The Technium

Kevin Kelly has a long (and slightly meandering) essay on technology and how it will evolve with culture and even our human form. In the essay he coins the phrase ‘Technium‘ and writes:

The main question that I’m asking myself is, 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? Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force - the only lasting force - in culture. If that’s so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it? Sadly we don’t even have a good theory about technology.

…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. That is, an individual technological organism has one kind of response, but in an ecology comprised of co-evolving species of technology we find an elevated entity — the technium — that behaves very differently from an individual species. 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.

I tend to think of the technium like a child of humanity. Our job will be to train the technium, to imbue it with certain principles because, at a certain level and at a certain age, it will basically become much more autonomous than it is now. It will leave us like a teenager who goes on to live alone: although he or she will continue to interact with us and will always be part of us, we have to let it go.

We can’t raise a successful human by remaining in complete control as parents. We have to train our children well — bury within them a strong conscience with deep values that can guide them to do the right thing in situations we had not foreseen or even imagined. We need to do the same with the technium and our technologies. In the same sense we need to embed our values into the technological superorganism so that these heuristics become guiding factors. As more autonomy is given and won by the technium, it will then be able to do the right thing.

The Edge