In his important new book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly – the legendary Silicon Valley provocateur and Wired magazine’s Senior Maverick – introduces technology as a thing with needs, wants and appetites. What Kelly thinks of as “technology” might not quite be God, but it’s something that reflects the laws of the universe and is thus central to our experience as human beings.
For Kelly, technology is “stuff we make with our minds” – which includes everything from this post to his book to your iPhone to Facebook to the Internet. This is what Kelly – whose ideas seem to be simultaneously religious, Darwinian and transcendental – calls the “technium” and it, he says, is what is driving today’s seemingly unstoppable and inevitable digital revolution. So where did this technium begin and where will it end? If anyone knows the answer to this question it is Kevin Kelly, who, twenty-five years ago predicted the future before most of us knew it existed.
This is a two-part post on my interview with Kelly. The first part can be found here.
What Does Technology Want?
What Is the Future of Technology?
Is Technology God?