What Technology Wants (2 page)

I acknowledge that my relationship with technology is full of contradictions. And I suspect they are your contradictions, too. Our lives today are strung with a profound and constant tension between the virtues of more technology and the personal necessity of less: Should I get my kid this gadget? Do I have time to master this labor-saving device? And more deeply: What
is
this technology taking over my life, anyway? What is this global force that elicits both our love and repulsion? How should we approach it? Can we resist it, or is each and every new technology inevitable? Does the relentless avalanche of new things deserve my support or my skepticism—and will my choice even matter?

I needed some answers to guide me through my technological dilemma. And the first question I faced was the most basic. I realized I had no idea what technology really
was
. What was its essence? If I didn't understand the basic nature of technology, then as each new piece of it came along, I would have no frame of reference to decide how weakly or strongly to embrace it.

My uncertainty about the nature of technology and my own conflicted relationship with it sent me on a seven-year quest that eventually became this book. My investigations took me back to the beginning of time and ahead to the distant future. I delved deep into technology's history, and I listened to futurists in Silicon Valley, where I live, spin out imaginative scenarios for what will come next. I interviewed some of technology's fiercest critics and its most ardent fans. I returned to rural Pennsylvania to spend more time with the Amish. I traveled to mountain villages in Laos, Bhutan, and western China to listen to the poor who lack material goods, and I visited the labs of rich entrepreneurs trying to invent things that everyone will consider essential in a few years.

The more closely I looked at the conflicting tendencies of technology, the bigger the questions became. Our confusion over technology usually starts with a very specific concern: Should we allow human cloning? Is constant texting making our kids dumb? Do we want automobiles to park themselves? But as my quest evolved, I realized that if we want to find satisfying answers to those questions, we first need to consider technology as a whole. Only by listening to technology's story, divining its tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction can we hope to solve our personal puzzles.

 

 

 

Despite its power, technology has been invisible, hidden, and nameless. One example: Since George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in 1790, every American president has presented to Congress an annual summary of the nation's condition and prospects and the most important forces at work in the world. Until 1939, the colloquial use of the term
technology
was absent. It did not occur twice in a State of the Union address until 1952. Surely my grandparents and parents were surrounded by technology! Yet for most of its adult life, our collective invention did not have a name.

The word
technelogos
is nominally Greek. When the ancient Greeks used the word
techne,
it meant something like art, skill, craft, or even craftiness.
Ingenuity
may be the closest translation.
Techne
was used to indicate the ability to outwit circumstances, and as such it was a trait greatly treasured by poets like Homer. King Odysseus was a master of
techne
. Plato, though, like most scholarly gentlemen of that era, thought that
techne,
which he used to mean manual craftwork, was base, impure, and degraded. Because of his contempt for practical knowledge, Plato omitted any references to craft in his elaborate classification of all knowledge. In fact, there's not a single treatise in the Greek corpus that even mentions
technelogos
—with one exception. To the best of our knowledge, it was in Aristotle's treatise
Rhetoric
that the word
techne
was first joined to
logos
(meaning word or speech or literacy) to yield the single term
technelogos
. Four times in this essay, Aristotle refers to
technelogos,
but in all four instances, his exact meaning is unclear. Is he concerned with the “skill of words” or the “speech about art” or maybe a literacy of craft? After this fleeting, cryptic appearance, the term
technology
essentially disappeared.

But of course, technology did not. The Greeks invented iron welding, the bellows, the lathe, and the key. Their students the Romans invented the vault, the aqueduct, blown glass, cement, sewers, and water mills. Yet in their own time and for many centuries thereafter, the totality of all that was manufactured was virtually invisible—never discussed as a distinct subject, apparently never even contemplated. Technology could be found everywhere in the ancient world except in the minds of humans.

In the centuries following, scholars continued to call the making of things
craft
and the expression of inventiveness
art
. As tools, machines, and contraptions spread, the work performed with them was termed the “useful arts.” Each useful art—mining, weaving, metalworking, needlework—had its own secret knowledge that was passed on through a master/apprentice relationship. But it was still an
art,
a singular extension of its maker, and the term retained the original Greek sense of craft and cleverness.

For the next thousand years, art and technique were perceived as distinctly personal realms. Each product of these arts, whether an iron-work fence or an herbal formula, was considered a unique expression derived from the particular cleverness of a particular person. Anything made was a work of solitary genius. As the historian Carl Mitcham explains, “Mass production was unthinkable to the classical mind, and not just for technical reasons.”

By the European Middle Ages, craftiness manifested itself most significantly in a new use of energy. An efficient horse collar had disseminated throughout society, drastically increasing farm acreage, while water mills and windmills were improved, increasing the flow of lumber and flour and improving drainage. And all this plentitude came without slavery. As Lynn White, historian of technology, wrote, “The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power.” Machines were becoming our coolies.

In the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was one of several revolutions that overturned society. Mechanical creatures intruded into farms and homes, but still this invasion had no name. Finally, in 1802, Johann Beckmann, an economics professor at Gottingen University in Germany, gave this ascending force its name. Beckmann argued that the rapid spread and increasing importance of the useful arts demanded that we teach them in a “systemic order.” He addressed the techne of architecture, the techne of chemistry, metalwork, masonry, and manufacturing, and for the first time he claimed these spheres of knowledge were interconnected. He synthesized them into a unified curriculum and wrote a textbook titled
Guide to Technology
(or
Technologie
in German), resurrecting that forgotten Greek word. He hoped his outline would become the first course in the subject. It did that and more. It also gave a name to what we do. Once named, we could now see it. Having seen it, we wondered how anyone could not have seen it.

Beckmann's achievement was more than simply christening the unseen. He was among the first to recognize that our creations were not just a collection of random inventions and good ideas. The whole of technology had remained imperceptible to us for so long because we were distracted by its masquerade of rarefied personal genius. Once Beckmann lowered the mask, our art and artifacts could be seen as interdependent components woven into a coherent impersonal unity.

Each new invention requires the viability of previous inventions to keep going. There is no communication between machines without extruded copper nerves of electricity. There is no electricity without mining veins of coal or uranium, or damming rivers, or even mining precious metals to make solar panels. There is no metabolism of factories without the circulation of vehicles. No hammers without saws to cut the handles; no handles without hammers to pound the saw blades. This global-scale, circular, interconnected network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, codes, calculators, sensors, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators—this whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a single system.

When scientists began to investigate how this system functioned, they soon noticed something unusual: Large systems of technology often behave like a very primitive organism. Networks, especially electronic networks, exhibit near-biological behavior. Early in my online experience I learned that when I sent out an e-mail message, the network would cut it up into pieces and then send those bits along more than one pathway to the message's final destination. The multiple routes were not predetermined but “emerged” depending on the traffic of the whole network at the instant. In fact, two parts of the e-mail might take radically different pathways and then reassemble at the end. If a bit got lost along the way, it was simply re-sent along different routes until it arrived. That struck me as marvelously organic—very much like the way messages in an anthill are sent.

In 1994, I published a book called
Out of Control
that explored at length the ways in which technological systems were beginning to mimic natural systems. I cited computer programs that could duplicate themselves and synthetic chemicals that could catalyze themselves—even primitive robots that could self-assemble, just as cells do. Many large, complex systems, such as the electrical grid, had been designed to repair themselves, not too differently from the way our bodies do. Computer scientists were using the principles of evolution to breed computer software that was too difficult for humans to write; instead of designing thousands of lines of code, the researchers unleashed a system of evolution to select the best lines of code and keep mutating them, then killing off the duds until the evolved code performed perfectly.

At the same time, biologists were learning that living systems can be imbued with the abstracted essence of a mechanical process like computation. For instance, researchers discovered that DNA—the actual DNA found in the ubiquitous bacteria
E. coli
in our own intestines—could be used to compute the answers to difficult mathematical problems, just like a computer. If DNA could be made into a working computer, and a working computer could be made to evolve like DNA, then there might be, or must be, a certain equivalency between the made and the born. Technology and life must share some fundamental essence.

During the years I was puzzling over these questions, something strange happened to technology: The best of it was becoming incredibly disembodied. Fantastic stuff was getting smaller, using less material but doing more. Some of the best technology, such as software, didn't have a material body at all. This development wasn't new; any list of great inventions in history contains plenty that are rather wispy: the calendar, the alphabet, the compass, penicillin, double-entry accounting, the U.S. Constitution, the contraceptive pill, domestication of animals, zero, germ theory, lasers, electricity, the silicon chip, and so on. Most of these inventions wouldn't hurt you if you dropped them on your toes. But now the process of disembodiment was speeding up.

Scientists had come to a startling realization: However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. And as technology was unveiled from its shroud of atoms, we could see that at its core, it, too, is about ideas and information. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.

It was at this point that I realized I needed even greater clarity on what kind of force flowed through technology. Was it really mere ghostly information? Or did technology need physical stuff? Was it a natural force or an unnatural one? It was clear (at least to me) that technology was an extension of natural life, but in what ways was it
different
from nature? (Computers and DNA share something essential, but a Mac-Book is not the same as a sunflower.) It is also clear that technology springs from human minds, but in what categorical way are the products of our minds (even cognitive products like artificial intelligences) different from our minds themselves? Is technology human or nonhuman?

We tend to think of technology as shiny tools and gadgets. Even if we acknowledge that technology can exist in disembodied form, such as software, we tend not to include in this category paintings, literature, music, dance, poetry, and the arts in general. But we should. If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology (the computer code for a web page), then a thousand lines of letters in English (
Hamlet
) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google's search engine and the iPod: They are something useful produced by a mind. We can't separate out the multiple overlapping technologies responsible for a
Lord of the Rings
movie. The literary rendering of the original novel is as much an invention as the digital rendering of its fantastical creatures. Both are useful works of the human imagination. Both influence audiences powerfully. Both are technological.

Why not just call this vast accumulation of invention and creation
culture
? In fact, some people do. In this usage, culture would include all the technology we have invented so far, plus the products of those inventions, plus anything else our collective minds have produced. And if by “culture” one means not just local ethnic cultures but the aggregate culture of the human species, then this term very nearly represents this vast sphere of technology that I have been talking about.