevitable — the existence of the Patent Office is evidence of this.
“independent simultaneous invention of of inventions is the norm that is normal and we have an intuitive sense of that because that's what the Patent Office is sort of all about”
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.
“most of the problems we have in our lives today are techno genic they're actually created by previous technologies”
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.
“while the internet might have been inevitable the the expression a particular expression of the internet was not whether it was going to be open or closed institutional or transnational”
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.
“the thing you have in your pocket requires maybe a thousand other technologies to create it and maintain it make it operate in each of those intermediate ones might depend on hundreds of thousands of others”
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.
“we have systems that can repair themselves their self repairing and we have systems that like the Internet they can actually self-direct their traffic and we have we have immune systems on the internet”
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.
“a technology is really not powerful and revolutionary unless it is sort of revolutionary and can be powerfully abused”
There is not a single technology that we cannot or have not been able to invent a greener version of, which suggests the Technium — as an extension of evolutionary force — is not inherently anti-life but is inherently compatible with life, so the answer to a bad technology is better technology, not less technology.
“there's not a single technology that we prevented that we cannot or have not been able to invent a more greener version of”
The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) was right about one big thing — that the Technium is a cohesive, interdependent system with its own agenda that you cannot escape because even fighting it requires using technology — but wrong in concluding this agenda robs people of freedom; in reality the Technium increases choices, possibilities, and freedom.
“he saw very clearly that the Technium was a system that had its own agenda ... he had actually the best explanation about the reality of this Technium”
A plausible 'weak' version of the singularity is a phase change: the speed, acceleration, and ubiquity of machine intelligence could create something as hard for us to envision as language was for pre-language protohumans, but more likely than machine takeover is a symbiotic/cyborg outcome where human and Technium influence remain permanently entangled, like our unresolvable nature-nurture mix.
“it could be very very difficult to imagine what would happen on the other side and and I think that's that to me is a plausible scenario”
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.
“they have at least a chance to have their kids educated they have at least a chance of getting medicine if they needed it because they have at least a chance of doing something different than hoeing potatoes”
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.
“when it comes to kind of our own artificial systems we're very seem to be reluctant to accept emergent behavior there because because we've made these things and so we we kind to kind of project our own making on that”
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.
“attempt to prohibit technology are just doomed because it's really really really hard to eliminate things once they're invented I mean we can't even do it deliberately”
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.
“generally it adds options rather than just replaces them ... most often they're just supplemented and that is actually more the pattern the Technium”
Keeping the Jewish Sabbath means stepping off the grid from Friday sunset to Saturday dark, and people without a religious framework find it very hard to voluntarily disconnect from technology even though they admire the practice.
“I keep the Jewish Sabbath which means I'm sort of roughly about 15% Amish I step off the grid from sunset on Friday”
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.
“they are really into genetically modified crops so that that mix does not seem to make sense at first but what I'm mostly trying to suggest is that they are very selective and what they adopt”
We overvalue inventors and undervalue implementers: because the general idea is inevitable and held by thousands, the real difficult value lies in the more specific, less inevitable work of translating an idea into a market-ready expression — paralleling how great books often have nothing new to say but package ideas so people can absorb them, and how copyright protects expression not ideas.
“the more general the idea is the more people will have it and as it as it becomes more articulated and more specific down to the market to be implemented ... it is less inevitable”
Because we are self-created, we are both the creator and the created, both master and slave of technology, so a permanent duality and tension is baked into our relationship with the Technium that cannot be eliminated, only better managed.
“when you're self created you're both the Creator and they created you're both the master and the slave and I think that duality is going to be present that tension is going to be present”
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.
“what we need to master without the individual technologies but detecting them itself and how the Technium works”
Our ability to steer the Technium may be limited, so to maximize whatever steering ability we have we must understand what the technology wants and where we lack control; assuming we are fully in control (denying autonomy) is a recipe for being blindsided.
“we certainly have to understand what it wants in order to be able to exert whatever we want where we want it”
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.
“some of the technologies of the Industrial Age were kind of like our terrible teas and humans it was their kind of selfish grimy dirty self-centered”
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.
“it's actually because work is so good that you want the Sabbath from it”
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.
“all these new things are real challenge to our identity the Amish don't have that because they're not kind of engages that things that challenge our identity are one of the things that they keep out”
Adam Ferguson, a predecessor of Adam Smith writing around 1750, observed that there are things that are the product of human action but not of human design.
“Adam Ferguson a predecessor of Smith around 1750 or so ... he said there are things that are the product of human action but not human design”
Technology has produced dramatic, measurable progress including expanded lifespan, declining infant mortality, declining maternal mortality, and health benefits such as artificial knees that let a 75-year-old play tennis.
“lifespan is a expansional lifespan is a decline in infant mortality the decline in maternal mortality ... playing tennis on an artificial knee”
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.
“it may only be the same size of the stone ax of long ago which was made by one person”