Technology's epic story - Kevin Kelly

And I want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives, not just our immediate life, but in the cosmic sense. In a kind of a long history of the world and our place in the world, what is this stuff? What is the significance? And so, I want to kind of go through my little story of what I found out.

One of the first things I started to investigate was the history of the name of technology. In the United States, there's a State of the Union address given by every president since 1790, and each one of those is really kind of summing up the most important things for the United States at that time. If you search for the word "technology," it was not used until 1952. So, technology was sort of absent from everybody's thinking until 1952, which happened to be the year of my birth. Obviously, technology had existed before then, but we weren't aware of it, and so it was sort of awakening of this force in our life.

I actually did research to find the first use of the word technology; that was in 1829. It was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum, a course that brought together all the kinds of arts and crafts and industry, and he called it technology. That's the very first use of the word. So what is this stuff that we're all consumed by and bothered by? Allen K calls that technology "anything that was invented after you were born," which is sort of the idea that we normally have about what technology is—it's all that new stuff. It's not roads or penicillin or factory tires; it's the new stuff.

My friend Danny Hillis has a kind of a similar one: "this technology is anything that doesn't work yet," which is again a sense that it's all new. But we know that it's just not new; it actually goes way back, and what I want to suggest is it goes a long way back.

So, another way to think about technology and what it means is to imagine a world without technology. If we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today—and I mean everything from blades to scrapers to cloth—we, as a species, would not live very long. We would die by the billions, and very quickly the wolves would get us. We would be defenseless; we would be unable to grow enough food or find enough food. Even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools, and so with the minimal technology they had, they had some technology.

If we study those hunter-gatherer tribes, and lean and D and earth—all which are very similar to early man—we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology. This is a kind of a curve of their average age: there are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we've ever found. So, the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30. There are very few young infants because they die—a high mortality rate—and there's very few old people.

So, the profile of your average San Francisco neighborhood: a lot of young people. If you go there, you say, "Hey, everybody's really healthy!" That's because they're all young. The same thing is with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man: you didn't live beyond the age of 30, so it was a world without grandparents. Grandparents are very important because they are the transmitters of cultural evolution and information. Imagine a world where basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old; how much learning can you do? You can't do very much learning in your own life; it's so short, and there's nobody to pass on what you do learn.

So that's one aspect: it was a very short life. At the same time, anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world, without very little technology, actually did not spend very long gathering the food that they needed—three to six hours a day. Some anthropologists call that the original affluent society because they had banker's hours, basically.

So, it was possible to get enough food, but when scarcity came, when the highs and lows and the droughts came, then people went into starvation, and that's why they didn't live very long. So, what technology brought through very simple tools like these stone tools is that early bands of humans were actually able to bring about the extinction of about 250 megafauna animals in North America when they first arrived, ten thousand years ago. So, long before the Industrial Age, we’ve been affecting the planet on a global scale with just a small amount of technology.

The other thing that early man then discovered was fire. Fire was used to clear out, and again it affected the ecology of grass and whole continents and was used in cooking. It enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things. It was, sort of in a certain sense, in McLuhan's sense, an external stomach in a sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise. If we don't have fire, we actually could not live; our bites have adapted to these new diets. Our bites have changed in the last 10,000 years.

So, what's that little bit of technology? Humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so—the same numbers as Neanderthals everywhere—and we suddenly exploded with the invention of language around 50,000 years ago. The number of humans exploded, and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet. They migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until, within several tens of thousands of years, we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species with a very small amount of technology.

Even at that time, with the introduction of agriculture, 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, we start to see climate change. So, climate change is not a new thing; what's new is just the degree. Even during the agricultural age, there was climate change, and so already small amounts of technology were transforming the world.

What this means, and where I'm going, is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world. All the things that we see today that are changing our lives, we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology. So, it's a force that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet, and it's such a degree that I think that it's become our—who we are. In fact, our humanity and everything that we think about ourselves is something that we've invented.

So, we've invented ourselves. Of all the animals that we domesticated, the most important animal we've domesticated has been us. Okay? So, humanity is our greatest invention, but of course we're not done yet; we're still inventing. This is what technology is allowing us to do: it continues to reinvent ourselves. It's a very, very strong force.

I call this entire thing "us humans" as our technology. Everything that we've made—gadgets in our lives—we call that the Technium. That's this world ID networking definition of technologies: anything that is useful that a human mind makes. It's not just hammers and gadgets like laptops, but it's also law, and of course cities are ways to make things more useful to us.

While it's something that comes from our mind, it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos. The origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang in this way, in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the Big Bang and goes through galaxies and stars into life, and to us.

The three major phases of the early universe were energy, when the dominant force was energy; then it became the dominant force as it cooled, becoming matter; and then, with the invention of life four billion years ago, the dominant force in our neighborhood became information. That's what life is: this information process that was restructuring and making new order. So, those energy and matter—Einstein showed—were equivalent.

Now, the new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated. So, it's one long continuum: you put energy into the right kind of system, and out comes wasted heat, entropy, and extra trouble, which is order. It's the increasing order. So where does this order come from? Its roots go way back; we actually don't know.

But we do know that this self-organization trend throughout the universe is long, and it began with things like galaxies; they maintained their order for billions of years. Stars are basically nuclear fission machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years. This order against the entropy of the world, and flowers and plants are the same thing extended.

Technology is basically an extension of life. So one trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this is actually increasing. The amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence, and the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star because of the star's long lifespan.

The energy density in life is actually higher than a star, and the energy density that we've seen—the greatest, if anywhere in the universe—is actually in a PC chip. There's more energy flowing through, per gram per second, than anything that we have any other experience with.

What I would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going, we continue that trajectory, and we say that what's going to become more energy dense—that's where it's going. What I've done is I've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and said, "What are the general trends in evolutionary life?"

There are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, ubiquity, and most importantly, evolvability. Those very same things are also present in technology. That's where technology is going. In fact, technology is accelerating all the aspects of life.

We can see that happening. Just as there's diversity in life, there's more diversity in the things we make. Things in life start off being general cells and they become specialized, like tissue cells—your muscle cells, brain cells—and the same thing happens with, say, a hammer, which is general first and becomes more specific.

So, I would like to say that while there's six kingdoms of life, we can think of technology as basically a seventh kingdom of life. It's the granting off from the human form, but technology has its own agenda, like anything—like life itself.

For instance, right now, three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the Technium itself. In transportation, it's not to move us; it's to move the stuff that we make or buy. I use the word "want"; technology once—this is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power. Your cat wants more food; a bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light.

If urge, technology has an urge at the same time—it wants to give us things. What it gives us is basically progress. You can take all kinds of curves, and they're all pointing up. There's really no dispute about progress if we discount the cost of that.

That's the thing that bothers most people: is that progress is really real, but we wonder and question whether the environmental cost of it. I did a survey of the number of species of artifacts in my house, and there's 6,000. Other people have come up with 10,000. When King Henry of England died, he had 18,000 things in his house, but that was the entire wealth of England.

With that entire wealth of England, King Henry could not buy any antibiotics; he could not buy refrigeration. He could not buy a trip of a thousand miles, whereas this rickshaw wallah in India could save up and buy antibiotics, and he could buy refrigeration. He could buy things that King Henry, in his all's well—that's what progress is about.

So, technology's selfish; technology's generous. That conflict, that tension, will be with us forever. Sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do, and sometimes it's going to do things for us. We have confusion about what we should think about a new technology.

Right now, the default position about when a new technology comes along is—the way people talk about the precautionary principle—which is very common in Europe. It basically says don't do anything when you meet a new technology; stop until it can be proven that it does no harm. I think that really leads nowhere.

A better way is what I call the proactive principle: which is you engage with technology; you try it out. Obviously, you do what the precautionary principles suggest; you try to anticipate it. But after anticipating it, you constantly assess it—not just once, but eternally.

When it diverts from what you want, we prioritize risk; we evaluate not just the new stuff but the old stuff. We fix it. But most importantly, we relocate it. What I mean by that is that we find a new job for it. Nuclear energy, fission, is really a bad idea for bombs, but it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity instead of burning coal.

When we have a bad idea, the response to a bad idea is not no ideas; it's not to stop thinking. The response to a bad idea, I say, is that tungsten light bulb is a better idea. Okay? So better ideas are really always the response to technology that we don't like; it's basically take better technology.

In a certain sense, technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas, if you can think about it that way. So maybe spraying DDT on crops is a really bad idea, but DDT sprayed on local homes—there's nothing better to eliminate malaria than insect DDT impregnated mosquito nets.

But that's a really good idea—that's a good job for technology. So our job as humans is to parent our mind children, to find them good friends, to find them a good job. Every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job. That's actually my son right here!

There are no bad technologies, just like there's no bad children. Children—we don't say children are neutral; children are positive. We just have to find them the right place. What technology gives us over the long term—over this sort of extended evolution from the beginning of time, through the mention of plants and animals and evolution of life, the evolution of brains—what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences, increasing diversity, increasing options, increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities, and freedoms.

That's what we get from technology all the time. That's why people leave villages and go into cities, because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities. We are aware of the price; we pay a price for that. But we are aware of it, and generally we will pay the price for increased freedoms, choices, and opportunities.

Even technology wants clean water. Technology is diametrically opposed to nature because technology is an extension of life; it's parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants.

So, I think technology loves biology. If we allow it to, great movement that started billions of years ago is moving through us, and it continues to go. Our choice, so to speak, in technology is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves.

So, technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket; it's more than just gadgets; it's more than just things that people invent. It's actually part of a very long story—a great story that began billions of years ago. It's moving through us; it's self-organization. We're extending and accelerating it, and we can be part of it by linking the technology that we make with it.

I really appreciate your attention today. Thank you.