What Technology Wants (39 page)

The same goes for the technium. The proper response to a lousy technology is not to stop technology or to produce no technology. It is to develop a better, more convivial technology.

Convivial
is a great word whose roots mean “compatible with life.” In his book
Tools for Conviviality,
the educator and philosopher Ivan Illich defined convivial tools as those that “enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups. . . .” Illich believed that certain technologies were inherently convivial, while others, such as “multilane highways and compulsory education,” were destructive no matter who ran them. In this way, tools were either good or bad for the living. But I am convinced by my study of the technium's imperative that conviviality resides not in the nature of a particular technology but in the job assignment, in the context, in the expression we construct for the technology. A tool's conviviality is mutable.

A convivial manifestation of a technology offers:

Living organisms and ecosystems are characterized by a high degree of indirect collaboration, transparency of function, decentralization, flexibility and adaptability, redundancy of roles, and natural efficiency; these are all traits that make biology useful to us and the reasons why life can sustain its own evolution indefinitely. So the more lifelike we train our technology to be, the more convivial it becomes for us and the more sustainable the technium becomes in the long run. The more convivial a technology is, the more it aligns with its nature as the seventh kingdom of life.

It is true that some technologies are more inclined toward certain traits than others. Certain technologies will easily be decentralized, while others will tend to centralize. Some will take to transparency naturally, others lean to obscurity, perhaps requiring great expertise to use. But every technology—no matter its origin—can be channeled toward more transparency, greater collaboration, increased flexibility, and greater openness.

And this is where our choice comes in. The evolution of new technologies is inevitable; we can't stop it. But the character of each technology is up to us.

13

So what does technology want? Technology wants what we want—the same long list of merits we crave. When a technology has found its ideal role in the world, it becomes an active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others. Our task is to encourage the development of each new invention toward this inherent good, to align it in the same direction that all life is headed. Our choice in the technium—and it is a real and significant choice—is to steer our creations toward those versions, those manifestations, that maximize that technology's benefits, and to keep it from thwarting itself.

Our role as humans, at least for the time being, is to coax technology along the paths it naturally wants to go.

But how do we know just where it wants to go? If certain aspects of the technium are preordained and certain aspects contingent upon our choices, how do we know which are which? Systems theorist John Smart has suggested that we need a technological version of the Serenity Prayer. Popular among participants in 12-step addiction recovery programs, the prayer, probably written in the 1930s by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, goes:

So how do we acquire the wisdom to discern the difference between the inevitable stages of technological development and the volitional forms that are up to us? What technique makes the inevitable obvious?

I think that tool is our awareness of the technium's long-term cosmic trajectories. The technium wants what evolution began. In every direction, technology extends evolution's four-billion-year path. By placing technology in the context of that evolution, we can see how those macroimperatives play out in our present time. In other words, technology's inevitable forms coalesce around the dozen or so dynamics common to all exotropic systems, including life itself.

I propose that the greater the number of exotropic traits we observe in a particular expression of technology, the greater its inevitability and its conviviality. If we want to compare, say, a vegetable-oil steam-powered automobile versus a rare-Earth-metal solar electric car, we could inspect the extent to which each of these mechanical manifestations supports these trends—not just follows the trends, but extends them. A technology's alignment with the trajectory of exotropic forces becomes the Serenity Prayer filter.

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:

This list of exotropic trends can serve as a sort of checklist to help us evaluate new technologies and predict their development. It can guide us in guiding them. For instance, at this particular phase in the technium, at the turn of the 21st century, we are building many intricate, complex systems of communications. This wiring up of the planet can happen in a number of ways, but my modest prediction is that the most sustainable technological arrangements will be those manifestations that tend toward the greatest increases in diversity, sentience, opportunity, mutuality, ubiquity, etc. We can compare two competing technologies to see which one favors more of these exotropic qualities. Does it open up diversity or close it down? Does it bank on increasing opportunities or assume they wither? Is it moving toward embedded sentience or ignoring it? Does it blossom in ubiquity or collapse under it?

Using this perspective we might ask, Is large-scale petrol-fed agriculture inevitable? This highly mechanical system of tractors, fertilizers, breeders, seed producers, and food processors provides the abundant cheap food that is the foundation of our leisure to invent other things. It feeds our longevity to keep inventing, and ultimately this food system fuels the increase in population that generates increasing numbers of new ideas. Does this system support the trajectories of the technium more than the food-production schemes that preceded it—both subsistence farming and animal-powered mixed farming at its peak? How does it compare to hypothetical alternative food systems we might invent? I would say as a rough first pass that mechanized farming was inevitable in that it increased the merits of energy efficiency, complexity, opportunities, structure, sentience, and specialization. It does not, however, support increasing diversity or beauty.

According to many food experts, the problem with the current food-production system is that it is heavily dependent on monocultures (not diverse) of too few staple crops (five worldwide), which in turn require pathological degrees of intervention with drugs, pesticides, and herbicides, soil disturbance (reduced opportunities), and overreliance on cheap petro fuels for both energy and nutrients (reduced freedoms).

Alternative scenarios that can scale up to the global level are hard to imagine, but there are hints that a decentralized agriculture, with less reliance on politically motivated government subsidies or petroleum or monocultures, might work. This evolved system of hyperlocal, specialized farms might be manned either by a truly globally mobile migrant labor force or by smart, nimble worker robots. In other words, instead of highly technological mass-production farms, the technium would run on highly technological personal or local farms. Compared to the industrial factory farm, as found in the corn belt of Iowa, this type of advanced gardening would lean toward more diversity, more opportunities, more complexity, more structure, more specialization, more choices, and more sentience.

This new, more convivial agriculture would sit “on top” of industrial agriculture in the same way industrial farming sits on top of subsistence farming, which is still the norm for most of the farmers alive today (most of them living in the developing world). Petrol-based farming will inevitably remain the largest global producer of food for many decades. The trajectories of the technium point toward a more sentient, diverse agriculture intelligently layered over it, much as the tiny region of our language skills sits on top of the bulk of our animal brain. In this way a more heterogeneous, decentralized agriculture is inevitable.

But if the trajectories of the technium are long trains of inevitability, why should we bother encouraging them? Won't they just roll along on their own? In fact, if these trends are inevitable, we couldn't stop them even if we wanted to, right?

Our choices can slow them down. Postpone them. We can work against them. As the dark skies of North Korea show, it is very possible to opt out of the inevitable for a while. On the other hand, there are several good reasons for hastening the inevitable. Imagine what a different world it would be if 1,000 years ago people had accepted the inevitability of political self-governance, or massive urbanization, or educated women, or automation. It is possible an early embrace of these trajectories could have accelerated the arrival of the Enlightenment and science, lifting millions of people out of poverty and increasing longevity centuries earlier. Instead, each of these movements was resisted, delayed, or actively suppressed in different parts of the world at different periods. Those efforts succeeded in crafting societies without these “inevitabilities.” From inside these systems these trends did not seem inevitable at all. Only in retrospect do we agree they are clearly long-term trends.

Of course, long-term trends are not equivalent to inevitabilities. Some argue that these particular trends still are not “inevitable” in the future; at any moment a dark age could descend and reverse their course. That is a possible scenario.

They are really only inevitable in the long term. These tendencies are not ordained to appear at a given time. Rather, these trajectories are like the pull of gravity on water. Water “wants” to leak out of the bottom of a dam. Its molecules are constantly seeking a way down and out, as if overcome with an obsessive urge. In a certain sense it is inevitable that someday the water
will
leak out—even though it may be retained by the dam for centuries.

Technology's imperative is not a tyrant ordering our lives in lock-step. Its inevitabilities are not scheduled prophesies. They are more like water behind a wall, an incredibly strong urge pent up and waiting to be released.

It may seem like I am painting a picture of a supernatural force, akin to a pantheistic spirit roaming the universe. But what I am outlining is almost the opposite. Like gravity, this force is embedded in the fabric of matter and energy. It follows the path of physics and obeys the ultimate law of entropy. The force that is waiting to erupt into the technologies of the technium was first pushed by exotropy, built up by self-organization, and gradually thrown from the inert world into life, and from life into minds, and from minds into the creations of our minds. It is an observable force found in the intersection of information, matter, and energy, and it can be repeated and measured, though it has only recently been surveyed.

The trends cataloged here are 13 facets of this urge. This list is not meant to be comprehensive. Other people may draw a different profile. I would also expect that as the technium expands in coming centuries and our understanding of the universe deepens, we will add more facets to this exotropic push.

In preceding chapters, I've sketched out three of these tendencies and shown how they display themselves in biological evolution and are now extending themselves into the growing technium. In chapter four, I traced the long-term increase in energy density from celestial bodies to the current champ of energy efficiency, the PC chip. In chapter six, I described the way the technium expands possibilities and opportunities. In chapter seven, I retold the story of life's rise as the story of increasing emergence, showing how “higher” levels of organization crystallize out of “lower” parts. In the sections that follow, I will briefly describe the other 10 universal tendencies carrying us forward.

Evolution manifests a number of tendencies, but the most visible of these trends is the long-term move toward complexity. If asked to describe the history of the universe in plain language, most people today would outline this great story: Creation moves from the ultimate simplicity after the big bang to a slow buildup of molecules in a few hot spots till the first tiny spark of life appears, and then an ever-increasing parade of more complex beings, from single cells to monkeys, and then the rush from simple brains to complex technology.

For most observers, the increasing complexity of life, mind, and technology feels intuitive. In fact, modern citizens need no argument to convince them that things have been getting more complex for 14 billion years. That trend seems to parallel the apparent increase in complexity they have seen in their own life spans, so it is easy to believe it has been going on a while.