I overall really enjoyed Kelly’s What Technology Wants, especially how he structured his argument within the construct of the over-arching theme of the technium. At first, when you read the first two sections of the book, Origins and Imperatives, you get a large degree of insight into Kelly’s personality and overall view of technology as being intertwined and stemming from biological evolution. It is in these two sections that he lays down the foundation of his argument, barely even touching on the book title’s question. This all changes though in the last two parts of the book where Kelly really synthesizes his argument and attacks a lot of notions that I myself had previously believed as right.

One  of these notions is tackled by Kelly in the Choices section of What Technology Wants, which is outlined by the Precautionary Principle approach. After taking Environmental Science last year, I felt very strongly that the Precautionary Principle approach to new technologies was the most effective and ethical way about going about the introduction of new technology into society. For instance, in Environmental Science, we studied the entire DDT “disaster” as the event that birthed the modern environmental activism movement. The take away from the entire disaster was that the Precautionary Principle approach, which was implemented in part because of what happened, was the “right” and “safest” way to go about the introduction of technology. Kelly counters this belief though when he disputes that DDT’s positive effects out weight its negative effects by stating the following:

“They were relying on the precautionary principle: DDT was probably bad; better safe than sorry. In fact DDT had never been shown to hurt humans, and the environmental harm from the miniscule amounts of DDT applied in homes had not been measured. (Kelly 321).

This except really woke me up to Kelly’s proposed idea that in order to make an accurate risk assessment one must investigate thoroughly both the positive and negative effects in order to come to a proper conclusion.

One point that I did not fully agree with of Kelly’s was his assessment of technology as being more of a creation of God that say a being that is biological in nature. This view of Kelly’s is reflected best when he states,

“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.”(Kelly 460)

I think that the statement that “the most convivial technology we can make is not a testament of human ingenuity” is a extremely bold claim that downplays the importance and power of “human ingenuity”. I think that technology is  a prime example of “human ingenuity” and not as Kelly puts it “a testimony of the holy” because I don’t believe that technology can ever be a product of the divine even if you argue its transitive connection to it as Kelly does throughout the book. I’m not very religious, but I still believe that if anything is divine it is life because at the end of the day you can’t breath life or a true conscience into technology no matter how hard humans try. The final result will always be artificial.

With that said, my question for the class is as follows: Do you think that it is possible for technology, or a machine for that matter,  to be considered divine or holy?

Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.

In Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants, Kelly raises the interesting point of the power balance we face between technologies. This is something that I had never thought about, the “enormity and cleverness of our creation [to overwhelm our] ability to control or guide [the technium]” (239). From his descriptions of this potential future world, as humans we are capable of creating a technology that will then takes its own course posing the question if “the human mind [will be able to] master what the human mind has made?” (239). This idea that technology can take a mind of itself bares a very strong resemblance to the world that was described in E.M Forester’s The Machine Stops. Interestingly, technology will take on its own course regardless of human interaction especially “in [our] deeply connected world, [with] the accelerated pace of technological succession” (243). Due to this quicker pace of technological advancement, Kelly’s question of whether or not humans will be able to comprehend what technology will turn into is almost impossible to answer as “projecting what harm may come from technology before it ‘is’ is almost impossible” (244). The idea of creating a piece of technology, giving it to the public and watching it advance and develop into a piece more advanced than ever imagined is frightening but also holds many excitements for the future. These advancements in technology may not always be for the worst and just as technology evolves, humans evolve slowly as well. A problematic point I found with Kelly’s writings was his inclusion of The Precautionary Principle. I was questioning his choice of elaborating on this principle as it seemed counter to his previous points and it did not seem to be the most reliable principle. The principle states that “a technology must be shown to do no harm before it is embraced” however with Kelly’s theories on inevitability and his previous description of how technology is advancing at a rapid pace this seems to be an impossible feat (246). In addition, Kelly adds that “the predictivity of most things, [technology], is exceedingly low” therefor making it even more difficult to prove a piece of technology can do no harm before it is embraced. Kelly explains how many inventions were created without the intention of what its primary use would be today, such as the inventor of gunpowder not predicting the gun or its presence in our society today (245). This principle seems to contradict all of Kelly’s latter theories and explanations of technology and its life force.

My question for discussion is, to what extent can inventors of a product foresee its use in the future and how would an inventor foresee what the future use of his/her product will be?

According to Kevin Kelly, the most important feature of technology and the technium as a whole is its ability to create new choices and opportunities. While we may be a bit disconcerted by the notion of an unstoppable driving force causing certain technological concepts to be inevitable, Kelly reminds and reassures us that a large part of the process is malleable and very influenced by us, Sapiens. Through analysis and constant regulation, we can learn to harness these technologies and appropriate them to more useful tasks if they seem ineffective or wrong in their current use. Kelly strays into some murky waters when he begins to analyze the Unabomber’s anti-civilization manifesto and agrees with portions of the logic. However, he ultimately uses the Unabomber’s and the Amish’s somewhat hypocritical beliefs to further prove his point about the necessity of new technology. Rather than living off the land, the Unabomber’s shack in the woods was chock-full of products purchased from Wal-Mart and other department stores. The Amish, similarly, wouldn’t be able to maintain their lifestyle of selective technological use were it not for the modern civilization right outside their towns. Kelly describes how increased technology in mega-cities like NYC, Shanghai, Mumbai, etc., attracts millions of people yearly from the countryside. Increased technology and civilization offers a plethora of choices and opportunities not present outside of it. The well-researched example of Amish life, though, gives the reader some useful insight; the idea that technology can be selected carefully and methodically on the individual level so that we aren’t overwhelmed. Kelly doesn’t want to decrease technological progress, though, claiming that, “To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from.” (238) In our search for conviviality with the technology we create, and our correlated investigation into the possible harms deriving from it, Kelly believes that it’s near impossible to calculate these harms, but that this shouldn’t stop us from still creating and implementing them. He believes that the best method for testing a technology is by rendering it ubiquitous; by suggesting this he also rejects the Precautionary Principle (which I was taught in AP Enviro. and didn’t question until this book). Another key tool that we have in affecting technology is deciding which direction it’ll go in in terms of transparency and decentralization. While it’s true that technology decreases privacy, we can structure it so that it increases government and corporate transparency. We can hold active roles in the modification of the new tech because of how it is structured, therefore decentralizing the power that one owner/director/company might have.  Kelly believes that an innate search for complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure and evolvability details the path that technology will take in the coming years. Ultimately, Kelly asserts that technology “brings to us individually of finding out who we are, and more important, who we might be.” (349) We are the curators of the art which is technology. We (NYU kids specifically) are the “haves” that can perfect, reduce the cost of and share the technology needed to expand the lives of the “have-laters.” We have the opportunity to play the infinite game where we play with boundaries rather than play within them. (353) While the negative consequences of our industrialization and construction of ridiculous amount of technology are very apparent, we must not forget that we are lucky to live in this era of choice and opportunity, and that there is the possibility to do all of this on a much cleaner/greener platform.

My provocation question is: What do you think about Kelly’s eventual reflection on religion? He almost gives the possibility that these scientific laws we’ve discovered, which drive evolution and technology, are made by a God. Or that this increasing complexity is God organizing and building himself. Or that we must be modeled after a great creator because we have created this child which is technology. This book was a mind trip but I loved it and I’m looking forward to hearing all of your insights in the next class discussion.