What Technology Wants (4 page)

And to do that successfully, we first need to understand technology's behavior. In order to decide how to respond to technology, we have to figure out what technology wants.

After a long journey, that is where I have ended up. By listening to what technology wants, I feel that I have been able to find a framework to guide me through this rising web of hatching technologies. Seeing our world through technology's eyes has, for me, illuminated its larger purpose. And recognizing what it wants has reduced much of my own conflict in deciding where to place myself in its embrace. This book is my report on what technology wants. My hope is that it will help others find their own way to optimize technology's blessings and minimize its costs.

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To see where technology is going, we need to see where it has come from. And that's not easy. The further back we trace the technium's history, the further back its origins seem to recede. So let's begin with our own origins, that moment in prehistory when humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. What were our lives like without technology?

The problem with this line of questioning is that technology predated our humanness. Many other animals used tools millions of years before humans. Chimpanzees made (and of course still make) hunting tools from thin sticks to extract termites from mounds and slammed rocks to break nuts. Termites themselves construct vast towers of mud for their homes. Ants herd aphids and farm fungi in gardens. Birds weave elaborate, twiggy fabrics for their nests. And some octopuses will find and carry shells for portable homes. The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of one's own body is a half-billion-year-old trick at least.

Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or predigesting, with fire. Cooking acts as a supplemental stomach—an artificial organ that permits smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provides more kinds of stuff to eat. Technology-assisted hunting, as opposed to tool-free scavenging, is equally old. Archaeologists have found a stone point jammed into the vertebra of a horse and a wooden spear embedded in a 100,000-year-old red deer skeleton. This pattern of tool use has only accelerated in the years since.

All technology, the chimp's termite-fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leaf-cutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate manufactured technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as antinature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals, a tool is as natural as our life. Humans are animals—no argument. But humans are also not-animals—no argument. This contradictory nature is at the core of our identity. Likewise, technology is unnatural—by definition. And technology is natural—by a wider definition. This contradiction is also core to human identity.

Tools and bigger brains mark the beginning of a distinctly human line in evolution. The first simple stone tools appeared in the same archaeological moment that the brains of the hominins (humanish apes) who made them began to enlarge toward their current size. Thus hominins arrived on Earth 2.5 million years ago with rough, chipped stone scrapers and cutters in hand. About a million years ago, these large-brained, tool-wielding hominins drifted beyond Africa and settled into southern Europe, where they evolved into the Neanderthal (with an even bigger brain) and further into eastern Asia, where they evolved into
Homo erectus
(also bigger brained). Over the next several million years, all three hominin lines evolved, but the ones that remained in Africa evolved into the human form we see in ourselves. The exact time these protohumans became fully modern humans is of course debated. Some say 200,000 years ago, but the undisputed latest date is 100,000 years ago. By 100,000 years ago, humans had crossed the threshold where they were outwardly indistinguishable from us. We would not notice anything amiss if one of them were to stroll alongside us on the beach. However, their tools and most of their behavior were indistinguishable from those of their relatives the Neanderthals in Europe and Erectus in Asia.

For the next 50 millennia not much changed. The anatomy of African human skeletons remained constant over this time. Neither did their tools evolve much. Early humans employed rough-and-ready lumps of rock with sharpened edges to cut, poke, drill, or spear. But these handheld tools were unspecialized and did not vary by location or time. No matter where or when in this period (called the Mesolithic) a hominin picked up one of these tools, it would resemble one made tens of thousands of miles away or tens of thousands of years earlier or later, whether in the hands of a Neanderthal, Erectus, or
Homo sapiens
. Hominins simply lacked innovation. As biologist Jared Diamond put it, “Despite their large brains, something was missing.”

Then about 50,000 years ago, that missing something arrived. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time, hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, or Sapiens (a term I am using to distinguish them from earlier populations of
Homo sapiens
), charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands, and in a rela-tively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands of individuals in Africa to an estimated eight million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Prehistory Explosion of Human Population.
A simulation of the first human population explosion, which began about 50,000 years ago.

The speed at which Sapiens marched across the planet and settled every continent (except Antarctica) is astounding. In 5,000 years they overtook Europe. In another 15,000 they reached the edges of Asia. Once tribes of Sapiens crossed the land bridge from Eurasia into what is now Alaska, it took them only a few thousand years to fill the whole of the New World. Sapiens increased so relentlessly that for the next 38,000 years they expanded their occupation at the average rate of one mile (two kilometers) per year. Sapiens kept pushing until they reached the furthest they could go: land's end at the tip of South America. Fewer than 1,500 generations after their “great leap forward” in Africa,
Homo sapiens
had become the most widely distributed species in Earth's history, inhabiting every type of biome and every watershed on the planet. Sapiens were the most invasive alien species ever.

Today the breadth of Sapiens occupation exceeds that of any other macrospecies we know of; no other visible species occupies more niches, geographical and biological, than
Homo sapiens
. Sapiens' overtake was always rapid. Jared Diamond notes that “after the ancestors of the Maori reached New Zealand,” carrying only a few tools, “it apparently took them barely a century to discover all worthwhile stone sources; only a few more centuries to kill every last moa in some of the world's most rugged terrain.” This sudden global expansion following millennia of steady sustainability was due to only one thing: technological innovation.

As Sapiens expanded in range, they remade animal horns and tusks into thrusters and knives, cleverly turning the animals' own weapons against them. They sculpted figurines, the first art, and the first jewelry, beads cut from shells, at this threshold 50,000 years ago. While humans had long used fire, the first hearths and shelter structures were invented about this time. Trade of scarce shells, chert, and flint rock began. At approximately the same time Sapiens invented fishing hooks and nets and needles for sewing hides into clothes. They left behind the remains of tailored hides in graves. A few bits of pottery from that time have the imprint of woven net and loose fabrics on them. In the same period Sapiens also invented animal traps. Their garbage reveals heaps of skeletons of small furred animals without their feet; trappers today still skin small animals the same way, keeping the feet with the skin. On walls artists painted humans wearing parkas and killing animals with arrows or spears. Significantly, unlike Neanderthal's and Erectus's crude creations, these tools varied in small stylistic and technological ways place by place. Sapiens had begun innovating.

The Sapiens mind's ability to make warm clothes opened up the arctic regions, and the invention of fishing gear opened up the coasts and rivers of the world, particularly in the tropics, where large game was scarce. While Sapiens' innovation allowed them to prosper in many new climates, the cold and its unique ecology especially drove innovation. More complex “technological units” are needed (or have been invented) by historical hunter-gatherer tribes the higher the latitude of their homes. Hunting oceanic sea mammals in arctic climes took significantly more sophisticated gear than fishing salmon in a river. The 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.

During their quick global takeover, Sapiens displaced (with or without interbreeding) the several other coinhabiting hominin species on Earth, including their cousins the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were never abundant; they may have only numbered 18,000 individuals at one time. After dominating Europe for hundreds of thousands of years as the sole hominin, the Neanderthals vanished in less than 100 generations after the tool-carrying Sapiens arrived. That is a blink in history. As anthropologist Richard Klein points out, this displacement occurred almost instantaneously from a geologic perspective. There were no intermediates in the archaeological record. As Klein says, “The Neanderthals were there one day, and the Cro-Magnons [Sapiens] were there the next.” The Sapien layer was always on top, and never the reverse. It was not even necessary that the Sapiens slaughter the Neanderthals. Demographers have calculated that as little as a 4 percent difference in reproductive effectiveness (a reasonable expectation given Sapiens' ability to bring home more kinds of meat) could eclipse the lesser breeding species in a few thousands years. The speed of this several-thousand-year extinction was without precedent in natural evolution. Sadly, it was only the first rapid species extinction to be caused by humans.

It should have been clear to Neanderthals, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared—a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (including Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, and William Calvin, among many others) think that the “something” that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, hominins had been smart. They could make crude tools in a hit-or-miss way and handle fire—perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The growth of the African hominin's brain size and physical stature had leveled off, but evolution continued inside the brain. “What happened 50,000 years ago,” says Klein, “was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation affected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech.” Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthals and Erectus did, Sapiens gained a rewired brain. Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennett crows in elegant language: “There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When
Homo sapiens
became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species.” The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.

Language accelerates learning and creation by permitting communication and coordination. A new idea can be spread quickly if someone can explain it and communicate it to others before they have to discover it themselves. But the chief advantage of language is not communication but autogeneration. Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns a mind into a tool. With a grip on the slippery, aimless activity of self-awareness and self-reference, language can harness a mind into a fountain of new ideas. Without the cerebral structure of language, we couldn't access our own mental activity. We certainly couldn't think the way we do. If our minds can't tell stories, we can't consciously create; we can only create by accident. Until we tame the mind with an organization tool capable of communicating to itself, we have stray thoughts without a narrative. We have a feral mind. We have smartness without a tool.