Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants is built on a single audacious premise: that the vast interlinked system of tools, machines, processes, and organizations that humanity has produced — what Kelly calls the 'technium' — behaves more like a living organism or an ecosystem than a collection of inert artifacts. The technium has tendencies: toward complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, and sentience. These tendencies are not imposed by human designers; they emerge from the system itself and can be observed across the entire history of technical change. Just as evolution tends toward increasing diversity and complexity of life forms regardless of the intentions of individual organisms, the technium trends toward increasing the diversity and complexity of technical forms regardless of the intentions of individual inventors.

Kelly places the technium within a cosmic evolutionary narrative that runs from the Big Bang through chemistry, biology, mind, and culture. Each stage increases the density of information processing and the range of possible states in the universe. Technology, on this account, is not a human invention in any deep sense; it is what the universe does at this stage of its evolution, using humans as its current vehicle. Individual technologies that appear 'inevitable' — the telephone, the airplane — are so because they correspond to persistent combinatorial possibilities in the technium that will be discovered by whoever reaches the relevant level of knowledge, in whatever culture, in whatever century. Kelly's framework is the most expansive attempt to locate the origin of technology not in human history but in cosmic history, treating invention as a phase transition in the self-organization of matter.