Revisiting the technium: a staging post, not the final destination
A belated review of Kevin Kelly's "What technology wants"
In Dezember 2011, a friend wrote to me that What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Viking Penguin, 2010) was “the most insightful book in a decade or more,” describing it as “a synthesis of Kelly’s long-ranging ideas over the decades.” Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired, a magazine which focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. I read the book, highlighted some passages, and put it aside. Lately I’ve been thinking about the role technology plays in evolution (human and beyond), and this made me take another look at Kelly’s theses.
Kelly (“somewhat reluctantly”) coined the word technium, which he uses “where others might use technology as a plural.” One difference is that “technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.” It includes about everything humanity / the human mind has discovered or invented, including everything it has discovered or invented by making use of what it has discovered or invented. The technium, in short, forms “a self-reinforcing system of creation.” This system, according to Kelly, has begun “to exercise some autonomy,” some will of its own—hence the title of the book. This has the unnerving implication that “we can’t demand that technology obey us any more than we can demand that life obey us.”
To Kelly, the technium has become (or is becoming) the seventh kingdom of life1:
It extends a process begun four billion years ago. Just as the evolutionary tree of Sapiens branched off from its animal precursors long ago, the technium now branches off from its precursor, the mind of the human animal…. The technium has overtaken its brainy parents…. As the seventh kingdom of life, the technium is now amplifying, extending, and speeding up the self-organized progress that propels biological evolution through the aeons.
While in and of itself technology may be neither good nor bad, no technology can be separated from the purposes for which it was created or the uses to which it is put, and these purposes or uses may be judged good or bad. Technology is routinely called upon to solve problems technology has created, and some solutions are patently worse than the problems they were meant to solve. Undeterred, Kelly claims that
there is evidence that on average and over time, the new solutions outweigh the new problems…. I think the balance settles out at higher than 50 percent positive, even if it is only slightly higher…. But if we create only 1 percent or 2 percent (or even one-tenth of 1 percent) more positive stuff than we destroy, then we have progress.
This must be to most pollyannaish concept of progress I have ever come across.
To Kelly, pace textbook orthodoxy, the course of biological evolution is not a random drift merely subject to physical laws and environmental constraints: “rather, evolution—and by extension, the technium—has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy.” I, for one, keep wondering what he might mean by “the nature of matter and energy.”
It seems fair to say that, to most people, matter is what we can perceive as being objectively “out there,” whether through our unaided senses or by means of telescopes, microscopes, or other imaging devices (such as radiography, ultrasound, CT, MRI, or PET). This unscientific notion of “matter” is certainly not what Kelly had in mind.
To most people (including physicists), what is objectively “out there” is things. But things can’t be measured; only their properties can. If matter is what possesses or “carries” properties, then we know zilch about what matter is in and of itself. This observation would be sheer sophistry, were it not for the fact that the properties of quantum objects (particles and such) are contextual, in the sense that they are defined by the experimental contexts in which they are measured. What’s more, they not only owe their existence to the experimental conditions under which they are observed, they exist only if and when they are observed.
Take the droplets forming a track in a cloud chamber. It’s virtually impossible not to think of them as caused by the passage of a particle, but it is wrong. What is factual are the droplets. As Schrödinger insisted a long while ago (see here),
Observations are to be regarded as discrete, disconnected events. Between them there are gaps which we cannot fill in. There are cases where we should upset everything if we admitted the possibility of continuous observation…. Sometimes these events form chains that give the illusion of permanent beings—but only in particular circumstances and only for an extremely short period of time in every single case.
Quantum objects, for their part, are contextual in that they are individuated by the experimental contexts in which they are observed. As Brigitte Falkenburg has demonstrated (see here),
only the experimental context (and our ways of conceiving of it in classical terms) makes it possible to talk in a sloppy way of quantum objects.... [Quantum objects] seem to be Lockean empirical substances, that is, collections of empirical properties which constantly go together. However, they are only individuated by the experimental apparatus in which they are measured or the concrete quantum phenomenon to which they belong.
But if quantum objects owe their properties as well as their individuality to the experimental conditions under which they are observed, then the experimental apparatus cannot owe its properties to the quantum-objects of which it is commonly said to be composed. The mutual dependence of microscopic/quantum objects and macroscopic/classical objects makes it impossible to conceive of either as enjoying the independent existence that classical objects did enjoy before quantum mechanics came along.
Add to this that the shapes of things resolve themselves into sets of spatial relations between the constituent parts of things, and that there are things—the so-called fundamental particles—which lack constituent parts. What follows is that a fundamental particle is a formless entity.
Add to this the miraculous identity of particles (not only) of the same type. What follows is that all existing spatial relations are reflexive: they are self-relations entertained by a single self-same entity. And since in the absence of this entity there wouldn’t be any spatial relations, nor any shapes, nor a universe, we are free to think of this entity as the true constituent not only of each quantum object but also of every classical one. If there is such a thing as matter, this is it.
This conclusion requires us to rethink the mutual dependence between quantum objects and classical ones. As this was done in a previous post, I just state the upshot: the essential difference between the so-called classical domain (containing classical objects) and the so-called quantum domain (containing quantum objects) is the difference between the manifested world and its manifestation. Instead of being constituent parts of the manifested world, quantum objects are instrumental in the manifestation of the objects that populate the manifested world.
Readers of this substack know that my critiques make use of this pair of pincers: my philosophy of quantum physics and Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution. Having pointed out the questionable nature of “the nature matter” on quantum-mechanical grounds, I’ll take another shot at figuring out what Kelly means when he writes that biological evolution’s inherent direction is “shaped by the nature of matter and energy.” The following passage provides an indication:
In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned. The rules of chemistry, momentum, torque, electrostatic charges, and other such reversible forces of physics were all that mattered…. The ironclad constraints of the material world birthed only extremely simple mechanical forms—rocks, ice, gas clouds. But the expansion of space, with its corresponding increase in potential energy, introduced new immaterial vectors into the world: information, exotropy, and self-organization…. Life and mind emerged out of the constraints to transcend them.
While the idea that the expansion of space implies an increase in potential energy is debatable,2 it is not central to Kelly’s argument. On his theory of evolution, there are two kinds of constraints, negative ones, out of which life and mind emerged, and positive ones, which “channel evolutionary innovation in certain directions”:
In tandem with the constraints of physical laws outlined above, the exotropy of self-organization steers evolution along a trajectory…. While it is no longer associated with the supernatural today, the idea of directional evolution is now associated with the idea of “inevitable”—a concept that many modern scientists find intolerable in any form. I would like to present the best case for a direction within biological evolution that our evidence so far will permit.
Kelly’s exotropy should not be confused with the extropy of the extropians. Extropianism—the E of the TESCREAL bundle of interconnected ideologies, the techno-utopian project mentioned in this post—aims to counter entropy in order to extend the human lifespan indefinitely if not infinitely. “Exotropy,” on the other hand, is just another word for negentropy, or negative entropy. Since entropy is a statistically predicted increase in disorder, “exotropy” stands for an increase in order. But what is order?
For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don’t have useful metrics for exotropy. The best we can say is that exotropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information and that it entails self-organization…. [Nor do we] really know what information is…. The term information is more metaphor than anything else…. Muddying the waters further, information is the reigning metaphor of the moment. We tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature was described as a body, then a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine in the industrial age. Now, in the “digital age,” we apply the computational metaphor.… None of these historical metaphors is wrong; they are just incomplete. Ditto for our newest metaphor of information and computation.
Thus while the course of biological evolution “has an inherent direction that is shaped by the nature of matter and energy,” in the early universe “only the laws of physics reigned…. The ironclad constraints of the material world birthed only extremely simple mechanical forms.” Life and mind emerged out of these constraints, transcending them via the new “immaterial vectors” of information, exotropy, and self-organization. “The nature of matter and energy,” therefore, covers not only the laws of physics—the negative constraints from which life and mind emerged—but also the positive ones which “channel evolutionary innovation in certain directions.”
This calls for another aside, this time on the “reign of the laws of physics.” There are the laws of classical physics, which are applicable to the manifested world, and there are the laws of quantum physics, which concern its manifestation. The former may be said to reign over the manifested world, but only for all practical purposes. The expression “for all practical purposes” (or its acronym FAPP) is widely used in situations in which quantum effects can be ignored—situations in which the manifested world can be treated as if it were a free-standing reality—a reality existing out of relation not only to anything manifesting it but also to anyone experiencing it. But the manifested world isn’t such a reality.
While the laws of quantum physics do not hold merely FAPP, they only encapsulate statistical correlations. These correlations obtain between events, and these events may indicate either some property possessed by a quantum system or the presence of a particular type of quantum object. But for something to be indicated, there has to be a conscious subject to which it is indicated. And since the properties of quantum objects, as well as individual quantum objects, only exist if and when their existence is indicated, it follows that for the property of a quantum object or an individual quantum object to exist, there has to be a conscious subject to which its existence is indicated.
Kelly’s concession that information is but a metaphor (as popular and as incomplete as the metaphors of clockworks and engines were in their times) leaves room for mind—both as an object of discourse and as a discoursing subject—to evolve beyond all currently available metaphors.
It also leaves room for the technium itself to be a concept of limited utility, typifying a transitional stage in the evolution of life. For if the technium encompasses everything the human mind discovers, creates, or invents, then the technium is limited by the human mind’s modus operandi, its distinctive methods of discovery and invention, its ways of thinking, understanding, and devising. The reality the human mind creates—both internally as a mental construct and externally by technological means—may be the mere shadow of a transcendent reality beyond its reach. Likewise, the reality human consciousness perceives may be the faint image of a reality a consciousness beyond the human perceives. The human mind may be no more than the precursor of a greater mind, a mind that, in the words of the Rig Veda (IX.68.5), is but “half arisen into manifestation.”
Kelly might respond that all of these possibilities are potentialities of the technium itself. But let’s be clear: the human mind cannot deal with anything that is unique; it discovers laws; it understands in terms of laws; its concepts express regularities. Even if something is sui generis, the human mind knows it only as genus, not as its unique instance. The human mind creates or invents by applying, over and over again, the laws and regularities it has discovered. What it can neither create nor change is the laws buttressing its inventions. But the greater mind I’m alluding to would be able to do just that.
I agree with Kelly that evolution has an inherent direction, and that this “introduces inevitabilities into the shape of life.” Kelly lists three factors that contribute to the shaping of life: orthodox natural selection, contingency (owing to which rewinding “the tape of life”3 would produce different results), and structural inevitability (owing to which rewinding the tape of life would produce identical results). As an example of structural inevitability, he mentions the venomous sting, which “has been evolved at least twelve times: in the spider, the stingray, the stinging nettle, the centipede, the stonefish, the honeybee, the sea anemone, the male platypus, the jellyfish, the scorpion, the cone-shell mollusk, and the snake.” He maintains that “all the main morphological features of organisms—hearts, brains, guts, limbs, eyes, leaves, flowers, roots, trunks, branches, to mention only the obvious ones” would reappear if the tape of life were rewound.
But why would they inevitably reappear? Why does “the exotropy of self-organization” steer evolution along inevitable trajectories? The historical fact that wings, eyes, mimicry, etc. evolved independently multiple times doesn’t imply that their evolution was inevitable. (The inference of inevitability from historical data is known as the fallacy of “retrospective determinism.”) The evolution of eyes, being a necessary precondition for the existence of sight, would be inevitable if the evolution of the sense of sight were itself inevitable for some reason.
To Kelly, the evolution of mind, too, was inevitable: “Rewind the tape of life and it would (on another planet or in a parallel time) produce a mind again.” But, again, neither the laws of physics (with or without exotropic self-organization) nor the fact that mind did evolve, implies that mind had to evolve. If the evolution of mind was inevitable, it can only be because it was a necessary stage in the evolution of something above or beyond mind, whose evolution was inevitable.
To that something above or beyond mind Sri Aurobindo gave the name “supermind.” To him, the manifestation of this supramental consciousness was “an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and [was] therefore sure.”4 What Sri Aurobindo means by “supermind” is the power of an infinite conscious Existence or self-existent Consciousness—two sides of the same coin—to determine itself or to give itself content. It uses this power for only one reason: to express and experience its inherent Quality/Delight. If none of this is obvious to us, it is also for only one reason: in our world, infinite conscious Existence has imprisoned itself—Houdini-like5—in inanimate matter. It has imposed on itself the “ironclad constraints” of the physical laws in order to set the stage for its adventure of self-evolution.
The expression of Quality/Delight in material form involves two stages: the first casts Quality/Delight into expressive ideas, the second executes creative ideas, casting them into material form. Mind being essentially the power that creates ideas, and life being essentially the power that executes them,6 the evolution of life is a necessary precondition for the evolution of mind, and the evolution of mind is a necessary precondition for the evolution of supermind.
While mind is a means to an end and humans are “transitional beings”,7 the seemingly ever-expanding, all-engulfing technium engendered by the human mind is at once helper and bar, in the sense intended by Sri Aurobindo in one of his aphorisms8:
When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge. Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.
When we have passed beyond willings, then we shall have Power. Effort was the helper; Effort is the bar.
When we have passed beyond enjoyings, then we shall have Bliss. Desire was the helper; Desire is the bar.
When we have passed beyond individualising, then we shall be real Persons. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.
When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man. The Animal was the helper; the Animal is the bar.
In other words, mental “knowings” prepare but eventually stand in the way of the supramental Knowledge; mental “willings” prepare but eventually stand in the way of the effortlessly effective Power of the Supermind; mental “enjoyings” prepare but eventually stand in the way of the Supermind’s objectless (and therefore desireless) ecstasy; the separative and therefore necessarily ego-centric character of mental consciousness prepares but eventually stands in the way of a supramental Self that is identically the same in all beings; and the animal-nature of humanity prepares but eventually stands in the way of the evolution of a species of supramentally conscious beings.
Kelly’s belief that “in the long-term view, technology is simply the further evolution of evolution,” is another instance of the fallacy of retrospective determinism. Mind, along with its technological manifestations, belongs to a transitional stage in evolution. The “further evolution of evolution” takes us beyond mind and the technium. Equally fallacious is Kelly’s belief that “by definition [definition of what?] we are, and will always remain, part of the technium itself,” or that “Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role.”
Kelly is not wrong in his belief that “the thrust of the technium’s trajectory is to further organize the avalanche of information and tools we are generating and to increase the structure of the made world.” He is wrong only in believing that this trajectory will continue forever, rather than culminate in an evolutionary crisis which will catalyze the evolutionary saltus beyond mind. This saltus is likely to decrease the structure of the world, for, arguably, the evolution of the various organ systems of the mammalian body (cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, lymphatic, muscular, nervous, respiratory, skeletal, etc.) was necessitated by the stringent constraints imposed by the Houdini-like nature of evolution. Since the Supermind was instrumental in imposing these constraints, once evolved it can also loosen and eventually remove them. Those organ systems might therefore be discardable like a scaffolding or the chrysalis of a butterfly.
“Desire was the helper; Desire is the bar…. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.” These gnomes highlight a crucial difference between the characteristic behavior of mental beings and that of supramental ones. Mental beings are selfish, and so is the technium: “The technium’s autonomy includes us and our collective minds. We are part of its selfish nature.” Kelly actually marvels at “the unbelievable levels of selfish autonomy [the technium] possesses,” never mind that it may eventually extinguish us along with itself:
Technology has its own agenda. It is selfish. …the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. Certain aspects of the technium are detrimental to the human self, because they defuse our identity. The technium also contains power to harm itself; because it is no longer regulated by either nature or humans, it could accelerate so fast as to extinguish itself.
Who would have thought! Kelly again:
I have read almost every book on the philosophy and theory of technology and interviewed many of the wisest people pondering the nature of this force. So I was utterly dismayed to discover that one of the most astute analyses of the technium was written by a mentally ill mass murderer and terrorist. What to do? A few friends and colleagues counseled me to not even mention the Unabomber in this book. Some are deeply upset that I have….
I quote at length from the Unabomber’s manifesto for three reasons. First, it succinctly states, often better than I can, the case for autonomy in the technium. Second, I have not found a better example of the view held by many skeptics of technology (a view shared by many ordinary citizens less strongly) that the greatest problems in the world are due not to individual inventions but to the entire self-supporting system of technology itself. Third, I think it is important to convey the fact that the emergent autonomy of the technium is recognized not only by supporters of technology like myself, but also by those who despise it. The Unabomber was right about the self-aggrandizing nature of the technium.
Kelly bemoans “our refusal to accept our nature—the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create…. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.”
Perhaps it is our selfishness we hate. At any rate, it is not bombings that will cure us of our selfishness or eliminate the detrimental aspects of the technium. It is only by transcending our separative mental selves that we can cease to be slaves of the technium and thereby truly master it—to the extent this remains necessary or useful.
Reminder: The six kingdoms of life.
What is meant by the “expansion of space” is an observed increase of the average distances between galaxy clusters: they appear to recede from each other. In Newton’s theory of gravity, a model of randomly but approximately homogeneously distributed point masses initially flying apart at high speed implies that the average kinetic energy of the point masses decreases while their potential energy increases. But the best empirically supported theory of gravity today is not Newton’s but Einstein’s, nor is the average speed with which galaxy clusters recede from each other decreasing; rather, it is found to increase. Sometimes referred to as “gravitational repulsion,” this effect is currently attributed to a mysterious “dark energy,” which like Ptolemy’s epicycles is an ad hoc postulate added in response to observations that falsify a theory. Whether dark energy increases the potential energy of the mutually receding galaxy clusters as well as their average kinetic energy remains an open question.
For the benefit of young readers who only know digital recorders, “rewinding a tape” is an expression left over from a technology no longer in use, just like “dialing a phone” or “cranking an engine.”
Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 357.
Harry Houdini was a stage magician and stunt performer famous at the turn of the 20th Century, noted for his sensational escape acts.
The essential natures of these principles are obscured by the Houdiniesque character of our world, owing to which the emergence of life required the creation of increasingly complex organisms, and the emergence of mind required the creation of increasingly complex nervous systems.
“Man and Supermind,” in: Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, pp. 157–268.
“Aphorisms,” in: Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, pp. 199–207.
Oh dear myself, some things stay better in the shelf.