technology - eyal matsliah on Diigo

18 Oct 09

15 Aug 09

Technology, Evolution, and God | Integral Life

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technology evolution spirituality kevin-kelly to-read must-read

07 Aug 09

The Technium: Technophilia

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technology culture technophilia predictions

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an "evocative object."
Turkle says, "we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with."
8 more annotations...
- 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.
- 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 me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.
- 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?
- But the goal of every robot, and every machine and tool, is to exist for its own sake. To exist not only because it is useful, but because its existence is beautiful.
- e don't "need" a lot of what we maintain. We keep specific technology around not only because it may be useful, but because we like to have it around. The gear, devices, networks form an interdependent ecosystem of interrelated parts, and we have a technophilia for its survival. We love the jungly mesh of the technium, and the way we can lose ourselves in it. We rebel at the negative costs of this interrelatedness, and its negative externalities such as pollution (global warming is a type of pollution), but we have a deep affinity for its web. We continue to manufacture new ideas and new artifacts, not because we always need them, but because the technium needs them, and because we find the technium attractive.
- As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: "We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don't worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber."
- No human can turn away from the trick of anthropomorphism, and not be seduced by the humanity we project onto look-alikes, but the attraction of highly evolved technology is not only in its reflection of our faces. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution.
- 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 technology's charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.
  
  And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

06 Aug 09

The Technium: The Choice of Cities

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globalization technology urban

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them.
As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, "Cities are wealth creators; they have always been." He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world's population, "produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations." A Canadian demographer figured that "80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities." The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens.
5 more annotations...
- As Suketa Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai, and quoted by Brand) says, "Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?" Then he answers: "So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment…"
- Then Mehta continues: "For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn't just about money. It's also about freedom." Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children."
- The migrants don't have to come. Yet, they come by the millions from the villages, or the deserts and scrublands. If you ask them why they come, it's almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities.
- Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desires to migrate to the city because their villages lacked the options of education, jobs and opportunity. It is true there's an imbalance of options — that's the point. But there is work in the villages; it is just that this work does not pay cash (by which to buy cell phones and movie tickets), and it is boring for many, although it can be very satisfying if one is patient. That livelihood of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, strong conformity, rewarding physical labor — all this treasure is unquestionably available to them. They could stay. But they do not choose it. They choose possibilities and opportunities.
- A certain small percentage of the river of people streaming into the cities today are being pushed by the expansion of the technium. It is a horribly stupid policy to destroy natural habitat this way, and a horribly stupid policy to displace tribes. It does not have to be that way. Wiser people would not allow it.
  
  But today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities — the hundreds of millions per decade — is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head towards possibilities and increased freedoms.

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

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technology evolution free-will

another great article by kevin kelly - eyalnow on 2009-08-06

"technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions."
Lastly, who you are in the richest sense of the word — your character, your spirit, what you do with your life — is determined by what you choose. An awful lot of the shape of your life is given to you and is beyond your control, but your freedom to choose within those givens is huge and significant. The course of your life within the constraints of your genes and environment is up to you.
16 more annotations...
- Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.
- "So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse." More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.
- As in personality, technology is shaped by a triad. In addition to the primary drive of preordained development (force #1), and in addition to the escapable influences of technological history (force #2), there is society's collective free will in shaping the technium (force #3).
- In contrast to these two, the third force is our free will to make individual choices of use, and collective policy decisions. Compared to all possibilities that we can imagine we have a very narrow range of choices. But compared to 10,000 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, or even last year, our possibilities are expanding. Although restricted in the cosmic sense, we have more choice than we know what to do with. And via the engine of the technium, these real choices will keep expanding (even though the larger path is preordained).
- "human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen." And so as historian David Apter writes, "to be modern means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices" in "a process of increasing complexity in human affairs within which the polity must act," that is within a course that is determined.
- God grant me the serenity
  
  To accept the things I cannot change;
  
  Courage to change the things I can;
  
  And wisdom to know the difference.
- the dozen or so attributes I describe as "what technology wants." These are: an increase in complexity, diversity, specialization, efficiency, consilience, socialization, structure, ubiquity, opportunity, beauty, sentience, and evolvability. All these values are increasing on average in sustainable systems like life, evolution, and the technium.
- There is a misguided idea that GM food is more engineered, when of course ordinary crops are highly technological, having been deliberately "engineered" through breeding for millennia.
- "So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse." More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.
- "human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen." And so as historian David Apter writes, "to be modern means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices" in "a process of increasing complexity in human affairs within which the polity must act," that is within a course that is determined.
- "technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions."
- God grant me the serenity
  
  To accept the things I cannot change;
  
  Courage to change the things I can;
  
  And wisdom to know the difference.
- the dozen or so attributes I describe as "what technology wants." These are: an increase in complexity, diversity, specialization, efficiency, consilience, socialization, structure, ubiquity, opportunity, beauty, sentience, and evolvability. All these values are increasing on average in sustainable systems like life, evolution, and the technium.
- There is a misguided idea that GM food is more engineered, when of course ordinary crops are highly technological, having been deliberately "engineered" through breeding for millennia.
- The French philosopher of technology Jacques Ellul says "the process of technological advance surges along an ineluctable path largely because human agents have abdicated their essential role." In other words, technologies are only inevitable if we let them be.
- The lessons of the technium's triad are this: 1) Anticipate the technium's inevitable macro developments, and build better tools to predict them; 2) Make choices in technology that further the extropic principles of increasing opportunities, socialization, consilience, sentience, and so on. 3) Choose details and defaults with the awareness that our choices today form the constraints of tomorrow.

Technology is Nature « BLACK MIRRORS

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technology related:kevinkelly

05 Aug 09

The Technium: Triumph of the Default

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technology choice design

“and if you choose not to decide/you still have made a choice”
- rush

17 Jun 09

The Addiction to Control

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technology book-online

Utopia Postponed

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technology book-online

10 Jun 09

The Ascent of Humanity online text

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gift-economy technology

The Technium: Reasons to Diminish Technology

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technology philosophy-of-technology

One reason to diminish technology is that technology tends to bring our attention mainly, if not only, to external inputs, giving less time and space for listening to our inner happenings. Technology, especially Internet, is feeding the infinite crave of the mind toward novelties, which reduces our clarity and awareness, as every meditator knows.

06 Jun 09

The Technium: The Arc of Complexity

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Complexity technology

Each of those lines of code is the equivalent of a gear in a clock. The Windows OS is a machine with 50 million moving pieces.

05 Jun 09

The Technium: Increasing Specialization

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technology predictions

At the moment computers seem to be headed in the opposite direction. They seem to becoming evermore general purpose machines, as they swallow more and more functions.
The portals into computation, or the net, will specialize to a remarkable degree. The keyboard, for one, will loose its monopoly. Speech and gesture input will gain a major role. Spectacle and eyeball screens will supplement walls and flexible surfaces.
1 more annotations...
- All the things we make with our mind, and the creations of artificial minds, will all tend over time to become more niche based. The "long-tail" is not merely a characteristic of media, but of technological evolution itself: the tail of niches gets longer and longer. We can imagine the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. Technology wants specialization.

30 May 09

The Technium: Increasing Ubiquity

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technology

20 Nov 08

The Ninth Transition of Evolution - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

collective intelligence

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evolution technology twine collective-intelligence super-organisms cooperation

What Nova Spivack suggests here is that the path from random population to meta-individual is a path of increasing structure. The parts are more tightly bound in relationships, and as they gain in interdependence, the whole advances to the next phase.
Smith and Szathmary say that evolution is the continued, graduated progression in which smaller units form larger, higher level units, and then those new meta-individuals start to form a new group, where each meta-individual is a mere individual
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- Robert Wright, writing in "Nonzero" argues that the evolution of humanity is one long progression of increasing cooperation, starting from the first cell of life, where both "sides" win.
- For the ninth transition in life's evolution -- the transition to a planetary level organization of humans and machines -- we should expect to see:
  
  1. Increased cooperation among humans, benefiting both humans and the OM.
  
  2. Increased span of interdependence. Planetary scale, things happening and enduring longer or quicker than before.
  
  3. Increase complexity of informational flow. New ways of connecting, organizing, relating not possible before.
  
  4. Emergence of a new level of control. An innovation (like DNA, or spinal cord, government) that takes control of functions in order to benefit constituents non-zero-ly.

02 Nov 08

Social Innovation Camp » The Big Idea

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social-web technology innovation

Clay Shirky writes that technology becomes socially interesting only once it has become technologically boring. The web has reached this point.
Whilst Amazon and eBay have become a common way to shop, the expectation that a similar tool might be an aspect of healthcare choices or a child’s education is not yet a reality.

Free, as in Beer, by Lawrence Lessig - Wired 14.09: Posts

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business innovation opensource technology LAWRENCE-LESSIG

"Think free," the movement's founder, Richard Stallman puts it, "as in free speech, not free beer." You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.
The short list of these books is led by MIT professor Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation.
2 more annotations...
- Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks places this commercial practice in a larger and perhaps more significant social context: Although peer production is profitable for business, writes Benkler, "we are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us and how we act, alone and in concert with others."
- And a few of those may then think a bit more about what helps innovation flourish. It's not any magic word, like free or open. It is instead a practice that encourages the widest range of innovators. Superflex has inspired this practice with beer. And perhaps with much more as well.

27 Oct 08

Edge: THE TECHNIUM AND THE 7TH KINGDOM OF LIFE

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technology kevin-kelly emergence technium meaning-of-life green-technology

THE TECHNIUM AND THE 7TH KINGDOM
OF LIFE [7.19.07]

A Talk with Kevin Kelly
What is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life?
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- 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.

17 Oct 08

mediageek: Are CD Players Obsolete?

obsolescence

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CD TECHNOLOGY obsolete-technology radio broadcast quality mediageek obsolescence

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YouTube - 2008 Latest Edition - Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year

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Technology, Evolution, and God | Integral Life

The Technium: Technophilia

The Technium: The Choice of Cities

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

Technology is Nature « BLACK MIRRORS

The Technium: Triumph of the Default

The Addiction to Control

Utopia Postponed

The Ascent of Humanity online text

The Technium: Reasons to Diminish Technology

The Technium: The Arc of Complexity

The Technium: Increasing Specialization

The Technium: Increasing Ubiquity

The Ninth Transition of Evolution - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Social Innovation Camp » The Big Idea

Free, as in Beer, by Lawrence Lessig - Wired 14.09: Posts

Edge: THE TECHNIUM AND THE 7TH KINGDOM OF LIFE

mediageek: Are CD Players Obsolete?

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