What Technology Wants (7 page)

Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time to steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice and launched a global economy. The invention of moveable-type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion's founding text themselves and make their own interpretations, and that launched the very idea of “protest” within and against religion. Way back in 1620, Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three “practical arts”—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—that had changed the world. He declared that “no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” Bacon helped launch the scientific method, which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux, as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium.

Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divided an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science and all its many cultural descendants. He says, “The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began.”

During the Industrial Revolution, our inventions transformed our daily routines. Mechanical contraptions and cheap fuel gave us plenty of food, nine-to-five days, and smokestacks. This phase of technology was dirty, disruptive, and often built and run at an inhuman scale. The stiff, cold, unbending nature of raw steel, brick, and glass cast the encroachment as alien, in opposition to us, if not to all living things. It directly fed upon natural resources and so had a devilish shadow. The worst by-products of the industrial age—black smoke, black river waters, blackened short lives working in the mills—were so remote from our cherished self-conception that we wanted to believe the source itself was alien. Or worse. It was not difficult to eye the hard, cold material takeover as evil, even if a necessary evil. When technology appeared among our age-old routines, it was set outside ourselves and treated like an infection. People embraced its products, but guiltily. It would have been ludicrous a century ago to think of technology as ordained. It was a suspect force. When two world wars unleashed the full killing power of this inventiveness, it cemented the reputation of technology as a beguiling satan.

As we refined this stuff through generations of technological evolution, it lost much of its hardness. We began to see through technology's disguise as material and began to see it primarily as action. While it inhabited a body, its heart was something softer. In 1949, John von Neumann, the brainy genius behind the first useful computer, realized what computers were teaching us about technology: “Technology will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.” No longer a noun, technology was becoming a force—a vital spirit that throws us forward or pushes against us. Not a thing but a verb.

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Looking back at Paleolithic times, we can observe an evolutionary phase when human tools were embryonic, when the technium existed in its most minimal state. But since technology predated humans, appearing in primates and even earlier, we need to look beyond our own origins to understand the true nature of technological development. Technology is not just a human invention; it was also born from life.

If we chart the varieties of life we have so far discovered on Earth, they fall into six broad categories. Within each of these six categories, or kingdoms of life, all species share a common biochemical blueprint. Three of these kingdoms are the tiny microscopic stuff: one-celled organisms. The other three are the biological kingdoms of organisms we normally see: fungi (mushrooms and molds), plants, and animals.

Every species in the six kingdoms, which is to say every organism alive on Earth today, from algae to zebra, is equally evolved. Despite the differences in the sophistication and development of their forms, all living species have evolved from predecessors for the same amount of time: four billion years. All have been tested daily and have managed to adapt across hundreds of millions of generations in an unbroken chain.

Many of these organisms have learned to build structures, and those structures have allowed the creature to extend itself beyond its tissue. The hard two-meter mound of a termite colony operates as if it were an external organ of the insects: The mound's temperature is regulated and it is repaired after injury. The dried mud itself seems to be living. What we think of as coral—stony, treelike structures—are the apartment buildings of nearly invisible coral animals. The coral structure and coral animals behave as one. It grows, breathes. The waxy interior of a beehive or the twiggy architecture of a bird's nest works the same way. Therefore a nest or a hive can best be considered a body built rather than grown. A shelter is animal technology, the animal extended.

The extended human is the technium. Marshall McLuhan, among others, noted that clothes are people's extended skin, wheels extended feet, camera and telescopes extended eyes. Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body. During the industrial age it was easy to see the world this way. Steam-powered shovels, locomotives, television, and the levers and gears of engineers were a fabulous exoskeleton that turned man into superman. A closer look reveals the flaw in this analogy: The extended costume of animals is the result of their genes. They inherit the basic blueprints of what they make. Humans don't. The blueprints for our shells spring from our minds, which may spontaneously create something none of our ancestors ever made or even imagined. If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas.

With minor differences, the evolution of the technium—the organism of ideas—mimics the evolution of genetic organisms. The two share many traits: The evolution of both systems moves from the simple to the complex, from the general to the specific, from uniformity to diversity, from individualism to mutualism, from energy waste to efficiency, and from slow change to greater evolvability. The way that a species of technology changes over time fits a pattern similar to a genealogical tree of species evolution. But instead of expressing the work of genes, technology expresses ideas.

Yet ideas never stand alone. They come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, and logical consequences and a cascade of subsequent possibilities. Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them.

Most new ideas and new inventions are disjointed ideas merged. Innovations in the design of clocks inspired better windmills, furnaces engineered to brew beer turned out to be useful to the iron industry, mechanisms invented for organ making were applied to looms, and mechanisms in looms became computer software. Often unrelated parts end up as a tightly integrated system in a more evolved design. Most engines combined heat-producing pistons with a cooling radiator. But the clever air-cooled engine merges two ideas into one: The engine contains the pistons but also doubles as a radiator to dissipate the heat they generate. “In technology, combinatorial evolution is foremost, and routine,” says economist Brian Arthur in
The Nature of Technology
. “Many of a technology's parts are shared by other technologies, so a great deal of development happens automatically as components improve in other uses ‘outside' the host technology.”

These combinations are like mating. They produce a hereditary tree of ancestral technologies. Just as in Darwinian evolution, tiny improvements are rewarded with more copies, so that innovations spread steadily through the population. Older ideas merge and hatch idea-lings. Not only do technologies form ecosystems of cross-supported allies, but they also form evolutionary lines. The technium can really only be understood as a type of evolutionary life.

We can arrange the story of life in several ways. One way chronicles biological landmarks. At the top of the list of life's greatest million-year passages would be the point when organisms migrated from the sea to land or the period when they acquired backbones or the era in which they developed eyes. Other milestones would be the arrival of flowering plants or the demise of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals. These are important benchmarks in our past and legitimate achievements in our ancestors' tale.

But since life is a self-generated information system, a more revealing way to view the four-billion-year history of life is to mark the major transitions in the informational organization of life's forms. Of the many ways in which a mammal differs from, say, a sponge, one of the primary differences is the additional layers in which information flows through the organism. To view life's stages we need to call out the major transitions of life's structures over evolutionary time. This was the method of biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, who recently found eight thresholds of biological information in life's history.

They concluded that the major transitions in biological organization were:

Each level in their hierarchy marks a major advance in complexity. The invention of sex is probably the biggest step in the reordering of biological information. By permitting a controlled recombination of traits (some traits from each partner) rather than either the pure random diversity of mutations or the rigid sameness of clones, sex maximizes evolvability. Animals using sexual recombination of genes will evolve faster than their competitors. The later natural invention of multicellularity and, still later, the invention of colonies of multicell organisms each supply Darwinian survival advantages. But more important, these innovations serve as platforms that permit biological informational bits to be organized in newer, more easily organized ways.

The evolution of science and technology parallels the evolution of nature. The major technological transitions are also passages from one level of organization to another. Rather than catalog important inventions such as iron, steam power, or electricity, in this view we catalog how the structure of information is reshaped by new technology. A prime example would be the transformation of alphabets (strings of symbols not unlike DNA) into highly organized knowledge in books, indexes, libraries, and so on (not unlike cells and organisms).

In a parallel to Smith and Szathmary, I have arranged the major transitions in technology according to the level at which information is organized. At each step, information and knowledge are processed at a level not present before.

The major transitions in the technium are:

No transition in technology has affected our species, or the world at large, more than the first one, the creation of language. Language enabled information to be stored in a memory greater than an individual's recall. A language-based culture accumulated stories and oral wisdom to disseminate to future generations. The learning of individuals, even if they died before reproducing, would be remembered. From a systems point of view, language enabled humans to adapt and transmit learning faster than genes.

The invention of writing systems for language and math structured this learning even more. Ideas could be indexed, retrieved, and propagated more easily. Writing allowed the organization of information to penetrate into many everyday aspects of life. It accelerated trade, the creation of calendars, and the formation of laws—all of which organized information further.

Printing organized information still more by making literacy widespread. As printing became ubiquitous, so did symbolic manipulation. Libraries, catalogs, cross-referencing, dictionaries, concordances, and the publishing of minute observations all blossomed, producing a new level of informational ubiquity—to the extent that today we don't even notice that printing covers our visual landscape.

The scientific method followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating. Via peer-reviewed correspondence and, later, journals, science offered a method of extracting reliable information, testing it, and then linking it to a growing body of other tested, interlinked facts.

This newly ordered information—what we call science—could then be used to restructure the organization of matter. It birthed new materials, new processes for making stuff, new tools, and new perspectives. When the scientific method was applied to craft, we invented mass production of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, efficiency, and specialization. All these forms of informational organization launched the incredible rise in standards of living we take for granted.