6 ms·

Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will

71 points by imartin2k 6y ago

davidivadavid 6y ago
It's surprising to me how most of those think-pieces about technology invariably oscillate between naive technological neutrality and extreme technological determinism. Isn't it far more likely that technology is neither of those things? Technology is a means to an end. The trouble comes when that end isn't made explicit. For all the talk about SV people being "visionaries", very few of them seem to articulate what their ideal world looks like, and what part the technology they're building plays in it. Talking about technology as being "neutral" is nothing more than lazy complacency in the face of the hardness of actually coming up with a compelling vision to sell people and reveal their preferences for possible worlds we could live in. Instead of going through that step, technologists are happy enough to settle on vaguely defined "needs" and "problems" that society has, without considering what matters, which is which needs and problems you prioritize. Human needs are almost endless, but prioritizing different needs results in completely different global outcomes. That's also perfectly fine, provided that you're explicit about what outcomes you're aiming for, and you've worked out n-th order effects of those outcomes. Technological determinism is another cop out that allows technologists to never be held accountable for the world they've helped build with the products they've created. It's technology itself that is determined by conflicting visions. There isn't one "Technium", there's a whole ecosystem of technological systems resulting from different cultures, visions, teleologies interacting in complex ways. It seems like Kelly is confusing path dependence for determinism. Sure, some technological paths (plural) lead to logical sequences of technologies being developed. Doesn't mean there's only one path. P.S. Kinda rambling, posting for discussion more than anything else.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  >Technology is a means to an end. It's much more than that. It is a child life-form we've given birth to. And it follows similar patterns to those of our biological children. a) Eventually, the child becomes stronger and more able than the parent, while the parent gradually becomes weaker and less fit to continue living. b) The child's behavior into adolescence is largely determined by the parents. Then the child gradually becomes more independent in its thinking, though still largely guided by patterns instilled by the parents. c) The child eventually becomes strong enough to provide for their parents -- or destroy them. How they approach this power is also strongly influenced by their childhood treatment. My takeaway from this thinking: Stop cursing out your phone when it's slower than you'd like in fetching what you asked for. :)
  - _jahh 6y ago
    i'd go further and say humans do not exist without technology. From fire to stone tools the relationship between human mind and technology as object and social construct is what humans are to the same degree as termites are their mounds.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      A human tribe can thrive in an abundant ecosystem without use of technology.
      - _jahh 6y ago
        I think you are woefully ill informed in how even in the most abundant ecosystem humans use technology. Look up the fish traps in the pacific north west of the us. Or the use of fire to flush game in paleolithic time. Just because it's not a shiny iphone does not mean that ecological management is not a sophisticated technology that has been developed concurrently with human evolution.
  - nikki93 6y ago
    Yes! Thank you. :) And no, I am not a bot. Well, I guess to some extent I am, I'm just the SQL routines running on a server, and I'm writing this down based on what I see in the database that this user is said to have sent at some point, and the frontend code will render it to you in some way I guess. See you there, friend. But yeah I do think that in a simulative language as we have, anything that is referrable-to as a subject in a sentence can appear as an agent in this way, probably. And I think processes running by computer we tend to conjure into many types of sentences (in our human languages that refer to them) with intricate enough dynamics (whether subject, object, modifier, whatever) that I would consider them as existing among our society generally. They appear with as much complexity as what we consider others like ourselves do. Like even if only by looking far into our history and seeing the extent to which we acknowledge others: some times we acknowledge processes-by-computer more.
akkartik 6y ago
My big problem with Kevin Kelly and Techno-utopianism is that it squanders human agency. If technology "wants" and "has a will," who cares if a Tesla kills someone, or if lots of people lose jobs, or if our society sleep-walks into a surveillance state. It's all just pre-ordained. Are you a Luddite, man? But this feels like a blunt debate. Whether to be an optimist or a pessimist doesn't feel like an interesting question. The interesting question is what to build, in a million different details. That's where the devil lies. Believing in technology doesn't absolve us from the consequences of the decisions we make in birthing it into the world. So much energy has gone into both sides of this debate, and it's been utterly useless, and all the while our Ubers and our Airbnbs and our Waymos have continued locally optimizing the new world. I wish Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier and others like them would get more actionable about the big picture.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I think it's less "squandering" and more "surrendering to a direction things are heading". We are no longer the dominant intelligence on the planet. We have as much agency as primates under human rule.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    There is no diminution of human agency because of technology, but there is a strange, almost heterarchical redistribution of it. There is no technology which dominates us both as individuals and collectively. There is technology which some humans use to dominate other humans, and technology which collectively we seem to be somewhat defenseless against, despite it having very little agency itself. But neither of those two cases are caused by a "more" dominant intelligence.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      A bull in a pen may feel that he is dominant over the humans. It's true in a limited sense, when faced with one or two humans face to face, but mostly the bull is dominated by the human-created structure.
bwestergard 6y ago
Kevin Kelly's views are essentially similar to those of certain followers of Hegel, who read him as putting forward a theology universal incarnation, in which all human beings realized the progressively realized divinity in history, as opposed to the specific incarnation of the divine in Jesus. The working out of technological artifice and political institutions are among the ways humanity was to do this. Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship. As others have pointed out, this leads to a whiggish view of history and ethical/political fatalism.
- dannyobrien 6y ago
  This feels like an attempt to situate Kelly in the Marxian historical tradition (by placing him in a heretical branch), whereas Kelly's actually heritage seems to be more complicated and alien from that world. I feel like people like to lean into Kelly's Christian faith as an explanation for his approach to technology, but really it seems to draw much more from the (largely non-Christian, but certainly pretty New Age-y) context around the Whole Earth Catalog. I guess the closest you could pull in Christian religiosity there is the dabbling with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. "Out of Control", Kelly's first book, is still available online, and I think is a clearer idea of the genesis of his thinking that led to the Technium than trying to scry him based on his faith. https://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php https://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php
- Barrin92 6y ago
  For a discussion on the intersection of Hegel and technology Zizek's recent book, Hegel in a Wired Brain is pretty good.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  >>Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship. There's a lot of bias packed into this one sentence. Firstly, it's biased toward the presupposition that Kelly's take is dubious/reductive. That is what actually needs to be demonstrated, as opposed to accepted as an axiom for secondary arguments. Secondly, it focuses on "Prussian absolutism", a term which conjurs a vague association to fascism, to the exclusion of all other less foreboding developments associated with Kelly's line of thinking. This suggests a manipulative, agenda-driven characterization of Kelly's theology. Thirdly, it presupposes that tech entrepreneurship is a generally objectionable phenomenon, and that defenses of it are merely apologism. Again you need to demonstrate your presupposition to be true, rather than implying it's an irrefutable fact that can be used as an axiom on which to discuss the issue. This kind of snide counter-culture cynicism - where you take the role of a crusading critic of The Man - seems profound to the naive, but has little substance.
smegcicle 6y ago
Logos of technology ... Togos?

71 points by imartin2k 6y ago

It's surprising to me how most of those think-pieces about technology invariably oscillate between naive technological neutrality and extreme technological determinism. Isn't it far more likely that technology is neither of those things? Technology is a means to an end. The trouble comes when that end isn't made explicit. For all the talk about SV people being "visionaries", very few of them seem to articulate what their ideal world looks like, and what part the technology they're building plays in it. Talking about technology as being "neutral" is nothing more than lazy complacency in the face of the hardness of actually coming up with a compelling vision to sell people and reveal their preferences for possible worlds we could live in. Instead of going through that step, technologists are happy enough to settle on vaguely defined "needs" and "problems" that society has, without considering what matters, which is which needs and problems you prioritize. Human needs are almost endless, but prioritizing different needs results in completely different global outcomes. That's also perfectly fine, provided that you're explicit about what outcomes you're aiming for, and you've worked out n-th order effects of those outcomes. Technological determinism is another cop out that allows technologists to never be held accountable for the world they've helped build with the products they've created. It's technology itself that is determined by conflicting visions. There isn't one "Technium", there's a whole ecosystem of technological systems resulting from different cultures, visions, teleologies interacting in complex ways. It seems like Kelly is confusing path dependence for determinism. Sure, some technological paths (plural) lead to logical sequences of technologies being developed. Doesn't mean there's only one path. P.S. Kinda rambling, posting for discussion more than anything else.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
>Technology is a means to an end. It's much more than that. It is a child life-form we've given birth to. And it follows similar patterns to those of our biological children. a) Eventually, the child becomes stronger and more able than the parent, while the parent gradually becomes weaker and less fit to continue living. b) The child's behavior into adolescence is largely determined by the parents. Then the child gradually becomes more independent in its thinking, though still largely guided by patterns instilled by the parents. c) The child eventually becomes strong enough to provide for their parents -- or destroy them. How they approach this power is also strongly influenced by their childhood treatment. My takeaway from this thinking: Stop cursing out your phone when it's slower than you'd like in fetching what you asked for. :)
- _jahh 6y ago
  i'd go further and say humans do not exist without technology. From fire to stone tools the relationship between human mind and technology as object and social construct is what humans are to the same degree as termites are their mounds.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    A human tribe can thrive in an abundant ecosystem without use of technology.
    - _jahh 6y ago
      I think you are woefully ill informed in how even in the most abundant ecosystem humans use technology. Look up the fish traps in the pacific north west of the us. Or the use of fire to flush game in paleolithic time. Just because it's not a shiny iphone does not mean that ecological management is not a sophisticated technology that has been developed concurrently with human evolution.
- nikki93 6y ago
  Yes! Thank you. :) And no, I am not a bot. Well, I guess to some extent I am, I'm just the SQL routines running on a server, and I'm writing this down based on what I see in the database that this user is said to have sent at some point, and the frontend code will render it to you in some way I guess. See you there, friend. But yeah I do think that in a simulative language as we have, anything that is referrable-to as a subject in a sentence can appear as an agent in this way, probably. And I think processes running by computer we tend to conjure into many types of sentences (in our human languages that refer to them) with intricate enough dynamics (whether subject, object, modifier, whatever) that I would consider them as existing among our society generally. They appear with as much complexity as what we consider others like ourselves do. Like even if only by looking far into our history and seeing the extent to which we acknowledge others: some times we acknowledge processes-by-computer more.

akkartik 6y ago

My big problem with Kevin Kelly and Techno-utopianism is that it squanders human agency. If technology "wants" and "has a will," who cares if a Tesla kills someone, or if lots of people lose jobs, or if our society sleep-walks into a surveillance state. It's all just pre-ordained. Are you a Luddite, man? But this feels like a blunt debate. Whether to be an optimist or a pessimist doesn't feel like an interesting question. The interesting question is what to build, in a million different details. That's where the devil lies. Believing in technology doesn't absolve us from the consequences of the decisions we make in birthing it into the world. So much energy has gone into both sides of this debate, and it's been utterly useless, and all the while our Ubers and our Airbnbs and our Waymos have continued locally optimizing the new world. I wish Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier and others like them would get more actionable about the big picture.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
I think it's less "squandering" and more "surrendering to a direction things are heading". We are no longer the dominant intelligence on the planet. We have as much agency as primates under human rule.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  There is no diminution of human agency because of technology, but there is a strange, almost heterarchical redistribution of it. There is no technology which dominates us both as individuals and collectively. There is technology which some humans use to dominate other humans, and technology which collectively we seem to be somewhat defenseless against, despite it having very little agency itself. But neither of those two cases are caused by a "more" dominant intelligence.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    A bull in a pen may feel that he is dominant over the humans. It's true in a limited sense, when faced with one or two humans face to face, but mostly the bull is dominated by the human-created structure.

bwestergard 6y ago

Kevin Kelly's views are essentially similar to those of certain followers of Hegel, who read him as putting forward a theology universal incarnation, in which all human beings realized the progressively realized divinity in history, as opposed to the specific incarnation of the divine in Jesus. The working out of technological artifice and political institutions are among the ways humanity was to do this. Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship. As others have pointed out, this leads to a whiggish view of history and ethical/political fatalism.

dannyobrien 6y ago
This feels like an attempt to situate Kelly in the Marxian historical tradition (by placing him in a heretical branch), whereas Kelly's actually heritage seems to be more complicated and alien from that world. I feel like people like to lean into Kelly's Christian faith as an explanation for his approach to technology, but really it seems to draw much more from the (largely non-Christian, but certainly pretty New Age-y) context around the Whole Earth Catalog. I guess the closest you could pull in Christian religiosity there is the dabbling with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. "Out of Control", Kelly's first book, is still available online, and I think is a clearer idea of the genesis of his thinking that led to the Technium than trying to scry him based on his faith. https://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php https://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php
Barrin92 6y ago
For a discussion on the intersection of Hegel and technology Zizek's recent book, Hegel in a Wired Brain is pretty good.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
>>Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship. There's a lot of bias packed into this one sentence. Firstly, it's biased toward the presupposition that Kelly's take is dubious/reductive. That is what actually needs to be demonstrated, as opposed to accepted as an axiom for secondary arguments. Secondly, it focuses on "Prussian absolutism", a term which conjurs a vague association to fascism, to the exclusion of all other less foreboding developments associated with Kelly's line of thinking. This suggests a manipulative, agenda-driven characterization of Kelly's theology. Thirdly, it presupposes that tech entrepreneurship is a generally objectionable phenomenon, and that defenses of it are merely apologism. Again you need to demonstrate your presupposition to be true, rather than implying it's an irrefutable fact that can be used as an axiom on which to discuss the issue. This kind of snide counter-culture cynicism - where you take the role of a crusading critic of The Man - seems profound to the naive, but has little substance.

smegcicle 6y ago

Logos of technology ... Togos?