What Technology Wants (47 page)

Of course, dams inspire dread and disgust as well as awe and admiration. Soaring, breathtaking dams frustrate the return of single-minded salmon and other spawning fish, and they indiscriminately flood homelands. In the technium, revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates. On the other hand, no one has ever been revolted by a cathedral of redwoods. In reality no dam, even Hoover Dam, is eternal under the stars because rivers have a mind of their own; they pile up silt behind the dam's wedge so that eventually their waters can crawl over it. But while it stands, the artificial wins our admiration. We can identify with the dynamo revolving forever, as we feel our living hearts must do.

Passions for the made run wide. Almost anything manufactured will have adoring fans. Cars, guns, cookie jars, fishing reels, tableware, you name it. The “wild elaboration, passion and utility” of clocks snag some. For others the beauty of suspension bridges or of high-speed aircraft such as the SR71 or V2 is the apex of the made.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an “evocative object.” These bits of the technium are totems that serve as a springboard for identity or for reflection or for thinking. A doctor may love her stethoscope, as both badge and tool; a writer might cherish a special pen and feel its smooth weight pushing the words on its own; a dispatcher can love his ham radio, relishing its hard-won nuances as a magical door to other realms that opens to him alone; and a programmer can easily love the root operating code of a computer for its essential logical beauty. Turkle says, “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” She suspects that most of us have some kind of technology that acts as our touchstone.

I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it's the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo—a thing one plugs into—and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I've entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.

I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields to my desires, like a lover. Secret knowledge? Here. Predictions of what is to come? Here. Maps to hidden places? Here. Rarely does it fail to please, and more marvelous, it seems to be getting better every day. I want to remain submerged in its bottomless abundance. To stay. To be wrapped in its dreamy embrace. Surrendering to the web is like going on an aboriginal walkabout. The comforting illogic of dreams reigns. In dream time you jump from one page, one thought, to another. First on the screen you are in a cemetery, looking at an automobile carved out of solid rock; the next moment, there's a man in front of a blackboard writing the news in chalk, then you are in jail with a crying baby, then a woman in a veil gives a long speech about the virtues of confession, then tall buildings in a city blow their tops off in a thousand pieces in slow motion. I encountered all those dreamy moments this morning within the first few minutes of my web surfing. The net's daydreams have touched my own and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can't give you directions to a stranger's house, why can't you love the web?

Our technophilia is driven by the inherent beauty of the technium. Admittedly, this beauty has been previously hidden by a primitive phase of development that was not very pretty. Industrialization was dirty, ugly, and dumb in comparison to the biological matrix it grew from. A lot of that stage of the technium is still with us, spewing its ugliness. I don't know whether this ugliness is a necessary stage of the technium's growth or whether a smarter civilization than we could have tamed it earlier, but the arc of technology's origins from life's evolution, now accelerated, means that the technium contains all of life's inherent evolutionary beauty—waiting to be uncovered.

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and “useless.” Since technology is born out of usefulness, this is a long haul. As utilitarian technologies age, they tend to become recreational. Witness sailboats, open convertible cars, fountain pens, and fireplaces. Who would have guessed anyone would burn candles when lightbulbs are so cheap? But burning candles is now a mark of luxuriant uselessness. Some of our hardest-working technology today will achieve beautiful uselessness in the future. Perhaps a hundred years from now people will carry around “phones” simply because they like to carry things, even though they may be connected to the net by something they wear.

In the future, we'll find it easier to love technology. Machines win our hearts with every step they take in evolution. Like it or not, animal-like robots (at the level of pets, at first) will gain our affections, as even minimally lifelike ones do already. The internet provides a hint of the passion possible. Like many loves, it begins with infatuation and obsession. The global internet's nearly organic interdependence and emerging sentience make it wild, and its wildness draws our affections. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution.

Humans are the most complex, highly evolved organisms we have encountered, so we fixate on imitations of this form (quite naturally), but our technophilia is fundamentally not for anthropy, but for anything highly evolved.

Humanity's most advanced technology will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously nonhuman intelligences and obviously nonhuman robots and obviously non-Earthlike life, and all these will radiate an evolved attractiveness that will dazzle us.

As it does, we'll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it. In addition, the accelerated arrival of tens of millions more artifacts will deposit more layers onto the technium, polishing existing technology with more history and deepening the strata of embedded knowledge. Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this or that technology's charms and marvel at its subtlety. We will travel to it with children in tow to sit in silence beneath its towers.

The rock ant is tiny, even for an ant. Individually, each ant is the size of a comma on this page. Their colonies are small, too. Numbering about 100 workers, plus one queen, they normally nest between slivers of crumbling rock, hence their common name. Their entire society can fit into the glass case of a watch or between the one-inch covers of a microscope slide, which is where they are usually bred in laboratories. The brain of a rock ant contains fewer than 100,000 neurons and is so small as to be invisible. Yet a rock ant mind can perform an amazing feat of calculation. To assess the potential of a new nesting site, rock ants will measure the dimensions of the room in total darkness and then calculate—and that is the proper word—the volume and desirability of it. For many millions of years, rock ants have used a mathematical trick that was only discovered by humans in 1733. Rock ants can estimate the volume of a space, even an irregularly shaped one, by laying a scent trail across the floor of the space, “recording” the length of that line, and then counting the number of times they encounter that scented line during additional diagonal runs across the floor. The calculated area is inversely proportional to the frequency of intersections times length. In other words, the ants discovered an approximate value for pi derived by intersecting diagonals, a technique now known in mathematics as Buffon's Needle. Headroom in the potential ant house is measured by the ants with their bodies and then “multiplied” with the calculated area to give an approximate volume of their hole.

But these incredible tiny ant minds do more. They measure the width and numbers of entrances, the amount of light, the proximity of neighbors, and the degree of hygiene of the room. Then they tally these variables and calculate a desirability score for the potential nest by a process that resembles a “weighted additive” fuzzy-logic formula in computer science. All in 100,000 neurons.

The minds of animals are legion, and even fairly dumb ones can evoke amazement. Asian elephants will strip away branches to construct a fly switch to keep pesky flies away from their hind parts. Beavers, mere rodents, have been known to stockpile construction materials before starting to build their dams, thus displaying the ability to anticipate a future intent. They can even outwit humans trying to prevent their dams from flooding fields. Squirrels, another thinking rodent, continually outwit very smart college-degree suburbanites over control of their backyard bird feeders. (I've been battling my own black squirrel Einstein.) The honeyguide bird in Kenya lures humans to wild bee nests so that the birds can feast on the remaining bee brood after the humans remove the honey; sometimes, according to ornithologists, the honeyguide will “deceive” the hunters about the actual distance to a deep forest nest if it is more than two kilometers away, so as not to discourage them.

Plants, too, possess a decentralized type of intelligence. As biologist Anthony Trewavas argues in his remarkable paper, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” plants demonstrate a slow version of problem solving that fits most of our definitions of animal intelligence. They perceive their environment in great detail, they assess threats and competition, then take action to either adapt or remedy the problems, and they anticipate future states. Time-lapse motion pictures that speed up the action of vine tendrils probing their neighborhood make it clear that plants are closer to animals in their behavior than our fast lives permit us to see. Charles Darwin may have been the first to observe this. He wrote in 1822, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the root acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.” Like sensitive fingers, roots will caress the soil, seeking out moisture and nutrients much as a nose or trunk of a herbivore might dig in the earth. The ability of a leaf to follow the sun (heliotropism) to gain optimal light exposure can be replicated in a machine, but only by using a fairly sophisticated computer chip as a brain. A plant thinks without a brain. It uses a vast network of transducing molecular signals instead of electronic nerves to carry and process information.

Plants exhibit all the characteristics of intelligence, except they do it without a centralized brain and in slow motion. Decentralized minds and slow minds are actually quite common in nature and occur at many levels throughout the six kingdoms of life. A slime-mold colony can solve the shortest distance to food in a maze, much like a rat. The animal immune system, whose primary purpose is to distinguish between self and nonself, retains a memory of outside antigens it has encountered in the past. It learns in a Darwinian process and in a sense also anticipates future variations of antigens. And throughout the animal kingdom collective intelligence is expressed in hundreds of ways, including the famous hive minds of social insects.

The manipulation, storage, and processing of information is a central theme of life. Learning erupts over and over again in the history of evolution, as if it were a force waiting to be released. A charismatic version of intelligence—the kind of anthropomorphic smartness we associate with apes—evolved not just in primates but in at least two other unrelated taxa: whales and birds.

Stories of dolphin intelligence are famous. Dolphins and whales not only demonstrate intelligence, but they also occasionally give hints that they share a style of intelligence with us, the hairless apes. For instance, captive dolphins have been known to train other dolphins new to the pool. Yet the most recent common ancestor for apes, whales, and dolphins was 250 million years ago. In between apes and dolphins are many families of animals without this variety of thought. We can only surmise that this style of intelligence evolved independently.

The same can be said for birds. Measured by their intelligence, crows, ravens, and parrots are the “primates” of birds. Their forebrains are as relatively large as those of nonhuman apes, and the ratio of their brain weight to body weight is in the same line as apes. Like primates, crows live long and in complex social groups. New Caledonian crows, like chimpanzees, craft tiny spears to fish for grubs in crevices. Sometimes they save the manufactured spears and carry them around. In experiments with scrub jays, researchers discovered that that jays would re-hide their food later if another bird was watching them when they first hid it, but only if the jays had been robbed before. Naturalist David Quammen suggests that crow and raven behavior is so clever and peculiar that they should be evaluated “not by an ornithologist but by a psychiatrist.”

Thus, charismatic intelligence evolved independently three times: in birds on wing, in mammals that returned to the sea, and in primates.