From What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly
The technium is the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture. It is the current accumulation of all that humans have created. For the last 1,000 years, this techosphere has grown about 1.5% per year. It marks the difference between our lives now, verses 10,000 years ago. Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself. Yet, like all systems it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.
To head off any confusion, the technium is not conscious (at this point). Its wants are not deliberations, but rather tendencies. Leanings. Urges, Trajectories. By the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops, any large system will tend to lean in certain directions more than others. The sum total of millions of amplifying relationships, circuits, and networks of influence is to push the total in one direction more than another. Every owner of a large complicated machine can appreciate this tendency. Your machine will “want” to stall in certain conditions, or want to “runaway” in others. Left to its own devices, complex systems will gravitate to specific states. In mathematical terms this is called the convergence upon “strange attractors” – sort of gravity wells that pull in a complex system toward this state no matter where it starts.
Of course we humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants. Beyond our desires, there is a tendency within the technium that – all other things being equal — favors a certain solutions. Technology will head in certain directions because physics, mathematics, and realities of innovation constrain possibilities. Imagine other worlds of alien civilizations. Once they discover electricity, their electronics will share some, but not all, attributes with our electrical devices. That which they share can be counted as the inherent agenda of electrical technology. Throughout the galaxy any civilization that invents nuclear power will hit upon a small set of workable solutions: that set is the inherent “agenda” of technology.
The Arrow of Technological Progress
We live in a timeline that oscillates somewhere between strangeness and doom. Much of the blame gets placed on new technologies and society’s digestion of them. And though many of the growing pains we’re experiencing amount to history rhyming, our newfound access to enormous amounts of information has produced anomalies. Notably, we can create and live in elaborate simulative bubbles. Whether via politics (QAnon) or nostalgic cultural recreations (‘80s Downtown Art Scene), many choose to roleplay a world or previous historical era while increasingly intangible forms of technology become more powerful. It’s world-building that’s become almost a new social contract: let others do what they want politically and economically, so long as we can continue to roleplay without too much interference.
In general, people kind of live in this cultural simulation. For instance, when you look at something like Twitter—sure, there’s some tech that goes into it. But the way that it’s marketed to people—the way they interface with it—is through metaphors, as a simulation. So for you specifically, I wanted to tie this to the Technium: this idea of technology as its own thing that we almost aren’t a part of, that we actually just interface with.
Well, technically, we are part of the Technium. Humanity is itself an invention, a creation. We have engineered ourselves, and eventually will genetically engineer ourselves too. But for the most part, it’s something that is Other.
That is the curious paradox of the Technium: that we are both creators and the created, we are both the parent and child. That tension is going to remain forever—the tension of, are we in control, or is it controlling us? And the answer is yes.
https://palladiummag.com/2020/12/10/kevin-kelly-on-why-technology-has-a-will/
The Human Colossus - Neuralink
The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.
With the entire body of collective human knowledge in its brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own—things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before.
It turned our ox-drawn carts into speedy locomotives and our horse-and-buggies into shiny metal cars. It turned our lanterns into lightbulbs and written letters into telephone calls and factory workers into industrial machines. It sent us soaring through the skies and out into space. It redefined the meaning of “mass communication” by giving us radio and TV, opening up a world where a thought in someone’s head could be beamed instantly into the brains of a billion people.
If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.
And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.