What Technology Wants (3 page)

But the term
culture
falls short in one critical way. It is too small. What Beckmann recognized in 1802 when he baptized technology was that the things we were inventing were spawning other inventions in a type of self-generation. Technical arts enabled new tools, which launched new arts, which birthed new tools, ad infinitum. Artifacts were becoming so complex in their operation and so interconnected in their origins that they formed a new whole:
technology
.

The term
culture
fails to convey this essential self-propelling momentum pushing technology. But to be honest, the term
technology
does not quite get it right, either. It, too, is too small, because
technology
can also mean specific methods and gear, as in “biotechnology,” or “digital technology,” or the technology of the Stone Age.

I dislike inventing words that no one else uses, but in this case all known alternatives fail to convey the required scope. So I've somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the
technium
. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. For the rest of this book I will use the term
technium
where others might use
technology
as a plural, and to mean a whole system (as in “technology accelerates”). I reserve the term
technology
to mean a specific technology, such as radar or plastic polymers. For example, I would say: “The technium accelerates the invention of technologies.” In other words,
technologies
can be patented, while the
technium
includes the patent system itself.

As a word,
technium
is akin to the German word
technik
, which similarly encapsulates the grand totality of machines, methods, and engineering processes.
Technium
is also related to the French noun
technique,
used by French philosophers to mean the society and culture of tools. But neither term captures what I consider to be the essential quality of the technium: this idea of a self-reinforcing system of creation. At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence. It began to exercise some autonomy.

At first, this notion of technological independence is very hard to grasp. We are taught to think of technology first as a pile of hardware and secondly as inert stuff that is wholly dependent on us humans. In this view, technology is only what we make. Without us, it ceases to be. It does only what we want. And that's what I believed, too, when I set out on this quest. But the more I looked at the whole system of technological invention, the more powerful and self-generating I realized it was.

There are many fans, as well as many foes, of technology, who strongly disagree with the idea that the technium is in any way autonomous. They adhere to the creed that technology does only what we permit it to do. In this view, notions of technological autonomy are simply wishful thinking on our part. But I now embrace a contrary view: that after 10,000 years of slow evolution and 200 years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts have given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.

Okay, that's very poetic, but is there any
evidence
for the technium's autonomy? I think there is, but it rests on how we define autonomy. The qualities we hold dearest in the universe are all extremely slippery at the edges.
Life
,
mind
,
consciousness
,
order
,
complexity
,
free will
, and
autonomy
are all terms that have multiple, paradoxical, and inadequate definitions. No one can agree on exactly where life or mind or consciousness or autonomy begins and where it ends. The best we can agree on is that these states are not binary. They exist on a continuum. So: humans have minds, and so do dogs, and mice. Fish have tiny brains, so they must have tiny minds. Does that mean ants, who have smaller brains yet, also have minds? How many neurons do you need to have a mind?

Autonomy has a similar sliding scale. A newborn wildebeest will run on its own the day after it is born. But we can't say a human infant is an autonomous being if it will die without its mother for its first years. Even we adults are not 100 percent autonomous, since we depend upon other living species in our gut (such as
E. coli
) to aid in the digestion of our food or the breakdown of toxins. If humans are not fully autonomous, what is? An organism or system does not need to be wholly independent to exhibit some degree of autonomy. Like an infant of any species, it can acquire increasing degrees of independence, starting from a speck of autonomy.

So how do you detect autonomy? Well, we might say that an entity is autonomous if it displays any of these traits: self-repair, self-defense, self-maintenance (securing energy, disposing of waste), self-control of goals, self-improvement. The common element in all these characteristics is of course the emergence, at some level, of a self. In the technium we don't have any examples of a system that displays
all
these traits—but we have plenty of examples that display some of them. Autonomous airplane drones can self-steer and stay aloft for hours. But they don't repair themselves. Communication networks can repair themselves. But they don't reproduce themselves. We have self-reproducing computer viruses, but they don't improve themselves.

Woven deep into the vast communication networks wrapping the globe, we also find evidence of embryonic technological autonomy. The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world's electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.

Further deep analysis of the information flowing through the technium's network reveals that it has slowly been shifting its methods of organization. In the telephone system a century ago, messages dispersed across the network in a pattern that mathematicians associate with randomness. But in the last decade, the flow of bits has become statistically more similar to the patterns found in self-organized systems. For one thing, the global network exhibits self-similarity, also known as a fractal pattern. We see this kind of fractal pattern in the way the jagged outline of tree branches look similar no matter whether we look at them up close or far away. Today messages disperse through the global telecommunications system in the fractal pattern of self-organization. This observation doesn't prove autonomy. But autonomy is often self-evident long before it can be proved.

We created the technium, so we tend to assign ourselves exclusive influence over it. But we have been slow to learn that systems—all systems—generate their own momentum. Because the technium is an outgrowth of the human mind, it is also an outgrowth of life, and by extension it is also an outgrowth of the physical and chemical self-organization that first led to life. The technium shares a deep common root not only with the human mind, but with ancient life and other self-organized systems as well. And just as a mind must obey not only the principles governing cognition but also the laws governing life and self-organization, so the technium must obey the laws of mind, life, and self-organization—as well as our human minds. Thus out of all the spheres of influence upon the technium, the human mind is only one. And this influence may even be the weakest one.

The technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do. But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants. It wants to sort itself out, to self-assemble into hierarchical levels, just as most large, deeply interconnected systems do. The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.

I know this claim sounds strange. It seems to anthropomorphize stuff that is clearly not human. How can a toaster want? Aren't I assigning way too much consciousness to inanimate objects, and by doing so giving them more power over us than they have, or should have?

It's a fair question. But “want” is not just for humans. Your dog wants to play Frisbee. Your cat wants to be scratched. Birds want mates. Worms want moisture. Bacteria want food. The wants of a microscopic, single-celled organism are less complex, less demanding, and fewer in number than the wants of you or me, but all organisms share a few fundamental desires: to survive, to grow. All are driven by these “wants.” The wants of a protozoan are unconscious, unarticulated—more like an urge or a tendency. A bacterium tends to drift toward nutrients with no awareness of its needs. In a dim way it chooses to satisfy its wants by heading one way and not another.

With the technium,
want
does not mean thoughtful decisions. I don't believe the technium is conscious (at this point). Its mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather tendencies. Leanings. Urges. Trajectories. The wants of technology are closer to needs, a compulsion toward something. Just like the unconscious drift of a sea cucumber as it seeks a mate. The millions of amplifying relationships and countless circuits of influence among parts push the whole technium in certain unconscious directions.

Technology's wants can often seem abstract or mysterious, but occasionally, these days, you can see them right in front of you. Recently I visited a start-up called Willow Garage in a leafy suburban tract not far from Stanford University. The company creates state-of-the-art research robots. Willow's latest version of a personal robot, called PR2, stands about chest high, runs on four wheels, and has five eyes and two massive arms. When you take hold of one of its arms, it is neither rigid at the joints nor limp. It responds in a supple manner, with a gentle give, as if the limb were alive. It's an uncanny sensation. Yet the robot's grip is as deliberate as yours. In the spring of 2009, PR2 completed a full 26.2-mile marathon circuit in the building without crashing into obstacles. In robotdom, this is a huge accomplishment. But PR2's most notable achievement is its ability to find a power outlet and plug itself in. It's been programmed to look for its own power, but the specific path it takes emerges as it overcomes obstacles. So when it gets hungry, it searches for one of a dozen available power sockets in the building to recharge its batteries. It grabs its cord with one of its hands, uses its laser and optical eyes to line up a socket, and after gently probing the outlet in a small spiral pattern to find the exact slots, pushes its plug in to get fueled. It then sucks up power there for a couple of hours. Before the software was perfected, a few unexpected “wants” emerged. One robot craved plugging in even when its batteries were full, and once a PR2 took off without properly unplugging, dragging its cord behind it, like a forgetful motorist pulling out of the gas station with the pump hose still in the tank. As its behavior becomes more complex, so will its desires. If you stand in front of a PR2 while it is hungry, it won't hurt you. It will back-track and go around the building any way it can to find a plug. It's not conscious, but standing between it and its power outlet, you can clearly feel its want.

 

 

 

There is a nest of ants somewhere beneath my family's house. The ants, if we let them—and we won't—would carry off most of the food in our pantry. We humans are obliged to obey nature, except that sometimes we are forced to thwart it. While we bow to nature's beauty, we also frequently take out a machete and temporarily hack it back. We weave clothes to keep the natural world away from us, and we concoct vaccines to inoculate us against its mortal diseases. We rush to the wilderness to be rejuvenated, but we bring our tents.

The technium is now as great a force in our world as nature, and our response to the technium should be similar to our response to nature. We can't demand that technology obey us any more than we can demand that life obey us. Sometimes we should surrender to its lead and bask in its abundance, and sometimes we should try to bend its natural course to meet our own. We don't have to do everything that the technium demands, but we can learn to work with this force rather than against it.