eyal matsliah's Library tagged technium →  View Popular

The
emergent system of the technium — what we often mean by "Technology" with
a capital T — has its own inherent agenda and urges, as does any
large complex system, indeed, as does life itself.

The technium is a superorganism of
technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force
is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but
it's also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of
technology itself. That's the part that is scary and interesting.

Three, we have to be willing to risk surrendering autonomy
to the technium in order to reap the maximum freedom and benefits
for ourselves. Invest, let go, benefit. That's the tradeoff in
control I explored extensively in Out of Control.

I believe we can't know what technology
means (or what the technium wants) until we know what we mean.
More importantly, I believe we'll answer both at once; that only
by understanding what technology is will we understand who we are.

Is a sprinter with two prosthetic carbon-fiber springs instead of legs, disabled or enhanced? If he wants to compete in the Olympics, are his springs a crutch, or a jet pack?  What is a human anyway?

Hollywood and science fiction authors are the new theologians.

Therefore this large scale technological identity crisis is going
to be the recurring theme of this century. 

in the grand sweep of the cosmic evolution from the Big
Bang outwards, where does the technium or technology fit in? What
powers the origin and expansion of the technium? Does it have a
direction? 

One way to think of the technium is as the 7th kingdom of life. There are roughly six kingdoms of life according to Lynn
Margulis and others. As an extropic system that originated from animals, one of the six kingdoms, we can think of the technium as a 7th.

If you look globally,
I can guarantee that somewhere in the world today, nearly every
technology you can imagine is still being used, either as a tool
in everyday life or in either a revival sense. 

technological species,
unlike biological species, don't go extinct.

Technology also follows
life in a cosmic scale migration towards greater complexity, diversity,
and energy density.

In this sense the technium doesn't want pollution; it wants the same kind of pristine environment that we want, especially with regards to higher technologies.  

As technology
has developed and become more sophisticated, it has become more
and more closely aligned with environmental practices, just as
humans have.

It turned out the technium was capable of producing
substitutes faster than the resources would be eliminated.

Pollution is the same — the solution to pollution in most cases is better technology. All the trajectories for the technium are towards recycling materials including pollutants, energy efficiency, scarcity substitutions, the replacement of mass with information — all of which we would call green technology.

We're in that really horrible position where we don't even know how much we don't know.

But done using DNA sequencing, it seems more likely every day. As the technium accumulates the vast genetic knowledge of all species on earth, and as genetic engineering technologies advance, it may be that this wealth of genetic information will become a reason for the technium to care about species survival.

To be sure it does produce both problems
and solutions, but the chief effect of technology is that it produces
more possibilities. More options. More freedom, essentially.

These
opportunities, these freedoms, are a very powerful force. Imagine
a great artist like Mozart born before the possibility of a piano,
or orchestra — what a loss that would have been. Or if Hitchcock
had been born before the technology of film had been invented. Or
Van Gogh before cheap oil paints.

we have a moral obligation
to increase the technology of the world — of the universe — to
insure that the genius of every person born will have some way to
express its fullness. In the end, this is what the technium wants,
too. What the other six kingdoms of life want. What we want. To increase
choices. To open up new freedoms. To expand the possible.

Another tremendously unappreciated enabling technology is the API. This gateway allows controlled sharing of vast archives of data, unleashing the data's power via the usual network effects -- the more that use it the more valuable it becomes.

But learning how to share data is what the next web will be about. Those who are able to let go and understand that all the real value in this next stage will be built on the emergent value that comes from deep interlinking, deep interconnecting, and freely (as is reasonable) releasing your precious data, those will be the technologies and organizations who gain the most. 

That fourth stage is the drift towards linking up the things themselves. You want all the data about a thing to be embedded into the thing.

What we ultimately want is an internet of things.

An operational Semantic Web, or World Wide Database, or Giant Global Graph, or Web  3.0, will make possible millions of seemingly smarter services. I  won't have to re-tell each website who my friends are; once will be enough. If my name shows up in text, it will know it's me.

The apparent smarter nature of the web will be due to the fact that the web will "know" more. Not in a conscious way, but in a programatic way. Concepts and items represented on the web will point to each other and know about each other -- in a fundamental way they do not right now.

If the web knows you are always you, who are you? If the price of total personal service is total personal transparency, is that any different than total personal surveillance?

I'm counting on the fact that kids will love it.