what_technology_wants

Kevin Kelly - What Technology Wants

1. my Question

- Kevin Kellys relationship is full of contradictions (founded "Wired", no smartphone)
- Kelly starts with the question: What is technology? - we should consider technology as a whole
- term technology is relatively young, stems from greek though
- Even the industrial revolution didn't yield the use of the word technology, until a textbook appeared "Guide to Technology)
- Now, artifacts weren't considered as random inventions, but as woven into a coherent impersonal unity,

- the process of disembodiment of technology was speeding up
- Kelly asks himself, what kind of force flows through technology, both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information
- technology, e.g. Code, same as a piece of literature is something useful produced by a mind, but it is not included in the category of art, but we could use it in the term culture, although this might be a term too small
- technical art enables tools, they launch new arts and so on and form a new whole: Technology
- Kelly uses the term "technium": it exists beyond hardware and includes culture, art. creations,
- a whole self-reinforcing system of creation that gains autonomy and matures
- there are different traits of autonomy, no system displays all of them but parts
- the technium has as many chips as there are neurons in our brain, and a lof of eyes
- information has increasingly been transmitted in a fractal pattern of self-organization
- the technium is an outgrowth of the human mind, hence of life, hence of physical and chemical self-organization that led to life and the human mind is therefore only on of the influences upon the technium
- We do design what the technium wants but there are also other drives, it also wants to keep itself going
- All organisms share a few fundamental desires. to sruvive, to grow, - this is a "want", it doesn't have to mean "thoughtful decision", rather an urge, a tendency to a certain "need"
- technium is a great force, we should learn how to workt with this force, rather than against it


I Part One: Origins

2. Inventing Ourselves

- it is hard to dtermine the origin of technology, it precedes human beings, animals bended their environment already
- about 50 000 years ago, modern humans left their continent and multiplied exponentially
- technological innovations (shelters, clothes, traps) opened up new opportunities for expanding, neaderthals vanished
- "ability of sapiens to rapidly improve their tools allowed them to adapt to new ecological niches at a much faster rate than genetic evolution could ever allow"
- some scientists think, that the appearance of language led to this development
- language accelerates learning and creation, new idea can be spread quickly and it allows autogeneration, that means the mind can now question itself, become a tool
- their small amount of technology gave them sufficiency but not abundance, there was enough to survive, but not to transcend until language appeared
- we have evolved since then, technology has domesticated us,
- We are coevolving with our technology and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology - every last knife and spear - were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotiv with technology.
- technium has a self-amplifying nature, one breakthrough invention adds power and leads to further breakthroughs
- seemingly simple inventions like the stirrup or a certain form of bookkeeping have caused profound social consequences and are blamed for fundamental developments like that towards feudalism
- technology has become a force, not a noun or a thing, but a verb

3. history of the seventh kingdom
- a shelter for an animal is the animal extended, the technium is the extended human
- in the industrial age, the technologies were liken exoskeletons (clothes, steam engines...)but they have no genetical blueprint, they are extensions of our minds, technology is the extended body for ideas
- technium evolution resembles the evolution of genetic organisms, but it doesn't express the work of genes, but of ideas
- new ideas happen in a combinatory evolution, they do not come alone, they are woven in a web of ideas
- ideas improve in other uses outside the host technology and they mate, produce a hereditary tree
- one way to narrate the story of life is along the major transitions in the informational organization of life's forms
- major transition was for ecample the sexual recombination compared to cloning
- technological evolution has a major stage at the invention of language - more than a single persons ability to recall could now be stored in a memory, math, writing printing and then scientific review have strcuted the learning more
- science birthed new structures and the latest transition is our injecting order and design into everything we manufacture
- everything is a tiny sliver of our collective mind (?) and it is distributed around the globe
- in both life and technium, the thickening of interconnections weaves the level of organization above it, and both started off with the rise to language, it was the last major transformation in the natural world and the first transformation in the manufactured world
- words, ideas and concepts are the most complex things social animals make and the simplest foundation for any type of technology, natural evolution thus is bridged and flows into technological evolution
- the biggest difference is, that technological species almost never go extinct, items might be rare, but aren't dead
- technologies are idea-based and culture is their memory. They can be resurrected if forgotten, and can be recorded

4. The Rise of Exotropy
- "The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look."technology too, is made of these ancient atoms
- a computer chip concentrates energy for a long peroid of time, it conducts more energy per second per gram than animals, volcanoes or the sun (???)
- the story of the technium can be told as an expanding cosmic activity
- After the big bang, there was only one form of energy that diversified into many
- Energy is the potential (the difference needed) to cool, the faster the universe expanded, the greater was its potential to cool, the universe expanded faster than matter itself could cool
- It is this potential that powered evolution, life, intelligence and eventually the acceleration of technology
- the final end state will be the maximum entropy (waste, chaos, disorder)
- an eagle that eats a trout that has eaten grasshoppers that has eaten grass, doesn't consume the energy of this grass, every movement wastes a bit of heat (entropy), but circle of life is kept going by constant supply with energy by the sun
- some organizations maintain a persistens difference in the face of entropy's empty indifference
- the rising flow of sustanable difference is the inversion of entropy - exotropy
- exotropy isn immaterial flow that is much like information, the reversal of disorder, it entails self-organization
- the rise of exotropy can be stated as the slow ordering of accumulated information
- the technium is awash in its own ocean of information, 8000 years of embedded human knowledge, that is 487 exabytes, and technology expands data by 66 percent per year
- our migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy is a move toward the immaterial, we purchase services rather than manufactured goods
- a book is a compression on intangible, immaterial, Heidegger: Technology was an unhiding of an innrer reality
- the technium is the most intangible ind immaterial process yet unleashed, it is the most powerful force in the world.
- technology's dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds, it is part of an asymmetrical arc that begins at the bigh bang, the arc is the slow yet ireeversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy



Part Two: Imperative

5. Deep Progress

- up until the last two centuries, change was rarely experienced in ancient times
- both negative and positive streams of change are relentless
- there are according to kelly five indicators of the 1 percent more progress: 1. long term rise in education, health and walth, 2. devices get cheaper and better, we have more choices, 3. moral progress, since the notion of "others" expands (family to nation, even among species) 4. change in the culture can be viewed as a progress 5. urbanization

- cities are large technological artifacts, where innovation is created
- every city starts as a slum and grows chaotically, but they proceed to a part of the city for their economic activity, they boast eaterias and bars, shops
- slums are highly efficient, nothing goes to waste, cities generate a maximum of ideas and inventions
- living in slums is preferred to village housing, investment into future of the next generation and freedom are major reasons to voluntarily leave the village, the majority migrates out of choice
- change is accelerating, in the last fifity years especially, before there was change without progress
- tools for scientific method are low-tech and existed before, but science needs prosperity and populations
- population growth is necessary but not sufficient for progress, but more minds have more ideas and shared knowledge os superior to a million individuals
- if prosperity increases due to expanding population, fertility rates drop, which will shrink population
- if population declines ind the future, what happesn to progress, if it is connected to rising populations?

Scenario 1: it might be easier to have three children and morr fashionable, but steady population, doesnt grant progress
Scenario 2: artificial minds in the billoins can keep prosperity expanding, they might produce ideas but not consume them, sp progress might look different
scenario 3: fewer, but more powerful minds
scenario 4: maybe prosperity has nothing to do with an increasing number of minds
scenario 5: population plunges, worlds population oscillates up and down

- there are three rising curves since the 20th century: human population, technical progress and energy production, the strands of the technium
- but china burnt coal 500 years before the europeans did, but lacked the science to liberate the energy
- it is a self-amplifying circuit: more human minds, cheap energy, more minds, more technological inventions, more energy
- critics say, that progress might make things better for human, but at an unsustainable rate
- there is a real damage, but that doesn't lie in technology, we can make better technologies
- We address the problems of tomorrow with the tools of tomorrow, that is what progress is


6. Ordained Becoming

- considering the technium as evolution accelerated, we need to discern where evolution is headed and what is pushing it
- evolution is not a random drift, but it has an inherent direction, by the nature of matter and energy, hence an inevitable direction, that is also woven into the technium
- the eye seems to be somthing, that nature strove towards (Darwin), like a universal solution
- like vortices, complex interaction and recombination leads to similar charasteristics in distand branches, convergenge
- rhodopsin is a molecule that is best for seeing, but it evolved twice (which is as likely as finding the same star twice)
- this applies to several developments, hence the same environment favored a certain direction at every hub
- a fundamental force besides selection steers evolution: negative constraints, that limit the scope of life's possibilities and positive constraints, which generate a few repating new possibilites
- physical constraints lead to a lot of repetitions in evolution, all organisms seem to follow a universal metabolism scale
- DNA seems to be the only fitting, perfect molecle, that ist the simples carbon structure and maybe the basic building block of life in general
- constraints of physics, chemistry and geometry have governed life from its origins onward and even into the technium, life cannot produce every thinkable combination of proteins, there are bound and limits in many directions by matter itself
- the same applies to technology
- the second great force: positive constraints that steer innovation along a trajectory are even more important in techn.
- change is attributed to random variation, but variation is governed by geometry and physics and by possibilities inherent in revurring patters of self-organization
- some potentially usefuly mutations are so probable, that they can be viewed as implicitly encoded in the genome
- this flips the view: it is not inly internal factors, that created change and external, that selected, but also external, that ceates forms, while the internal selects or directs them (via self-organization) in recurring forms
- This flips the traditional view. In the old view, the internal (the source of mutation) created change, while the external(the environmental source of adaptation) selected or directed it; in the new view, the external (physical and chemical constraints) creates forms, while the internal (self-organization) selects or directs them.
- three vectors of evolution: the adaptive, the contingent and the inevitable (evolution of live ist not accidental, but expected)
- every organism and artifact is a wholly improbable arrangement of its constituent atoms. Yet within the long chain of reproducing self-organizatoin and restless evolution, these forms become highly probably, and even inevitable [...]
- And most of life's archetypal forms and stages are also inevitbale improbabilities, or, weh migh say, improbable inevitabilities
- homo sapens is a tendency, not an entity, technium as well, the only thing that counts is the direction
- Humanity is a process, human beings are the most open-ended species, ordained becoming


7. Convergence

- There are numerous examples of different scientists' innovations appearing at the same time or even the same year
- if discoveries are inevitable, the inventors are just conduits filled by an invention that just had to happen
- the higher the prominence of a scientist, the more he was involved in simultaneous discoveries
- the number of duplicated innovations increases with time
- it might be just coincidental, but the most multiples were simply not reported,
- most scientist do experience, that their work has already been done
- the archetype is ordained by the technium's trajectory, while the species is contingent
- the likelihood of someone inventing the lightbulb is 100%, likelihood of Edison being the inventor is one in 10000
- movie productions too, often appear in pairs (e.g. Deep impact and Armageddon), the Harry Potter books had many predecessors
- inevitability though is hard to prove, the processes would have needed to be rerun several tines but there are three evidences:
1. inventions have been made independently by more than one person
2. technology has evolved on different continents
- the blow gun evolved in different continents, pyramids also appeared in egypt and at maya regions, many inventions eripted on four continents, it is very unlikely though, that they came from the same source,
- discoveries become inevitbale when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate, not much different from the natural world
- the ever-thickening mix of existing technologies in a society creates a supersaturated matrix charged with restless potential, there is no way to leapfrog though
- new tech sits on a foundation of old tech, same with the brain: Being able to think relies on working layers of older processes, like walking, you can't do digital infrastructure before you do industrial
- Countries that fail to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones (Economist)
- high technology is not a demassification, it still relies on atoms, but it adds intelligence to industry (bits and atoms), rather than removing industry
- you cannot jump ahead, when you want to, but when the web of supporting technological species are in place, an invention will erupt
- The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology's imperative
3. in modern times improvement can be found that are difficult to stop


8. Listen to Technology

- people have tried to predict progress and were surprisingly correct, e.g. Moore's law
- do these predictions render technology inevitable?
- Moore's law depicts an acceleration of progress, and a regularity - according to Moore, this is linked to people's belief
- but it cannot be self-fulfilling, since obedience to curve starts before notion of the law
- Why aren't related technologies experiencing the same progress?
- exponential progress can not be found in inventions, that do not scale down (getting smaller), energy is a limiting constraint, unlike information, batteries for example store or generate lots of energy
- exponential progress can be seen for technologies, that minimize (bits, pixels, genes), but it all will eventually result in a pleateau or S-curve
- we shift what we care about, one rising technology might be shrugged off but engender a new development
- these laws are reflexes of the technium that kcik in regardless of the social climate an are self-governing
- we can try to get better at anticipating these inevitable surges and educate ourselves to meet them but we cannot escape
- When we spy our technological fate in the distance, we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather, we should lurch forward in preperation.


9. Choosing the Inevitable

- inevitable can mean: every realizable technology will exist once, somebody will somehow cobble it together, OR it means that a technology dominantes in its specific corner
- the picture telephone wanted to exist, but that can either
- analogy: our genes determine a lot that is beyond our control, but still, the freedom of choices we make amid the givens is huge and significant;
- the technium is the same, it is in some part ordained by its inherent nature and its largest trends of technology unroll in developmental stages, a cicilization also undergoes sequences and history matters at the same time
- the internet might have been inevitable but the character of its incarnation is contingent on the tenor of technologies that preceded it and they affect/constraint each other
- three forces shape technology:  preordained development, influence of technological history and society's free choices, the last force has a conscience, compared to the adaptive function in biological evolution
- our choices are limitied but the possibilities are expanding, we can for example foster equality or innovation
- inevitability is not a flaw, it can help to predict and prepare and our ways to anticipate will evolve
- although contrainted by predetermined forms of development, particular specifics of a technologcal phase matter to us
- urge for self-preservation, self-extension and self-growth is part of every living thing and it happens with technology too, technology is not anymore under full control of humanity, but this growth also brings benefits
- "But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotiv with it. At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this discretion, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believ) to resist our second self." "Tje tritj os tjat we are continuos with the machines we create" "By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts."


Part III Choices

10. The Unabomber Was Right

- inventors like Tesla or Einstein claimed their technologies to bring benefit to the people, but in fact many technologies created more problems than they solved
- And yet there is nothing inherently bad about technology,
- our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the abilitiy of the planet to modify us 10 000 years ago, that was a tipping point - the second tipping point is the technium's ability to alter us exceeding ours to alter technology
- the unabomber Ted Kaczynski (murdered 3 people with letter bombs) argued, that the system cannot exist to satisfy human needs, instead, human behavior has to be modified, the system is not guided by ideology but by technical necessity, modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another, hence you cannot erase only the "bad" parts
- that technology deprives us of our freedom and in many cases, people find themselves forced to use technology
- kazcynski thought, that the technium cannot be reformed but had to be destroyed, but he never got a fellowship
- kelly agrees that as the complexity of our built world increases, we will neet to rely on mechanical means to manage this complexity (e.g. algorithms, autopilots)
- but most people think, that technology might have erased some freedoms, but brought more freedoms than that
- kaczynski confused latitude and freedom: more choices encompass more actual freedom than simply increasing the latitude within limited choices, he in his shack was very limited in choices
- technologies indeed might start as optional but then are self-reinforcing, but the loss of freedoms is exceeded by the total gains in choices, possibilities and freedoms
- anti-civilizationists do not propose an alternative except going back, e.g. to tribal life, they also do not live in this state, they also live in modernity and do not chose to leave, kaczynski too bought food mostly in grocery stores
- the final problem is, that billions would die, if civilization was destroyed with its technology
- but the majority of people fled exactly from this "freedom", even if technology has its costs
- some people oppose this opinion, but why do we still use technology, even the ecowarrriors?
- We might be powerless to resist technology, the remedy of an addiction though is to change oneselve but not the drug
- theories: The technium is duping us on its own account, not on people trying to sell gadgets (they are also cast with this "spell"), it uses its own media to promote itself - but: people with few access to technology also strive towards it,
- remaining theory: we willingly choose technology and unconciously calculate its virtues, but not only rationally
- often we do take the decision for technology and pay the prive
- the costs are not easily visible and we need more technology to make better decisions
- we need self-monitoring, transparent sharing of problems, testing results and anlysis, honest account of externalities like pollution - tehcnology can help us reveal the costs of tehcnology and help us make better choices


11  Lessons of Amish Hackers

- Amish parishes differ greatly from each other, and there is a distinction between farms (more technology) and houses
- they do not oppose technology in common, they rather see the consequences and take decisions in favor of a solid community
- they can be quite geeky about self-invented technology, but pay attention to not being dependent on the electricity grid
- differentiate between using and owning
- amish don't adopt everything new, but if they do, they are about 50 years behind and slow down progress
- they are selective (aren't afraid to say no
- evaluate new things by experience (rather than by theory),
- have criterias, such as technology must enhance family and community and the choices are communal
- only few leave after the rumspringa, but the cost is a limit of choices-
- they do not manufacture everythinyg completely, their solar panels have been fabricated by huge machinery
- their choice of lifestyle is embedded in the technium and in the possibility to opt out from sth (in the USA)
- many hippies have left their communes in the 70ies to go back to high-tech and cities and choices
- the difference lies is optimizing contentment or optimizig choices
- Amish see human nature rather as unchanging, the peak of technology has been reached in the 40ies and since then tech might make things faster but not better, i gets worse, but human nature is not at the end, we are now different than we were 10 000 years ago
- technology leads to an expansion of imagination and scales of choices, amish trade contentment for revelation
- if we choose to expand ourselves, we also create an expansion of possibility for others, even for amish
- the dilemma is: to maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lies. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximiue the amount if technology in the world.




12. Seeking Conviviality

- prohibitions didn't often occur but lasted not long and when technology accelerates, probitions are abbreviated
- in a global marketplace, innovations are prohibited somewhere and adopted somewhere else
- prohibitions are postponements, partly because we never know what a technology becomes, before it "is"
- the more ideas and technologies in the world, the more possible combinations, reactions and interactions
- Precautionary Principle expects the worst, but finally leads to no direction at all
- risk aversion is not rational, its single value "safety" trumps innovation which can lead to less safety and adds even more things to a complex system that can go wrong and lead to less safety, but old risks are less likely to be considered
- scientific study cannot only analyze the primary risks or problems, the consequences of the problem can rarely be foreseen, technology has to be run in place to express secondary effects
- technology has to be constantly tested as soon as it appears, with vigilance due to its changing structure
- we have to recognize bad surprises early enough to do something about it and practice vigilance
- Amish evaluation is based on emprical evidence, we also have to live with them to adjust expectations, shift, test
- Kelly promotes a Proactionary Principle, based on five proactions:
1. Anticipation, Continual Assessment, Priorization of Risks, including Natural ones, Rapid Correction of Harm, No Prohibition but Redirection

- we can alter the direction of technology and allocate different tasks, since the first one is not at all ideal
- technology developes abilities to self-duplicate and self-improve, the unforseeable achievement will be amazing and terrifying both, plus they are self-amplifying and accelerating
- people demand to stop research on GRIN technologies (gene, robots, info, nano), but they are inevitable, we do have a choice though in the character of these innovations and make it open to participate
- creating a try-atorium rather than a moratorium and "train" the innovations from the beginning
- technology always tips slightly to the good, so any choice is better than no choice
- the proper response to a bad technology is to think of a better, more convivial technology (compatible with life)
- the conviviality resides not in the nature of a technology bt in the job assignment, in the context, expression
- We need collaboration (between people and institutions), transparency (workings intelligible to nonexperts), decentralization (not monopolized by a elite), flexibility (free to modify, give up or keep), redundancy (not a monopoly), efficiency
- these traits are part of biological usefulness and we should train our technology to be thus lifelike


Part Four
Directions

13. Technology's Trajectories

- We need to coax technology along the paths it naturally wants to go, therefore we need to know, what is preordained and what is part of our choices
- technology goes the same path as evolution, the same dynamics common to all exotropic systems, including life,
- it strives for efficiency, emergence, diversity, freedom and many more and we can check on innovations which one favors these goals more
- Our choices can slow these developments dowsn and pospone them and opt out of the inevitable, but eventually, innovations will appear, but there is no time schedule, rather an urge

10 tendencies that carry us forward:

1. Complexity:
- There is no sufficient definition of complexity yet, Kelly suggests, that complexity preceeded biology
- in evolution each escalating step led to an increase in logical, informational, thermodynamical depth if the resulting organization and it became more difficult to compress structure and it became less predictable
- each step was irreversible, although not every species escalates at the same time or at all
- the same dynamics that shape complexitiy in the antural world shape complexity in the technium
- the mass of of technology is dominated by smple technologies (such as a brick), the more complex a technology gets, the fewer mass it has or becomes disembodied (like software)
- the future might either bring the same simple technologies and some bevcome more complex or reach a plateau or we have no limit in complexity, Kelly though opts for scenario one

2. Diversity:

- elements, particles, planets, minerals increasingly diversified, then species diversified
- technologies invented, patents every year and products are diversified too
- might be paralyzing but "no choice" is a worse option
- we develop standards though, that are universal, which also recurs fears for minority cultures
- but the possibility to make differences visible can help to create a value for diversity
- how can diversity though be maintained facing a universal standardization?
- technology often is adopted for a social reason and for what it means to us besides the practical usage
- tribes often use technology or ignore it in order to identify
- groups and individuals will always reject technologies for different reasons


3. Specialization:

- "Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first version of a cell was a general-purpose survival-machine blog" and the domain of life was restricted to warm ponds
- by now, there is no sterilized place anywhere, except temporarily in hospitals
- cells in multicellular organism also specialize, human beings have 210 different cells
- organisms become more complex, plants find a particular niche and koalas eat eucalyptus
- the process from general to specific holds true for technologies, e.g. cars and cameras
- the individualization will proceed, with the demad of customized products
- Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity



4. Ubiquity

- consequence of self-reproduction is a drive towards ever-presence, but limits of resources and competition hinder a species to cover the globe
- humans are the reproductive rgan of technology, but we are limited and hence no technology reaches 100%
- agriculture is the most ubiquitos largest-scale engineering project on earth, followed by streets and buldings
- the speed of dospersion among people though is accelerating
- there is a difference wheteher, there are a lot of cars or one billion spread among the planet
- in the course of evolution every technology is put to the question: What happens, when it becomes ubiquitos and everyone has one?
- an innovation is always cumbersome in the beginning and disruptive, it requires the retraining of old habits
- ubiquity leads to embeddedness, we become unconscious of them
- it also leads to certainty aftera period of being cumbersome and tested by individuals (dependent on wealth, geography...)
- once it is modified and perfected, advantages become clearer and more desirable and question of have-nots appears
- early adopters purchase overpriced technology and fund the evolution of it for the have-laters
- technology stretches towards a pervasive presence, trajectory into ubiquity

5. Freedom

- Physicists argue, that a particle's spontaneous dissolution into subparticles and energy rays is not predictable nor determined, this is called "random" event. But this cannot be explained mathematically, hence the left option is "free will"
- more complexity leads to more choices to be made (e.g. between a placton, a mouse or a mind)
- artificial minds infuse hihjer levels of free will in the built environment and therefore the possibilities of mistakes
- cars that park themselves, a search engine, algorithms make choices what path an email takes
- the technium first expands the range of possibilities and then the agents that can make choices and multiplies liberty

6. Mutualism

- human life is immeres in different degress of mutualism, we need other life for survival (food), there is no other species that needs as many and different other species to stay healthy, and we are deeply social animals, dependent on others of our species, to survive and stay sane
- we depend for example on google, and it depends on us, to continue to exist and to get smarter
- the technium is moving towards increased symbiosis between humans and machines
- also among machines, they mostly exist to support other machines
- the trend towards mutualism between the technium and ourselves can be seen at sociability
- online masses have a great willingness to share (Facebook, flickr, wikipedia) and work together towards a goal
- the individual gains and the group gains, the sum outperforms the parts, which is an emergent power
- the increasing habit of sharin medical records, what we are reading etc. is becoming the foundation of the technium
- we used to ask ourselves, what the free market can do, now we ask what collaboration(mutualism) can do and the results are startling and greater than we imagined

7. Beauty

- the most beautiful things are those that are highly evolved
- also applies to technologies, such as cities, they start off as ugly but become filled in, renewd and more beautiful
- beuatiful tehcnologies carry wisdom if their ancestors
- we are attracted to life, which is why we keep pets and plants in our homes
- we are likewise attracted to technology, some bits of the technium serve as a springboard for identity (e.g. stethoscope)
- quote: p. 321, Liebeserklärung an das Internet
- technology wants to become art, beautiful and "useless", it goes a way from ugliness til there
- we will soon become more attached to technology as well and it will soon leave the imitation of humanity

8. Sentience

- plants act intelligent and so do animals, even ants, minds seem inevitable
- what we have invented to assist our minds are ingredients for producing new mind
- technium hijacks matter and infiltrates sentience, more technology will have as many decision-making circuits as a worm
- the technological minds get smarter every year, but we do not acknowledge something as intelligent, if it doesn't resemble the human mind
- more intelligent brains do not need to be bigger, billions of small computers are already connected to a huge mind
-  we have created it and we are teching this mind (the internet) by tagging, clicking, programming
- the technium is striving towards sentience, in numerous minds of a great variety

9. Structure

- the growth of information (66% per year) is faster than anything else manufactured or even evolutionary provess
- the technium feeds off this accumulation of information and knowledge and is deepening the strcutre of information begun by natural evolution
- science is the accumulation of structured knowledge, structure of knowledge is expanded, when it is related to other facts
- the strength of those connections is what we call truth
- science and what is considered as essential for scientific methods, is quite recent and more essentials are about to come
- at the core of this modification les technoligy, it's tools enable new ways of discovery and help to structure knowledge


10. Evolvability

- the system of evolution is powerful because of it's many new ways to adapt and it's propensity to create change
- evolution finds tricks to find solutions and none of these compares to mind
- the mind is built to learn and to adapt, learning how to learn will accelerate learning - this increases evolvability
- the most recent etension is technology, it is the further evolution of evolution
- the technium is a continuation of a 4 billion year old force that pursues more ability to evolve
- it has reached methods to evolve that were unreachable by biology
- the selfish technium has generated techniques and products to have sufficient material to keep evolving its power to evolve
- after language and writing, science as the third transition of evolution, has accelerated discovery a millionfold and also human evolution, our genes are evolving much faster since agriculture
- As the technium expands, it accelerates the rate of evfolution first begun with life, so that it now evovles the idea of change itself. This is more than simple the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe


- these technological trends are exploding outward from the present, like the universe, opening up the space it is expanding into, the technium is an explosion of information, organization, complexity, diversity, sentience, beauty and structure that is changing itself as it expands. Indeed, the expanding technium - its cosmic trajectories, its ceaseless reinvention, its inevitabilities, its self-generation - is an open-ended beginning, an infinite game callung us to play.




14. Playing the infinite Game

- What can technology do for us? It cannot make us better, but it can provide each person with chances to be different from the parents, to excel the mixture of talents, to create somethin
- Kelly sees civilization and technology as rooted in the same cosmic trends, and most people would agree that civilization was neccessary for betterment, tools provide choices, including choice for good
- technology provides us with the possibility to find out who we are and who we might be, it can unleash talent
- not the production of starlets, but the enabling of each person to optimize their talents in the sense of being unequaled in the unique contribution is ideal
- enlarging the scope of creativity for other, then, is an obligation, we enlarge others by enlarging the possibilities of the technium - by developing more technology
- many genious productions wouldn't have been possible if the technology hadn't existed
- many geniouses might be alive without being able to excercise their specific talent, because the technology isn't invented
- a world with more opportunities creates people that are capable of producing yet more opportunities - which is the strange loop of boostrapping creation
- the technium is the accumulation of choices that allow an individual human to generate AND participate in a greater number of ideas and it started off with civilization
- technology is acquiring its own autonomy and will invreasingly maximize its own agenda, but this agenda includes maximizing possibilities for us
- cybernetican Heinz von Foerster called it the Ethical Imperative: Always act to increase the number of choices

- there are finite games, that are designed to end and need rules and infinite games, that can only keep going by changing its rules and has no boundaries, their game is to keep the game going
- evolution, life, mind and the technium are infinite games, goals are not fixed, rules unknown und shifting
- we can generate as many new good possibilities as possible, that will generate more good possibilities
- the best open-ended choice is one that leads to the most subsequent open-ended chocies - recursive tree of technology

- summary of an god-like arc:
- undifferentiated energy cools down,
- coalesces into entitites,
- condenses into atoms
- form complex molecules
- those self-assemble into self-reproducing entities
- complexity is added
- adapts and learns until mind of self-awareness are created
- think up more minds
- destiny: expand imagination in all directions

- "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 th divine. [...] 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."
- the axial age started 20 generation ago with pople in religions seeking an answer why we are here, there might be a new axial age, focusing on technology
- technium is a becoming only in beginning, but contains more goodness than anything else we know.
- "the technium expands life's fundamental traits, and in so doin it expands life's fundamental goodness. Life's increasing diversity, it's reach for sentience, it's long-term move from the general to the different, ist 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."

- it will take the whole technium, including us to discover tools, that are needed to surprise the world, along the way we generate more option, more connections, more diversity, more unity, more though, more beauty and more problems. Those add up to more good, an infinite game worth playing. That's what technology wants.










Zitate

"ability of sapiens to rapidly improve their tools allowed them to adapt to new ecological niches at a much faster rate than genetic evolution could ever allow" p.25

"We are coevolving with our technology and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology - every last knife and spear - were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotiv with technology."  p. 37

"The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look." p. 58

 "This flips the traditional view. In the old view, the internal (the source of mutation) created change, while the external(the environmental source of adaptation) selected or directed it; in the new view, the external (physical and chemical constraints) creates forms, while the internal (self-organization) selects or directs them." p. 120

- every organism and artifact is a wholly improbable arrangement of its constituent atoms. Yet within the long chain of reproducing self-organizatoin and restless evolution, these forms become highly probably, and even inevitable [...] And most of life's archetypal forms and stages are also inevitbale improbabilities, or, weh migh say, improbable inevitabilities [...] homo sapens is a tendency, not an entity

"The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology's imperative" p.155

 "When we spy our technological fate in the distance, we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather, we should lurch forward in preperation." p.173

"But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotiv with it. At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this discretion, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believ) to resist our second self." "The truth is that we are continuos with the machines we create" "By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts."
p.188

"Technology", Kay says, is anything that was invented after you were born" p. 235

"the dilemma is: to maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lies. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world." p.238


"This should be the first law of technologcial expectation: The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater the potential for harm as well"[...]"If a new technology is likely to birth a never-before-seen benefit, it woll also likely birth a never-before-seen problem."
-  p. 246

p. 323: I love the web because...


"As the technium expands, it accelerates the rate of evfolution first begun with life, so that it now evovles the idea of change itself. This is more than simple the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe"  p. 344

"the technium is an explosion of information, organization, complexity, diversity, sentience, beauty and structure that is changing itself as it expands". "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." p. 345

"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 th divine. [...] 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." p. 356


 "the technium expands life's fundamental traits, and in so doin it expands life's fundamental goodness. Life's increasing diversity, it's reach for sentience, it's long-term move from the general to the different, ist essential (and paradoxical) ability to generate new cersion of itseld, and its constant play in an infinite game are the very traits and "wants" of the technium." p. 359