Throughout Kelly’s What Technology Wants, he takes the reader on a roundabout journey through the human past and attempts to explain the similarities between the developement of organic life and the simultaneuous creation of technologies that eventually gathered into the collective he names the technium. For me, the parrallels Kelly drew between the evolution of the human race and technology were the most interesting part of the book so far and appeared mostly within the Origins section. I found the weakest piece of the work wasn’t a specific point exactly, but rather that Kelly would spend almost too much time going through the historical narrative of things in our world without establishing the links to his main points about the technium until the very end, and in doing so making some of the factual information unnecessary and inconvenient.

Kelly made multiple interesting distinctions about the evolution of humans, but the most enlightening in my opinion was that about the domestication of the world. He argues that “technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves… We have rapidly and significantly altered ourselves and at the same time altered the world” (Kelly 37). I’d personally never explicitly thought of technology in this way, and it was beautiful to imagine that just as humans had the ability to change the environment through craft, craft has had the same ability to change us all along and it truly shows. My question thus becomes: if technology truly wants and seeks something just as humans do, and has been shown to change us over time, will these desires ever outrule our own and in what ways do they already overtake us?

In most cases, Kelly backed up his points with examples and detailed historical accounts, but it seemed to me that at times there was a disconnect between his evidence and statements (which I felt would become a bit tangential). Though this was mainly a problem in Origins with the broad summations of the Earth’s past. I also thought it odd that religion was completely left out of the scope of ‘technology’ when literally everything else humans have created was included in the technium. Although I’m not at all religious, faith and the belief in a higher power has been around in civilization for quite a long time and I feel it would make sense to include this in the technium. I find it interesting too that the way Kelly describes the technium as an entity constantly evolving alongside the human race resembles E.M. Forster’s The Machine very closely. Was it wise for Kelly to argue using only empirical and scientific historical facts, along with including all sorts of cultural phenomena in the technium, yet avoid the discussion of religion?