What Technology Wants
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Inevitable— a sweeping vision oftechnology as a living force that can expand our individual potential
This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed. This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts. Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, provocatively argues in this ingenious book that technology can have a positive impact on human life and culture. Kelly traces the origins of what he calls the "technium," or the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. The technium includes culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types, and it is a self-reinforcing system of creation. Kelly carefully avoids anthropomorphizing the technium, but acknowledges that various technologies, much like various systems or organisms in the natural world, express needs or tendencies toward other things; Kelly urges that we benefit the most from our relationship to the technium by learning to work with this force rather than against it. The technium, he argues, provides each person with chances to excel at the unique mixture of talents with which he or she was born or a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds. Thus, the technology of vibrating strings opened up (created) the potential for a virtuoso violin player. Kelly's wise attempts to explain our organic relationship with technology will surely provoke conversations with critics whose discussions of the evils of technology are limited to the negative impact of the computer and the Internet on culture.
