What Technology Wants

"This is Kevin Kelly’s very new book which I think is very profound. He’s the editor of Wired and has a really interesting background. He grew up in some sort of Amish-like community. Why do I think that? Anyway, in a backwoods, rural way, but he’s now the editor of a magazine about computers. He realises that there’s an inexorability about the way technology changes and that it’s almost as if technology has its own agenda. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He talks about the technium, the technologies that drive our lives and have a sort of inertia, a momentum about them. We invent the adjacent possible. We don’t make great leaps. We think we do and we give out Nobel Prizes but they are always building on the shoulders of others and making tiny incremental changes, but they happen to be in the right place at the right time when we’re giving out the prizes. So you don’t invent the internet before the computer. It edges forward incrementally, one step at a time. That’s why you get the simultaneous discovery of things. Almost every exciting technology has about five angry people saying, hang on, I invented it. Neptune was discovered by a Frenchman and an Englishman on the same day. Rosalind Franklin. She was one of the people on whose shoulders everyone trod, but then she was standing on Maurice Wilkins’s shoulders. She was a huge part of the story but was badly treated, as was Maurice Wilkins. She’s a classic example of how the incremental nature of discovery is overlooked in how we tell history. Because there is no end to this process. The only fuel that technology needs is ideas. You recombine thoughts to produce new thoughts. That process can go on indefinitely. We’re not going to run out of ways of tweaking cars and computers. There is an infinite supply of improvements to technology which will raise living standards."