Shorts: What Does Technology Want?

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Alright, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jada Boomerad. I'm Robert Quillwich. Radio Lab, the podcast.

This week we're going to go live. You're going live. Sort of. From the New York Public Library, where they have a program called New York Public Library Live.

So let's just get the introductions done. When was it, by the way? When was it? It was in November.

I don't remember the day, but I do remember the people around the stage with me. They are wonderful, but irritating. They are at Stephen Johnson, who's got a new book called, Where Good Ideas Come From. And then there's Kevin Kelly with a book that he entitled, What Technology Wants.

So that's Kevin. That's just a weird question, right? I mean, if I'm at a spoon, I know what it wants. It wants whatever I want.

I take it, put it in the soup, bring it to my mouth, suck on it, put it down. When it's down, it's just nothing. It doesn't want anything. So at least that's my notion.

So when you ask this question, you're actually going to ask it. Your book title answers it. What technology wants? What does that mean?

So I think we do technology generally to mean all this new stuff, this gadget stuff, this interpockets and kind of around our household. But I wanted to look at it, not the individual objects, because a single object doesn't want really anything as you're suggesting. I wanted to look at the way in which that object, that say that iPhone, that iPhone requires thousands of different technologies to make that one other technology. So there is a web of technologies that are kind of interdependent, interweaving, and to produce what I think of as sort of a superorganism of technology.

All the spoons, all the forms, all the knives, and all the telephones, all the factories, all the roads, everything together, and us together form a new thing that, like other superorganisms, have an emergent kind of agenda that is beyond just the spoon. So the spoon itself is sort of like the bee or the ant in the colony. It doesn't really mean much. But together, all the spoons and everything else connected together, all the little chips, all the wires, all the roads, it does form something that does begin in a very small way to have the slimmest bit of autonomy.

And autonomy that wasn't there in the individual pieces. And autonomy and some kind of will? Well, so that's a strong word, when I use the word wants, because we immediately think of what you want and what I want and say is deliberately thinking about what do I want. But I mean want in the way in which that flower, when it was alive, what sort of hangin' on?

It's wanted light, and so it kind of leans towards the light a little bit. It hasn't drift, it has a tendency towards the light. It's not intelligent, it's not conscious, but the plant itself is once light. It leans towards the light.

So the technom, which is the word I use to distinguish this whole superorganism of technology, it's leaning in certain directions. It has certain tendencies, so it wants to go in certain directions. We'll get to the directions where it may want to go. Let me ask you, your question is a little more modest than he is.

I am a little lower. This is Steve Johnson. We're in my career path. This is aimed at the liberal.

We're in our Kevin's going to steer right underneath. So your question is, where do good ideas come from? So let me look at the word idea. For use that word, what do you mean?

Everything from scientific breakthroughs, technological breakthroughs, breakthroughs in the creative arts, and also just ordinary breakthroughs in our lives where we have a good idea that helps us live a little bit better, be a little bit better in our jobs, human innovation. When you use the word innovation or idea, for most people in the cartoon version, that's the light bulb going on. So some guy is sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, and then they think, oh, E equals MC squared, so for you, when you look into a brain, you don't see anything coming out of nothing. There's something a little bit more.

That's one of the biggest things that you have to undo when you approach a topic like this, which is this idea that the breakthrough idea of the light bulb moment is a single thing happening in a single mind, and that it happens in an instant. For some reason, we want to tell the story that way. There's this kind of innate desire. I want to tell the story that way, too.

And people do tend to build these elaborate fictions about their moments of epiphany. But when you go back and look at the historical record and rewind the tape and play it slowly, and so many of these break through, allegedly break through epiphanies, what you find is, in fact, that the idea was incubating for a very long period of time. It actually builds upon other ideas by other people. It's more of a remixing of other people's concepts and other people's tools, and it kind of fades into view over a much longer period of time.

It's what I call the slow hunch in the book. It's not this kind of gut impression or this sudden moment of clarity, but this much more evolutionary, more lingering process. Do you have the sense that there is never a re-complement? Or do you have one re-complement and 50 slow, small, introverted?

I think that there are moments where you do advance in some clear fashion, and you suddenly do see things in any way. A lot of them come in dreams. Actually, the book talks a lot about how many amazing empirical scientific discoveries actually occur to people in dreams. But I guess part of what I'm trying to do with this argument is to correct the emphasis we place on those things.

And the other thing about those eureka moments is that they often usually do occur to at least ten other people at the same time, which diminishes the eureka-ness of it. For example, every single invention that we know about, for example, the telephone, the patents for the telephone, were submitted by Alexander Graham Bell and Gray within three hours of each other. Really? Yes.

And the light bulbs were the light bulbs that we associate with Thomas Edison. He was the last of 23 other people. It was no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb. And boom!

Nothing of a matter of a couple of years of light bulbs. Everybody had the light bulb idea. And what would explain the sudden ubiquity of an idea after a long eternal silence? The precursor inventions that are required for that next step have all been done.

So it's a kind of, it's like a growth where you need to go through a certain stage to get to the next stage, you have to have all the parts. And because no idea is alone, the light bulb required whatever is a hundred other sub-inventions to sustain it, and conceive of it. And when they're in place and then it's like the next idea is just there. And so being too early with an idea is really bad or worse than being too late.

So we both use this, Kevin and I are both kind of fans of this phrase from Stuart Kaufman, this idea of Jason Possible. Jason Possible. Yeah, I mean it's just bear with me. It's useful.

So many syllables. At any given time, oh come on, this is very literary crowd. So the idea is at any given time, both in the evolution of life and in the evolution of technology, there is kind of given the state of the current system. There are finite set of moves that are possible.

So imagine it like a chessboard, right? You're in the middle of a game, there's a certain number of moves that are possible, a much larger set of moves that are not possible. The same is true of, you know, technological history. You cannot invent a microwave oven in 1650, just as you cannot invent an automobile in ancient Egypt.

Just to make sure you could imagine one, but you can't build it. Yes, although it is remarkably hard to imagine one. That's part of the point here. I mean, when I saw this in detail in Invention of Air, the book about your friend Joe Priestley, who I like that you're a book people friend in terms of that killed a lot of mice.

So Priestley is most famous for inventing oxygen, isolating oxygen for the first time, which is another case of a multiple discovery where three other people kind of discovered it right around the same time and dependently more or less. And the point was that they were able to think about isolating oxygen for the first time, partially because there were tools that there were scales and things that made it easier to kind of realize this element was there. But the biggest one was a conceptually, which it only had become possible a couple of years before to even think about the air as being something you wanted to investigate scientifically. Up until that point they were like, well, I want to investigate wood and bodies and hearts and brains and rocks, but the air was pure.

The air was pure. The air was pure. I could hear it. The air was pure.

The air was pure. It was actually because they discovered vacuum, so they were like not the cleaners, but the empty air, the lack of air. They were like, okay, this is a vacuum, so there must be something in normal air that we can actually study and understand. And so conceptually that became a platform that enabled Priestley to kind of think in a way and his compatriots to think in a way that it was much harder to think, even five decades before us.

Do you think that when the environment is ready in some sense then it will happen? So it's almost as if the technique in your face is kind of whispering now. Yes, it is. It is an environment that we're in.

It's creepy to me. It's creepy. And it's also because it's inevitable too. That's also another creepy word that people get spooked by.

Inevitable? Inevitable. Right. Do you believe that?

You believe that spoon is an inevitable thing that's bound to happen if you're hungry and you invent soup? Yes, definitely. So the question is, I don't think everyone would think of spoon at the same time. They probably did.

Let me try this. We're going to make it right. So one very active evolutionary debate is something like the inevitability of evolution given enough time involving eyes. Light is the fastest way to transmit information.

And so the idea is that given enough evolutionary time, creatures would evolve the ability to process and make sense of light and somehow act on that information. And it turns out what we find when we go back is that eyes independently evolved multiple times in completely different lines because there was something about the physics of the world that made that despite the fact that evolution didn't on some level want to, there was no intelligent designer saying eyes would be good. Light weights moved very fast. That would be a good thing to do.

But evolution kept stumbling its way towards that innovation on these separate paths. And I think that's where I 100% agree with Kevin. No one says that eyes wanted to be there. No one said that there was a niche called the Eyemois leading for eyes.

The very serious question which I think is real is then how do you describe that? How do you describe that inevitability of a system not being directed somehow ending up again and again? If you rewound the tape and ran it again, you would have eyes, eyes which just keep showing up. So Kevin I think is picked as provocative but I think useful way of describing it is that there is this tendency of that system to go towards those attractors.

There are kind of magnets that the system will gravitate towards. What is that? It's spoons. No, but that spoons are the point eventually people will invent spoons as well.

So Robert, why don't we get together? Why does this bother you so much? I mean because there are obvious reasons that you are crossing a line here. You are saying that living systems which have a logic which he describes very well, that the logic of living systems also belongs to these inanimate things.

The history of technology sounds like for both of you sounds suspiciously like the history of life. Right. And I think that's very suspicious of these. You should be because the map does not look like a sunflower but there are tremendous similarities in many ways.

There was a famous evolutionary biologist Niels Eldridge who is alive and Niels' specialty is studying trilobites. Mapping the morphology of them as they change it can make trilobites. He can make trees, genealogical trees showing them. His hobby is collecting cornets from around the world.

Cornets has him. And so he uses the same techniques applied to the forms of these and actually traces out the little heritage trees. And he can show that to a rough degree the evolution of these technological forms resemble in many ways the kind of tracing of life as it works and speciates. And so there is one sense in which the things that we make are really just an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us.

And that really shouldn't really be a surprise. So for example, let me show you this from the book. A graph of what happened to underwater animals in the long time ago called trilobites. This is how they change.

And here next to it is a drawing showing what has happened in the history of cornet making. So I'm seeing here two branching trees which look kind of similar actually. So let me ask for selling you on this. Now let me get a little harder.

How far are you willing to push this biology path? Kevin, it seems to me when I read your book, it seems like you almost think that ideas are kind of alive or almost alive. You even say that if you were to look at the living systems of the world, the kingdoms of animals and plants of which there are sex, you then like, you know, a little map, you plop this technically thing into, you call it the seventh kingdom. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Because the first six are all have mommies and daddies. I'm not sure how to explain the seventh. Yeah, so I call it the seventh because I think it is, I mean, I place again the question I'm asking in a larger context is, what is the stuff that we're making and surrounding ourselves with? It's not just little bunch of gadgets.

It's just not wires. You have to see that it's really part of something that's been going on for a long time. There's a very big difference between a spoon and a whale. I mean, I'm not talking about the spoon.

I'm talking about the whole super organism. It's a lot of spoons. It's a lot of spoons. And what connects them is actually the fact that we have this stream of things that are organizing themselves, maintaining order, in some cases increasing their order, in the face of the rest of the universe running down.

But... And the spoons that you're obsessed with have come from that same strand. There is a strand of these galaxies and stars, and here's a little corner of the planet where this self-organizing system has been making more and more order, and it made these animals, and then more and more order, and structure, and complexity, and diversity, and it made minds, and these minds have made another thing that has high degree of order, and complexity, and stuff, and may itself be starting to make other things, other minds. May it's made, may it's...

Does that seem scary? Speak you. Speak you. Let me read to you at some of your reviewers who say it.

Kelly's central thesis is this. Technology has its own internal logic and rhythms that are distinct and sometimes adverse to the desires of the humans that create it. Technology creates itself using humans to do its bidding. Or humans can not direct or prevent technology's course, at least not in the long run.

Like water contained behind a dam, relentlessly seeking escape, technology will eventually find its own way. But doesn't that creep you out a little bit? No, no, no. No, seriously, it's like if you said the same thing about life, would that bother you?

No, I'm part of life. I'm just worried about the thing. No, you're part of technology too. You understand that we humans have invented ourselves.

We have this external stomach we call cooking that has changed our diets, that has changed our teeth, our jaws. We have remade ourselves. When we become literate, our brains are rewired, we think differently. We're not the same people that left Africa.

We have domesticated ourselves. We're going to continue doing that. So why is it you are technology? Does that bother you?

When you say what does technology want, I'm not sure I'm in that sentence. That's what keeps me up. What would happen if by your logic, and maybe as a fellow traveler by your logic, you could imagine a situation where the things that we have created, not only are ideas but the things we have made, will have by the same processes that describe the evolution of life, will of their own, and then there will be either an evolution at our command, or an evolution away from us, or a revolution that might somehow compete with us. I don't know.

To some extent, aren't we already in that kind of imagined future state? I mean, you think about the internet right now. If we wanted to turn it off, it would be extremely difficult to be impossible. And if we did, the catastrophic nonlinear unpredictable effects of turning this thing off would be unbelievably devastating.

We would have no idea what would happen. But at least what we would have all the things that we could be in that stuff at that point would be turning off something we use, something we need. At the moment, I don't know where this gets this far, but at the moment when to turn off the machine is to commit a murder, that is that the machine will have come somehow sentient or full of feeling. But that would be very very very likely to be very very likely to be a very clear, also to defend him again.

When you say one, and this is the danger of one, right, because he's not talking about consciousness, he's not talking about... Yes. Right. And it's like in the sense that you would say a little bacterium wants to kind of float up a nutrient stream or something like that, right?

The bacterium presumably is not conscious of what it is doing, it's not sitting there saying like, hmm, yummy nutrients here, this is great, if I only have a spoon, you know, it's not, but nonetheless you have to look at it and say it is happy going up this little great gradient sucking in all these nutrients and somehow that thing is driven towards that. And so maybe the problem is we don't quite have that, I want but there's no eye. Right. We don't have the kind of the verb or the...

I just want provocatively and deliberately but partly so that we can rehearse this idea as things acquire more autonomy. Right now the amount of autonomy and the things that we make is minuscule, it's about the size of a bacteria or a grasshopper. But it won't be, it will increase and so we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that someday we're going to make something that we'll have a want and how do we deal with that? When we make something that declares to us, oh I am a child of God, what's our response to it?

And so I use want to help us really prepare ourselves for that eventuality. Well let me just end, let me finish with this. You're like one of the happiest people I know. So you often thought that if in contemplating these future problems you just seem to always look on the, you know, that's not that from the life of Brian, always look on the right side of line.

In this case, if you were to give the technium a mind of its own, is your thought that it will work out great? Yes, I think that what evolution moves towards is increasing set of all sorts. So we see that throughout life, mind being invented all the time. I think what we are doing is we're kind of, we're kind of evolution's way to invent minds that evolution and biological evolution cannot make.

So we're going to invent all kinds of ways of thinking that evolution in a biological sense could not reach. And the reason why we're doing to do that is we're going to invent all kinds of minds, different kinds of thinking, because our mind alone is probably not sufficient to completely comprehend the universe. We need other species of thinking. So we're going to populate the universe as far as we can with other ways of thinking so that collectively we can comprehend the universe.

And those other ways of thinking are ways that biological evolution probably couldn't get to itself. So I think that yes, the more kinds of minds there are, the better. I think part of the problem is when you're saying are we going to be okay? Kevin is saying absolutely on the 10,000 year scale.

We're going to be great. Next year, what about next Tuesday? Yeah, right. Both are valid concerns.

Some things in life are bad. They can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse. When you're chewing on life's gristle, that grumble, give a whistle.

And this'll help things turn out for the best. I always look on the bright side of life. Always look on the light side of life. Special thanks to Paul Holden-Graver, Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library in New York City.

And of course, Stephen Johnson, whose new book is called Where Good Ideas Come From and Kevin Kelly, his book What Technology Wants. I'm Adam Ron. I'm Robert Coley. Thank you for listening.

Hello, this is Rachel Ricciat, a radio lab listener and supporter in Brooklyn, New York. Radio lab is supported in part by the Afford P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.flones.org. Thanks guys.

That's us Maine my Week.