What Technology Wants (50 page)

At the start of life, natural selection operated on molecules, later on population of molecules, and eventually on cells and colonies of cells. Eventually, evolution selected organisms out of a population, favoring the most fit. So over biological aeons, the focus of evolution shifted upward to more complex structures. In other words, over time, the process of evolution became a conglomeration of many different forces working at many levels. By slow accumulation of tricks, the system of evolution acquired a diversity of ways to adapt and create. Imagine a shape-shifter that can change the areas in which it changes! Who could keep up with it? In this way evolution has gathered itself up and ceaselessly remakes itself over and over again.

But this description doesn't quite capture the full power of this trend. Yes, life has gained more ways to adapt, but what is really changing is its evolvability—its propensity and agility to create change. Think of this as changeability. Not only is the aggregate process of evolution evolving, but it is evolving more ability to evolve, or greater evolvability. Gaining evolvability is much like a video game where you find a door that opens up another whole level that is much more complex, faster, and full of unexpected powers.

A natural organism, such as a chicken, is the mechanism for its genes to propagate more genes. From the selfish genes' point of view, the greater the number of organisms (chickens) they can produce and keep alive, the more those genes can spread themselves. We can also view an ecosystem as the vehicle for evolution to propagate itself and grow. Without a cornucopia of diverse organisms, evolution cannot evolve more evolvability. So evolution generates complexity and diversity and millions of beings to give itself material and room to evolve into a more powerful evolver.

If we think of each living species as an answer to the question “How does something survive in this environment?,” then evolution is a formula that provides concrete answers that are embodied in matter and energy. We might say that evolution is a search method for living solutions; it searches by endlessly trying out possibilities until it finds a design that works.

Of all the tricks that evolution came up with to find solutions in its first four billion years, none compared to minds. Sentience—and not just human sentience—bestows on life a greatly accelerated way to learn and adapt. This should not be surprising, because minds are built to find answers, and one of the key things to answer might be how to learn better and more quickly in order to survive. If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. So the presence of sentience in life vastly increased its evolvability.

The most recent extension of this expansion of evolvability is technology. Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities and change the methods of searching for solutions. It is almost a cliche to point out that technology has brought as much change on this planet in the last 100 years as life has in the last billion years.

When we look at technology, we tend to see pipes and blinking lights. But in the long-term view, technology is simply the further evolution of evolution. The technium is a continuation of a four-billion-year-old force that pursues more ability to evolve. The technium has discovered entirely new forms in the universe, such as ball bearings, radios, and lasers, that organic evolution could never invent. Likewise, the technium has discovered wholly new ways to evolve, methods that were unreachable by biology. And just as evolution did with life, technological evolution uses its fecundity to evolve more widely and faster. The “selfish” technium generates millions of species of gadgets, techniques, products, and contraptions in order to give it sufficient material and room to keep evolving its power to evolve.

The evolution of evolution is change squared. There's a visceral sense now that changes are happening so fast in technology that we cannot possibly imagine what will happen in 30 years, let alone 100. The technium can feel like a black hole of uncertainty sometimes. But humanity has passed through several similar evolutionary transitions already.

The first, as I mentioned earlier, was the invention of language. Language shifted the burden of evolution in humans away from genetic inheritance (the only line of evolutionary learning for most other creatures) and allowed our language and culture to carry our species' aggregate learning as well. The second invention, writing, changed the speed of learning in humans by easing the transmission of ideas across territories and across time. Solutions could be archived and transmitted on durable paper. This vastly accelerated humanity's evolution.

The third transition is science, or rather, the structure of the scientific method. This is the invention that enables greater invention. Instead of depending on random hit or miss, or trial and error, the scientific method methodically explores the cosmos and systematically delivers novel ideas. It has accelerated discovery a thousandfold, if not a millionfold. The evolution of the scientific method is responsible for the exponential rise in progress we now enjoy. Without a doubt science has uncovered possibilities—and new ways of finding them—that neither biological nor cultural evolution could have invented alone.

But at the same time, the technium has also accelerated the speed of human biological evolution. Swelling populations of humans in denser cities upped the contagion of disease and hastened the rate of our biological adaptation. Humans are smart and very mobile and so select mates from a much larger pool of candidates. New foods also sped the evolution of our bodies. For instance, the adult ability to drink milk evolved and spread quickly once humans succeeded in domesticating herbivores. Today, according to research on the mutations in our DNA, our genes are evolving 100 times faster than in preagricultural times.

Now, in just the last few decades, science has evolved yet another manner of evolution. We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds. Gene splicing, genetic engineering, and gene therapy have given our minds direct control of our genes, ending a four-billion-year hegemony of Darwinian evolution. Now the inheritance of acquired and desirable traits in human lines is possible. The technium will be completely liberated from the tyranny of slow-moving DNA. The consequences of this new symbiotic evolution are so immense that they silence us.

All the while each technological innovation creates new opportunities for the technium to change in new ways. And every kind of new problem caused by technology also creates a chance for new kinds of solutions and new paths to find those solutions—which is a type of cultural evolution. As the technium expands, it accelerates the rate of evolution first begun with life, so that it now evolves the idea of change itself. This is more than simply the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe.

 

 

 

These broad sweeps—of increasing opportunities, emergence, complexity, diversity, and so on—are one answer to where technology is going. On the much smaller day-to-day scale, predicting the future of technology is impossible. It's too hard to filter out the random noise of commerce. We will have better luck extrapolating historical trends that in some cases go back billions of years to see how they arc through technology today. These trends are subtle, nudging technologies in a slow drift in one direction that may not even be visible in the blink of a year.

They move slowly because they are not driven by human events. Instead these tendencies are biases generated by the tangle of the technium's system. Their momentum is like the gravity of the Moon, a weak, persistent, insensible pull that can eventually move oceans. Over the span of generations these trends overcome the churning noise of human infatuation, fads, and financial trends to push and pull technologies in certain ingrained directions.

Rather than a series of meandering lines that travel into a set future, picture these arrows of technological trends exploding outward from the present. Just as space is expanding away from us in every direction, opening up the universe, these rising forces are like ballooning spheres that create the territory they are expanding into. The technium is an explosion of information, organization, complexity, diversity, sentience, beauty, and structure that is changing itself as it expands.

This exhilarating self-acceleration resembles the mythical snake Uroboros grabbing its own tail and turning itself inside out. It is rife with paradox—and promise. Indeed, the expanding technium—its cosmic trajectories, its ceaseless reinvention, its inevitabilities, its self-generation—is an open-ended beginning, an infinite game calling us to play.

14

Technology wants us, but what does it want
for
us? What do we get out of its long journey?

When Henry David Thoreau spied engineers constructing a long-distance telegraph along the railroad tracks that ran past his hermitage on Walden Pond, he wondered if humans had anything important enough to say to warrant the engineers' considerable effort.

From his family farm in Kentucky, Wendell Berry watches how technology such as steam engines have taken over the manual work of farmers and wonders if machines have anything to teach humans: “The nineteenth century thought that machinery was a moral force and would make men better. How could the steam-engine make men better?”

It's a good question. The technium is reinventing us, but does any of this complicated technology make us any better as humans? Are there any manifestations of human thought anywhere than can make men better?

An answer that Wendell Berry might agree with is that the technology of law makes men better. A system of laws keeps men and women responsible, urges them toward fairness, restrains undesirable impulses, breeds trust, and so on. The elaborate system of law that undergirds Western societies is not very different from software. It's a complex set of code that runs on paper instead of in a computer, and it slowly calculates fairness and order (ideally). Here, then, is a technology that has bettered us—although, really, nothing can
make
us better. We can't be forced to do good, but we can be given opportunities.

I think Berry can't appreciate the gifts of the technium because his idea of technology is too small. He gets stuck on the cold, hard, yucky stuff, such as steam engines, chemicals, and hardware, which may be the mere juvenile stage of more mature things. Viewed from a wider perspective, where steam engines are merely a tiny part of the whole, convivial forms of technology really do allow us to be better.

How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to be different from his or her parents, a chance to create something his or her own.

I will be the first to add that by themselves—without any context around them—these possibilities are insufficient for human happiness, let alone betterment. Choice works best when it has values to guide it. But if one has spiritual values, Wendell Berry seems to say, you don't even need technology to be happy. In other words, he asks, is technology really necessary at all for human betterment?

Because I believe both the technium and civilization are rooted in the same bootstrapping cosmic trends, I think another way to ask the question is this: Is civilization necessary for human betterment?

When I trace the full course of the technium, I would say, definitely, yes. The technium is necessary for human betterment. How else are we going to change? A special subset of humans will find the constrained choices available in, say, a monastery cell or the tiny opportunities in a hermit's hut on the edge of a pond or in the deliberately restricted horizon of a wandering guru to be the ideal path to betterment. But most humans, at most moments in history, see the accumulating pile of possibilities in a rich civilization as something that makes them better people. That's why we make civilization/technology. That's why we have tools. They produce choices, including the choice for good.

Choices without values yield little, this is true; but values without choices are equally dry. We need the full spectrum of choices won by the technium to unleash our own maximum potential.

What technology brings to us individually is the possibility of finding out who we are, and more important, who we might be. During his or her lifetime, each person acquires a unique combination of latent abilities, handy skills, nascent insights, and potential experiences that no one else shares. Even twins—who share common DNA—don't share the same life. When people maximize their set of talents, they shine because no one can do what they do. People fully inhabiting their unique mixture of skills are inimitable, and that is what we prize about them. Talent unleashed doesn't mean that everyone will sing on Broad-way or play in the Olympics or win a Nobel Prize. Those high-profile roles are merely three well-worn ways of being a star, and by deliberate design those particular opportunities are limited. Popular culture wrongly fixates on proven star roles as the destiny of anyone successful. In fact, those positions of prominence and stardom can be prisons, straitjackets defined by how someone else excelled.

Ideally, we would find a position of excellence tailored specifically for everyone born. We don't normally think of opportunities this way, but these possibilities for achievement are called “technology.” The technology of vibrating strings opened up (created) the potential for a virtuoso violin player. The technology of oil paint and canvas unleashed the talents of painters through the centuries. The technology of film created cinematic talents. The soft technologies of writing, lawmaking, and mathematics all expanded our potential to create and do good. Thus in the course of our lives as we invent things and create new works that others may build on, we—as friends, family, clan, nation, and society—have a direct role in enabling each person to optimize their talents—not in the sense of being famous but in the sense of being unequaled in his or her unique contribution.