Recommended: What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Part 1)
I finally got around to reading this book by Kevin Kelly. It was, most decidedly, not a book to plow through in a single sitting. For me it took a lot of time -- months, in fact, digesting it slowly, and sometimes just as a background process. The final sprint was a rush: I covered the second half of the book in about a week's time.
I wrote out a couple of pages of notes to capture the essential takeaways, which I might eventually post, but I still want to distill its essence below. This is part one.
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The Technium includes all things made by humans. It captures more than we would simply refer to as "technology." Its current incarnation exists as a result of:
Preordained technology:....the laws of physics, and the self organizing tendencies of large, complex, adaptive system.
The gravity of the past -- the momentum of history, if you will -- constrains our choices going forward. We have built systems that are part of the infrastructure and force us down a constrained path.
Our collective choices, given #1-2. This is not the given, but the choices we make. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone wasn't.
The Amish are very selective in the technology they will allow into their lives. They are selective, and reject more than they accept. They evaluate by experience over theory. They adopt on several criteria: does it enhance family and community, and keep the world at a distance? Their choices and decisions are communal, not individual.
Question: Is it an addiction? The dopamine rush of the new? Are we addicted but unaware? Or do we willingly choose?
Answer: We freely choose it, because on the whole, it offers a greater benefit, but not by much. We embrace it and pay the price.
Lesson: Be selective in what you embrace.
The Battle in Managing Our Technology
How can we personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally?
to maximize our own contentment, we seek to minimize the amount of technology in our lives.
to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world.
we can only find our own minimal tools if other create a maximum pool of options to choose from.
The Technium's Imperative
When we first meet a new technology, we don't know how it will grow up. We are blinded by imagining it will do an old job better. When new technologies emerge, we see an intended use, and an actual use. The positive effects are easy to imagine; second- and third-order effects are more difficult to imagine. They require a certain density or ubiquity to reveal themselves: traffic jams, global warming, accidents and deaths, road rage, etc.
When a new technology is created, there is suddenly a new choice that did not exist before. As new technologies emerge, we will be tempted to reject them, but we should prefer a bad idea to no idea at all, because at least a bad idea can be reformed.
"The evolution of technology is inevitable. The character of each technology is up to us."
This gives us a scope for evaluating tech:
> Prioritization of risks
> Rapid correction of harm
> Not prohibition, but redirection
And then, a framework for having a convivial relationship with technology.
Cooperation: it promotes collaboration among people.
Transparency: Its ownership and origins are clear.
Decentralization: ownership, production and control are distributed, and it's not monopolized by professionals.
Flexibility: that it's easy for others to modify, adapt, improve, or inspect its core.
Redundancy: it's not the only option
and Efficiency: It minimizes the impact on ecosystems.
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