What Technology Wants (41 page)

On the other hand, the acceleration of the technium could speed up complexity so that even the technological equivalent of bacteria evolve. That's scenario #3, where the entire technosphere zooms away in complexity. Stranger things have happened.

In any of the scenarios, there is no limit to the most complex things we will make. We'll dazzle ourselves with new complexity in many directions. This will complexify our lives further, but we'll adapt to it. There is no going back. We'll hide this complexity with beautiful “simple” interfaces, as elegant as the round ball of an orange. But behind this membrane our stuff will be more complex than the cells and biochemistry of an orange. To keep up with this complexification, our language, tax codes, government bureaucracies, news media, and daily lives will all become more complex as well.

It's a trend we can count on. The long arc of complexity began before evolution, worked through the four billion years of life, and now continues through the technium.

The diversity of the universe has been increasing since the beginning of time. In its very first seconds the universe contained only quarks, which began to assemble into a variety of subatomic particles within minutes. By the end of the first hour, the universe contained dozens of types of particles but only two elements, hydrogen and helium. Over the next 300 million years, drifting hydrogen and helium bound themselves together into masses of growing nebulae that eventually collapsed into fiery stars. Star fusion built up dozens of new heavier elements, so the diversity of the chemical universe increased. Eventually, some “metallic” stars exploded into supernovae, spewing their heavy elements into space to be swept up again over millions of years into new stars. In a kind of pumping action, these second- and third-round star furnaces added yet more neutrons to metallic elements to create more varieties of heavy metals until all 100 or so varieties of stable elements were created. The increasing diversity of elements and particles also created an increasing variety of star species, galaxy types, and kinds of orbiting planets. On planets with active tectonic crusts, new kinds of minerals increased in time, as geologic forces reworked and rearranged the elements into new crystals and rocks. The diversity of crystallized minerals on Earth, for instance, increased threefold with the advent of bacterial life. Some geologists believe biochemical processes, and not geological alone, are responsible for the bulk of the 4,300 mineral species we find today.

The invention of life greatly accelerated the diversity in the universe. From a very few species 4 billion years ago, the number and variety of living species on Earth has increased dramatically over geological time to the 30 million now present. This rise has been uneven in several ways. At certain times in Earth's history large-scale cosmological disruptions (such as asteroid hits) have wiped out gains in diversity. And in specific branches of life, diversity sometimes did not advance very much, or even retreated temporarily. But overall, in life as a whole over geologic time, diversity has widened. In fact, life's diversity of taxonomic forms has doubled since the dinosaurian era, only 200 million years ago. The growth of biological differences, as a whole, is expanding exponentially, and this rocketing increase can be seen in vertebrates, plants, and insects.

Total Diversity of Life.
The increasing diversity of species on Earth, as measured by the number of taxonomic families over the last 600 million years.

The trend toward diversity is further accelerated by the technium. The number of species of technology invented every year is increasing at an increasing rate. It's difficult to precisely count the varieties of technological invention because innovations don't have the defined borders of breeding that most living organisms do. We might count ideas, which underlie each invention. Each scientific article represents at least one new idea. The number of journal articles has exploded in the last 50 years. Each patent is also a species of idea. At last count there were 7 million patents issued in the United States alone, and their total has been increasing exponentially as well.

Total Patent Applications and Scientific Articles.
The number of patent applications at the U.S. Patent Office and the worldwide publication of scientific articles follow nearly the same curve of exponential growth.

Everywhere we look in the technium we see increased diversity. Manufactured species of underwater organisms, such as 70-foot-long submarines, parallel living organisms, such as a blue whale. Airplanes mimic birds. Our houses are but better nests. But the technium explores niches that the born never ventured into. We know of no living organism using radio waves, yet the technium has produced hundreds of varieties of radio-communicating species. While moles have been digging up Earth for millions of years, two-story tunnel-digging contraptions are so much larger, faster, and less daunted by solid rock than anything born, that we can truly say these synthetic moles occupy a new niche on Earth. X-ray machines have a type of sight unknown among the living. And there is simply no biological analog to an Etch A Sketch, a glow-in-the-dark digital watch, or a space shuttle, to name a few examples. Increasingly, the diversity of the technium has no counterpart in biological evolution, so the technium has truly increased diversity.

The diversity of the technium has already surpassed our skills of recognition. There are so many varieties of things that one individual can't name them. Cognitive researchers have discovered there are about 3,000 easily recognizable noun categories in modern life. This total includes manufactured objects and living organisms, for example, elephant, airplane, palm tree, telephone, chair. These are things that are readily discernable in a flash without thinking. Researchers came up with the estimate of 3,000 categories based on several clues: the number of nouns listed in dictionaries; how many objects are found in the vocabulary of an average six-year-old child; and the number of objects that a primitive artificial learning machine can recognize. They estimated there are, on average, 10 named varieties for each noun category. Ten kinds of chairs, 10 kinds of fish, 10 kinds of phones, 10 kinds of beds that ordinary people might describe. That gives a rough estimate of 30,000 objects in most people's lives, or at least 30,000 that they would recognize. Even when we name a form, most of the variety of life and the technium goes by us without a specific name. We may recognize a bird, but not which species of bird. We know a grass, but not which grass. We know it is a cell phone, but not what model. When pressed we can discern a chef's knife from a Swiss Army knife from a spear point, but we may or may not be able to distinguish a fuel pump from a water pump.

There are branches of the technium where the diversity of technological species is dwindling; today there are fewer innovations in spark catchers, buggy whips, handlooms, and oxcarts. I doubt anyone has invented a new manual butter churn in the last 50 years (although many people are still inventing “better” mousetraps). Handlooms will always be around for art. Oxcarts are not extinct and will probably never go extinct globally as long as oxen are born. But because oxcarts encounter no new demands, they are remarkably stable inventions, continuing over time unchanged, like horseshoe crabs. Most artifacts hovering near obsolescence show a similar constancy. But technological backwaters like these are overwhelmed by the mind-numbing avalanche of innovation, ideas, and artifacts throughout the rest of the expanding technium.

The online retailer Zappos carries 90,000 different varieties of shoes. One hardware wholesaler in the United States, McMaster-Carr, lists over 480,000 products in its catalog. There you can find 2,432 varieties of wood screws alone (yes, I added them up). Amazon carries 85,000 different cell phones and cell-phone products. So far humans have created 500,000 different movies and about one million TV episodes. At least 11 million different songs have been recorded. Chemists have cataloged 50 million different chemicals. Historian David Nye reports, “In 2004, the Ford F-150 pickup truck was available in 78 different configurations that included variations in the cab, the bed, the engine, the drive train, and the trim as well as in the colors of the upholstery and the exterior paint. And once a vehicle was purchased, the owner could customize it further to the point that it literally was one of a kind.” If the current rates of inventiveness continue, in 2060 there will be 1.1 billion unique songs and 12 billion different kinds of products for sale.

A few iconoclasts believe this ultradiversity is toxic to humans. In
The Paradox of Choice,
psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that the 285 varieties of cookies, 175 kinds of salad dressing, and 85 brands of crackers for sale in the typical supermarket today are paralyzing consumers. Shoppers enter the store looking for crackers, see a bewildering wall of cracker choices, become overwhelmed with trying to make an informed decision, and finally walk out not purchasing any crackers at all. “Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice,” says Schwartz. Similarly, in trying to choose a medical-benefits plan with hundreds of options, many consumers give up because the complexity of choice is mind numbing and instead withdraw from the program, whereas programs that included a default choice (no decision necessary) had much higher enrollments. Schwartz concludes: “As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

It is true that too many choices may induce regret, but “no choice” is a far worse option. Civilization is a steady migration away from “no choice.” As always, the solution to the problems that technology brings, such as an overwhelming diversity of choices, is better technologies. The solution to ultradiversity will be choice-assist technologies. These better tools will aid humans in making choices among bewildering options. That is what search engines, recommendation systems, tagging, and a lot of social media are all about. Diversity, in fact, will produce tools to handle diversity. (Diversity-taming tools will be among the wildly diversity-making 821 million patents that current rates predict will have been filed in the U.S. Patent Office by 2060!) We are already discovering how to use computers to augment our choices with information and web pages (Google is one such tool), but it will take additional learning and technologies to do this with tangible stuff and idiosyncratic media. At the dawn of the web, some very smart computer scientists declared that it would be impossible to select from a billion web pages using a keyword search, but we routinely do just that on 100 billion web pages today. No one is asking for fewer web pages.

Not too long ago the stereotypical image of a technological future was one of standard products, worldwide sameness, and unwavering uniformity. Yet paradoxically, diversity can be unleashed by a type of uniformity. The uniformity of a standard writing system (like an alphabet or script) unleashes the unexpected diversity of literature. Without uniform rules, every word has to be made up, so communication is localized, inefficient, and thwarted. But with a uniform language, sufficient communication transpires in large circles so that a novel word, phrase, or idea can be appreciated, caught, and disseminated. The rigidity of an alphabet has done more to enable creativity than any unhinged brain-storming exercise ever invented.

The standard 26 letters in English have produced 16 million different books in English. Words and language will keep evolving, of course, but their evolution rides on basic fundamentals that are conserved and shared; unvarying (over the short term) letters, spelling, and grammar rules enable creativity in ideas. Increasingly, the technium will converge upon a few universal standards—perhaps basic English, modern musical notation, the metric system (except in the United States!), and mathematical symbols, but also widely adopted technical protocols, from the metric system to ASCII and Unicode. The infrastructure of the world today is built upon a shared system woven from these kinds of standards. That is why you can order machine parts in China to be used in factories in South Africa or have research done in India for drugs released in Brazil. This convergence of fundamental protocols is also why the youth of today can speak to one another directly in a way not possible even a decade ago. They use cell phones and netbooks running common operating systems, but they also employ standard abbreviations and increasingly share common cultural touchstones by watching the same movies, listening to the same music, studying the same subjects and textbooks in school, and pocketing the same technology. In a curious way, the homogenization of shared universals allows them to transmit the diversity of cultures.