What Technology Wants (52 page)

What I hope I have shown in this book is that a single thread of self-generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy. The technium is less an adversary to life than its extension. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made.

For several thousand years, humans have looked to the organic world, the world of the living, for clues about the nature of creation and even of a creator. Life was a reflection of the divine. Humans in particular were deemed to be made in the image of God. But if you believe humans are made in the image of God, the autocreator, then we have done well, because we have just birthed our own creation: the technium. Many, including many believers in God, would call that hubris. Compared to what has come before us, our accomplishments are puny.

“As we turn from the galaxies to the swarming cells of our own being, which toil for something, some entity beyond their grasp, let us remember man, the self-fabricator who came across an ice age to look into the mirrors and magic of science. Surely he did not come to see himself or his wild visage only. He came because he is at heart a listener and a searcher for some transcendent realm beyond himself.” That's Loren Eiseley, anthropologist and author, ruminating on what he calls our “immense journey” so far under the stars.

The bleak message of the stars in their overwhelming infinitude is that we are nothing. It is hard to argue with 500 billion galaxies, each with a billion stars. In the mists of the endless cosmos, our brief blink in an obscure corner is nothing at all.

Yet the fact that there is something in one corner that sustains itself against the starry vastness, the fact that there is anything bootstrapping at all, is an argument against the nihilism of the stars. The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it. The existence of a single rosebud, a single oil painting, a single parade of costumed hominins strolling down a street of bricks, a single glowing screen waiting for input, or a single book on the nature of our creations requires life-friendly attributes baked deeply into the primeval laws of being. “The universe knew we were coming,” says Freeman Dyson. And if the cosmic laws are biased to produce one bit of life and mind and technology, then one bit will flow after another. Our immense journey is a trace of tiny, improbable events stacked into a series of inevitabilities.

The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness. Carl Sagan put it memorably: “We are starstuff pondering the stars.” But by far humanity's greatest, most immense journey is not the long trek from star dust to wakefulness but the immense journey we have in front of us. The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium, with questions and problems and the thickening relations between bits that we call
con scientia
—shared knowledge—or consciousness.

And whether we like it or not, we stand at the fulcrum of the future. We are in part responsible for the evolution of this planet proceeding onward.

About 2,500 years ago most of humanity's major religions were set in motion in a relatively compact period. Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the authors of the Upanishads, and the Jewish patriarchs all lived within a span of 20 generations. Only a few major religions have been born since then. Historians call that planetary fluttering the Axial Age. It was as if everyone alive awoke simultaneously and, in one breath, set out in search of their mysterious origins. Some anthropologists believe the Axial Age awakening was induced by the surplus abundance that agriculture created, enabled by massive irrigation and waterworks around the world.

It would not surprise me if we saw another axial awakening someday, powered by another flood of technology. I find it hard to believe that we could manufacture robots that actually worked and not have them disturb our ideas of religion and God. Someday we will make other minds, and they will surprise us. They will think of things we never could have imagined, and if we give these minds their full embodiment, they will call themselves children of God, and what will we say? When we alter the genetics in our veins, will this not reroute our sense of a soul? Can we cross over into the quantum realm, where one bit of matter can be in two places at once, and still not believe in angels?

Look what is coming: Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?

For as long as the wind has blown and the grass grown, people have sat beneath trees in the wilderness for enlightenment—to see God. They have looked to the natural world for a hint of their origins. In the filigree of fern and feather they find a shadow of an infinite source. Even those who have no use for God study the evolving world of the born for clues to why we are here. For most people, nature is either a very happy long-term accident or a very detailed reflection of its creator. For the latter, every species can be read as a four-billion-year-long encounter with God.

Yet we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog. The phone extends the frog's four billion years of learning and adds the open-ended investigations of six billion human minds. Someday we may believe the most convivial technology we can make is not a testament to human ingenuity but a testimony of the holy. As the technium's autonomy rises, we have less influence over the made. It follows its own momentum begun at the big bang. In a new axial age, it is possible the greatest technological works will be considered a portrait of God rather than of us. In addition to holding spiritual retreats in redwood groves, we may surrender ourselves in the labyrinths of a 200-year-old network. The intricate, unfathomable layers of logic built up over a century, borrowed from rainforest ecosystems, and woven together into beauty by millions of active synthetic minds will say what redwoods say, only louder, more convincingly: “Long before you were here, I am.”

The technium is not God; it is too small. It is not utopia. It is not even an entity. It is a becoming that is only beginning. But it contains more goodness than anything else we know.

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. Or should I say, the technium's wants are those of life. But the technium does not stop there. The technium also expands the mind's fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands the mind's fundamental goodness. Technology amplifies the mind's urge toward the unity of all thought, it accelerates the connections among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite.

No one person can become all that is humanly possible; no one technology can capture all that technology promises. It will take all life and all minds and all technology to begin to see reality. It will take the whole technium, and that includes us, to discover the tools that are needed to surprise the world. Along the way we generate more options, more opportunities, more connection, more diversity, more unity, more thought, more beauty, and more problems. Those add up to more good, an infinite game worth playing.

That's what technology wants.

This work is dedicated to my children: Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen. And also to my wife, Gia-Miin, who supplied the necessary love for the long trek.

I am grateful for Paul Slovak at Penguin, who supported this book through its many years of gestation. He never gave up on it, and his enthusiasm for the ideas in this book made its birth possible.

The best editor I have ever worked with, Paul Tough, rescued this book from verbosity. He streamlined its narrative to a readable form, carving a book out of an almost book. Paul gave this work both its outline and its polish.

Camille Cloutier was my chief collaborator. The tasks she contributed are almost too many to list. Camille tracked down experts, arranged interviews, prepared quotes and passages, found key charts, fact-checked the entire book, footnoted it, proofed it, managed its many versions, compiled the bibliography, kept software going, and in every way made sure what I said was true and accurate.

Research librarian Michele McGinnis performed most of the original research reported in this book. She spent months in the library and five years online searching for sources. Almost every page of this book has been improved by her work.

Jonathan Corum, master designer and illustrator, rendered the charts on these pages in his distinctive, radically clear style. The jacket of the hardcover book was designed by Ben Wiseman.

This is the sixth book that John Brockman, adviser and agent extraordinaire, has engineered into existence with me. I would not think of doing a book without him.

Behind the scenes Victoria Wright made exact transcriptions of my interviews, and with a few Zen-like koans, William Schwalbe, book coach, offered extremely helpful suggestions when I was stuck. The book's layout was done by Nancy Resnick and the index compiled by Cohen Carruth, Inc.

The following readers endured the first draft of this book and provided me with valuable and constructive feedback: Russ Mitchell, Michael Dowd, Peter Schwartz, Charles Platt, Andreas Lloyd, Gary Wolf, and Howard Rheingold.

During the course of researching this book I interviewed, spoke with, or corresponded with the smartest people I know. Listed in alphabetical order, each of these experts lent their valuable time and insight for my project. Of course, any errors in transmitting their thoughts are mine.

Of the hundreds of books I consulted for this project, I found the following selected ones to be the most useful for my purposes. Listed in order of importance. (The rest of my sources are listed in the Source Notes.)

 

Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
. Langdon Winner. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977.

Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
. David Nye. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
. W. Brian Arthur. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems, and the Human World
. Richard Rhodes, ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

The Singularity Is Near
. Ray Kurzweil. New York: Viking, 2005.