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Read: What Technology Wants: Kevin Kelly #1

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p-raj commented 5 years ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7954936-what-technology-wants?ac=1&from_search=true

p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 2 (Imperatives ): Chapter 9 (Choosing the Inevitable)

The second, more substantial sense of “inevitable” demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology’s use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can’t be diverted by mere social whims.
So every new development in the technium is contingent upon the historical antecedents of previous technologies. In biology this effect is called coevolution, and it means that the “environment” of one species is the ecosystem of all the other species it interacts with, all of them in flux. 
Within the borders laid out by inevitable forces, our choices unleash consequences that gain momentum over time until these contingencies harden into technological necessities and become nearly unchangeable in future generations. There’s an old story about the long reach of early choices that is basically true: Ordinary Roman carts were constructed to match the width of imperial Roman war chariots because it was easier to follow the ruts in the road left by the war chariots. The chariots were sized to accommodate the width of two large warhorses, which translates into our English measurement of 4’ 8.5”. Roads throughout the vast Roman Empire were built to this specification. When the legions of Rome marched into Britain, they constructed long-distance imperial roads 4’ 8.5” wide. When the English started building tram-ways, they used the same width so the same horse carriages could be used. And when they started building railways with horseless carriages, naturally the rails were 4’ 8.5” wide. Imported laborers from the British Isles built the first railways in the Americas using the same tools and jigs they were used to. Fast-forward to the U.S. space shuttle, which is built in parts around the country and assembled in Florida. Because the two large solid-fuel rocket engines on the side of the launch shuttle were sent by railroad from Utah, and that line traversed a tunnel not much wider than the standard track, the rockets themselves could not be much wider in diameter than 4’ 8.5”. As one wag concluded: “So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses’ arse.” 
. The primary driver is preordained development—what technology wants. The second driver is the influence of technological history, the gravity of the past, as in the way the size of a horse’s yoke determines the size of a space rocket. The third force is society’s collective free will in shaping the technium, or our choices. 
Under the first force of inevitability, the path of technological evolution is steered both by the laws of physics and by self-organizing tendencies within its large, complex, adaptive system. The technium will tend toward certain macroforms, even if you rerun the tape of time.
What happens next is contingent on the second force, or what has already happened, and so the momentum of history constrains our choices forward.
In contrast to these two, the third force is our free will to make individual choices of use and collective policy decisions. Compared to all possibilities that we can imagine, we have a very narrow range of choices. But compared to 10,000 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, or even last year, our possibilities are expanding. Although restricted in the cosmic sense, we have more choice than we know what to do with. And via the engine of the technium, these real choices will keep expanding (even though the larger path is preordained).
“Human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen.”
“Technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions.”
The basic laws of physics and emergent self-organization drive technological evolution through an inevitable series of structural forms—four-wheeled vehicles, hemispherical boats, books of pages, et
the historical contingency of past inventions forms an inertia that bends evolution this way or that—within the bounds of the inevitable developments
the collective choice of free-willed individuals, that provides the character of the technium. And just as our free-will choices in our individual lives create the kind of person we are (our ineffable “person”), our choices, too, shape the technium.
To claim that the technium pushes itself through certain inevitable technological forms is not to say that every technology was a mathematical certainty. Rather, it indicates a direction more than a destiny. More precisely, the technium’s long-term trends reveal the design of the technium; this design indicates what the technium is built to do.

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p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 3 (Choices ): Chapter 10 (Unabomber was right)

Simply the fact that a machine is able to perform a task often becomes sufficient reason to have it do the task, even if it does it poorly at first.
Technology chips away at our human dignity, calling into question our role in the world and our own nature.
Technology destroys nature, strengthening itself further.
But because it is destroying nature, the technium will ultimately collapse.
Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it.
The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite. They gravitate toward technology because they recognize that they have more freedoms when they are empowered with it. They (that is, we) realistically weigh the fact that yes, indeed, some options are closed off when adopting new technology, but many others are opened, so that the net gain is an increase in freedom, choices, and possibilities.
Thousands of other technologies follow the same dynamic: The more people who participate, the more essential it becomes. Living without these embedded technologies requires more effort, or at least more
right that the selfish nature of this system causes specific harms. 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
The technium’s rampant materialism outlaws greater meaning in life by focusing our spirits on stuff. In a blind fury to find some kind of meaning in life, we consume technology madly, energetically, ceaselessly, obsessively buying the only answer that seems for sale—more technology. We end up needing more and more technology to feel less and less satisfied. “Needing more to be satisfied less” is one definition of addiction.
willingly choose technology, with its great defects and obvious detriments, because we unconsciously calculate its virtues. In an entirely wordless calculus, we note the addictions in others, the degradations in the environment, the distractions in our own lives, the confusion about character that various technologies generate, and then we sum these up against the benefits. I don’t believe this is a wholly rational procedure; I think we also tell each other stories about technology, and these are added in with as much weight as the pluses and minuses. But in a real way we do a risk-benefit analysis. Even the most primitive shaman trying to decide whether to trade a wild skin for a machete will make such a calculation. He’s seen what happens when others get a steel blade. We do the same with unknown technologies, too, just not as well. And most of the time, after we’ve weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it—and pay the price.
The costs of technology are not easily visible, and the expectations of virtue often hyped. To improve our chances of making better decisions, we need—I almost hate to say it—more technology. The way to reveal the full costs of technology and deflate its hype is with better information tools and processes
We require technologies such as real-time self-monitoring of our use, transparent sharing of problems, deep analysis of testing results, relentless retesting, accurate recording of the chain of sources in manufacturing, and honest accounting of negative externalities such as pollution

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p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 3 (Choices ): Chapter 11 (Lessons of Amish Hackers)

Unlike the Amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. If they don’t, then their children will. Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.
own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally
p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 3 (Choices ): Chapter 12 (Seeking Conviviality)

“For instance, the number of technologies to choose from so far exceeds our capacity to use them all that these days we define ourselves more by the technologies we don’t use than by those we do. In the same way that a vegetarian has more of an identity than an omnivore, someone who chooses not to drive or use the internet stakes out a stronger technological stance than the ordinary consumer. Although we don’t realize it, at the global scale, we opt out of more technology than we opt in to.”
“Large-scale prohibitions against technologies are rare. They are hard to enforce.”
“the English cottage weavers banned wide stocking-frame looms during the Luddite rebellion—it hurt their agrarian household businesses. Economic prohibitions can achieve their goals in the short term but often aggravate the inevitable transition to acceptance later.”
Prohibitions are in effect postponements
these widespread bans so rarely work is that we generally don’t understand new inventions when they first appear. Every new idea is a bundle of uncertainty. No matter how sure the originator is that his or her newest idea will transform the world or end war or remove poverty or delight the masses, the truth is that no one knows what it will do. Even the short-term role of an idea is unclear
More commonly a new invention is peddled by its inventors for one expected (and lucrative!) use, which is quickly proven wrong, and then advertised for a series of alternative (and less lucrative) uses, few of which work, until reality steers the technology toward a marginal unexpected use. Sometimes that marginal use blossoms into an exceptionally disruptive case that becomes the norm. When that kind of success happens, it obscures the earlier failures
Switching occupations is the norm for technology
This should be the first law of technological expectation: The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well
If a new technology is likely to birth a never-before-seen benefit, it will also likely birth a never-before-seen problem.
thousand times as much risk for technologies or situations that are voluntary rather than mandatory
“Psychologists have learned a fair amount about risk. We now know that people will accept a thousand times as much risk for technologies or situations that are voluntary rather than mandatory. ”
In a letter Orville Wright wrote to his inventor friend Henry Ford, Wright recounts a story he heard from a missionary stationed in China. Wright told Ford the story for the same reason I tell it here: as a cautionary tale about speculative risks. The missionary wanted to improve the laborious way the Chinese peasants in his province harvested grain. The local farmers clipped the stalks with some kind of small hand shear. So the missionary had a scythe shipped in from America and demonstrated its superior productivity to an enthralled crowd. “The next morning, however, a delegation came to see the missionary. The scythe must be destroyed at once. What, they said, if it should fall into the hands of thieves; a whole field could be cut and carried away in a single night.” And so the scythe was banished, progress stopped, because nonusers could imagine a possible—but wholly improbable—way it could significantly harm their society. (Much of the hugely disruptive theater around “national security” today is based on similarly improbable scenarios of worst-case dangers.)
Safety trumps innovation
“Technology always does more than we intend; we know this so well that it has actually become part of our intentions,” writes Langdon Winner. “Imagine a world in which technologies accomplish only the specific purposes one had in mind in advance and nothing more. It would be a radically constricted world and one totally unlike the world we now inhabit.” We know technology will produce problems; we just don’t know which new problems.
specific and fairly evolved technologies (e.g., the supersonic transport; a nuclear reactor; a particular pharmaceutical product), the radical transforming capacity of technology comes not from individual artifacts but from interacting subsets of technologies that permeate society
The principle of constant engagement is called the Proactionary Principle. Because it emphasizes provisional assessment and constant correction, it is a deliberate counterapproach to the Precautionary Principle
(regarding technology) what happens if everyone has this for free? Anticipation should not be a judgment. 
Testing can also be continual, 24/7, rather than the just on first release
Take photography. If the processing of color photography is centralized (as it was for 50 years by Kodak), that applies a different tenor to photography than if the processing is done by chips in the camera itself. Centralization fosters a type of self-censorship of what pictures you take, and it also adds a time lag for displaying the results, which slows learning and discourages spontaneity. To be able to take a colorful picture of anything and then review it instantly and cheaply—that changed the character of the same glass lenses and shutter
Radio broadcasting—a very old and easily manufactured technology—is currently among the most heavily regulated technologies in most countries. This steep regulation by government has led to the current development of only a few bands of frequencies out of all those available, most of which remain underused. In an alternative system, radio spectrum could be allotted in a very different manner, potentially giving rise to cell phones that communicate directly with one another instead of through a local hub cell tower. The resulting alternative peer-to-peer broadcast system would yield a vastly different expression of radio
The power of self-replication is now found in four fields of high technology: geno, robo, info, and nano. Geno stuff includes gene therapies, genetically modified organisms, synthetic life, and drastic genetic engineering of the human line. With genotechnology a new critter or new chromosome can be invented and released; it then reproduces forever, in theory.
Robo stuff is, of course, robots. Robots already work in factories making other robots, and at least one university lab has prototyped an autonomously self-assembling machine. Give this machine a pile of parts and it will assemble a copy of itself.
Info stuff is self-replicants such as computer viruses, artificial minds, and virtual personae built through data accumulation. Computer viruses have famously already mastered self-reproduction. Thousands infect hundreds of millions of computers. The holy grail of research into artificial learning and intelligence is, of course, to make an artificial mind smart enough to make another artificial mind smarter still.
Nano stuff is extremely tiny machines (as small as bacteria) that are designed for chores like eating oil or performing calculations or cleaning human arteries. Because they are so small, these tiny machines can work like mechanical computer circuits, and so in theory, they can be designed to self-assemble and reproduce like other computational programs. They would be a sort of like dry life, although this is many years away.
In these four areas the self-amplifying loops of self-duplication catapult the effects of these technologies into the future very quickly. Robots that make robots that make robots! Their accelerated cycles of creation can race so far ahead of our intentions that it is worrisome. Who’s controlling the robo descendants?
In the geno world if we code changes into a gene line, for example, those changes can replicate down generations forever. And not just in family lines. Genes can easily migrate horizontally between species. So copies of new genes—bad or good—might disseminate through both time and space. As we know from the digital era, once copies are released they are hard to take back. If we can engineer an endless cascade of artificial minds inventing minds smarter than themselves (and us), what control do we have over the moral judgment of such creations? What if they start out with harmful prejudices?
Information shares this same avalanching property of replicating out of our control. Computer security experts claim that of the thousands of species of self-replicating worms and computer viruses invented by hackers to date, not one has gone extinct. They are here forever—or as long as two machines still run.
Finally, nanotechnology promises marvelous super-micro-thingies that are constructed at the precision of single atoms. The threat of these nano-organisms breeding without limit until they cover everything is known as the “gray goo” scenario. For a number of reasons, I think the gray goo is scientifically unlikely, though some kind of self-reproducing nanostuff is inevitable. But it is very likely that at least a few fragile species of nanotechnology (not goo) will breed in the wild, in narrow, protected niches. Once a nanobug goes feral, it could be indelible
This is a replay of an old story. The amazing, uplifting power of life itself is rooted in its ability to leverage self-replication, and now that power is being born in technology. The most powerful force in the world will become much more powerful as it gains in ability to self-generate, but this liquid dynamite presents a grand challenge in managing
A convivial manifestation of a technology offers:
• Cooperation. It promotes collaboration between people and institutions.
• Transparency. Its origins and ownership are clear. Its workings are intelligible to nonexperts. There is no asymmetrical advantage of knowledge to some of its users.
• Decentralization. Its ownership, production, and control are distributed. It is not monopolized by a professional elite.
• Flexibility. It is easy for users to modify, adapt, improve, or inspect its core. Individuals may freely choose to use it or give it up.
• Redundancy. It is not the only solution, not a monopoly, but one of several options.
• Efficiency. It minimizes impact on ecosystems. It has a high efficiency for energy and materials and is easy to reuse.

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p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 4 (Directions ): Chapter 13 (Technology's Trajectories)

Technology wants what we want—the same long list of merits we crave. When a technology has found its ideal role in the world, it becomes an active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others.
Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability
The force that is waiting to erupt into the technologies of the technium was first pushed by exotropy, built up by self-organization, and gradually thrown from the inert world into life, and from life into minds, and from minds into the creations of our minds. It is an observable force found in the intersection of information, matter, and energy, and it can be repeated and measured, though it has only recently been surveyed.
And as with a ratchet, once a branch of life moves up a level, it does not move back. In this way there is an irreversible drift toward greater effective complexity.
This arc of complexity flows from the dawn of the cosmos into life. But the arc continues through biology and now extends itself forward through technology. The very same dynamics that shape complexity in the natural world shape complexity in the technium.
But as in natural evolution, a long tail of ever-complexifying arrangements of information and materials fills our attention, even if those complex inventions are small in mass. (Indeed, demassification is one avenue of complexification.) Complex inventions stack up information rather than atoms. The most complex technologies we make are also the lightest and least material. 
Throughout the technium, lineages of technology are restructured with additional layers of information to yield more complex artifacts.
Diversity powers the world. In an ecosystem, increasing diversity is a sign of health. The technium, too, runs on diversity. From the dawn of creation the tide of diversity has risen, and as far as we can look into the future, it will continue to diverge without end.
The trend toward specialization in life is propelled by an arms race. More specialized organisms (such as a clam thriving on sulfuric emissions in lightless deep-sea vents) present more specialized environments for competitors and prey (such as crabs that feed on the sulfuric clams), which breed more specialized strategies (such as parasites on the crabs) and solutions and in the end yet more specialized organisms.
This sequence from general to specific holds true for most technologies. Automobiles start off appealing broadly, and over time they evolve to specific models, while the general-purpose variety fades. You can choose among compacts, vans, sporty models, sedans, pickups, hybrids, and so on. Scissors are specified for hair, paper, carpet, mesh, or flowers.
This convergence is temporary. We are still in the early stages of computerization—or rather, intelligenation. Everywhere we currently apply our own personal intelligence (in other words, everywhere we work and play) we are rapidly applying artificial and collective intelligence as well, and rapidly overhauling our tools and expectations.
 The portals into the grid of computation, or the net, will specialize to a remarkable degree. The keyboard, for one, will lose its monopoly. Speech and gesture input will gain a major role. Spectacle and eyeball screens will supplement walls and flexible surfaces.
With the advent of rapid fabrication (machines that can fabricate things on demand in quantities of one) specialization will leap ahead so that any tool can be customized to an individual’s personal needs or desires. Very niche-y functions may summon devices that are assembled for only one task and then unassembled. Ultraspecialized artifacts may live for only a day, like a mayfly. The “long tail” of niches and personal customization is a characteristic not merely of media but of technological evolution itself.
We can forecast the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity.
In the long run, convivial technologies that open up other technologies tend to ascend to ubiquity fastest.
One thousand live, always-on cameras make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stoplight runners, and record police misbehavior. One billion live, always-on cameras serve as a community monitor and memory, they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs, they restructure the notion of the self, and they reduce the authority of authorities.
One thousand humanoid robots revamp the Olympics and give a boost to entertainment companies. One billion humanoid robots cause massive shifts in employment, reintroduce slavery and its opponents, and demolish the status of established religions.
In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question, What happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?
Usually what happens to a ubiquitous technology is that it disappears. Shortly after their invention in 1873, modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large, expensive motor in the place where a steam engine had formerly stood. That single engine turned a complex maze of axles and belts, which in turn spun hundreds of smaller machines scattered throughout the factory. The rotational energy twirled through the buildings from that single source.
In addition to a deep embeddedness, ubiquity also breeds certainty
The advantages of new technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. It is, to repeat Danny Hillis’s definition of technology, “stuff that does not work yet.” A newfangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can offer only uncertain advantages in exchange for certain trouble. Even after an invention has been perfected elsewhere, when it is first introduced into a new zone or culture it requires the retraining of old habit
In every technology’s life span, then, there will be a period of haves and have-nots. Clear advantages may flow to the individuals or societies who first take a risk with unproven guns or the alphabet or electrification or laser eye surgery over those who do not. The distribution of these advantages may depend on wealth, privilege, or lucky geography as much as desire. This divide between the haves and the have-nots was most recently and most visibly played out at the turn of the last century when the internet blossomed.
Isn’t that how it should be, that the rich fund the development of cheap technology for the poor?
When critics asked us champions of the internet what we were going to do about the digital divide and I said “nothing,” I added a challenge: “If you want to worry about something, don’t worry about the folks who are currently offline. They’ll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has six billion people, and they are all e-mailing at once, when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous. That will produce unintended consequences worth worrying about.”
The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are convivially open-ended: communications, computation, socialization, and digitization. 
More complexity expands the number of possible choices
A major consequence of creating cheap and ubiquitous artificial minds is to infuse higher levels of free will into our built environment. Of course we’ll put minds into robots, but we’ll also implant cars, chairs, doors, shoes, and books with slivers of choice-making intelligence, and all these expand the realm of those making free choices, even if those choices are only particle sized.
Where there are free wills there are mistakes. When we unleash inanimate objects from their shackles of hereditary inertness and give them particles of choice, we give them freedom to make mistakes. We can think of each new crumb of artificial sentience as a new way to make mistakes. To do stupid things. To make errors. In other words, technology teaches us how to make innovative kinds of mistakes we could not make before. In fact, asking ourselves how humanity might make entirely new kinds of mistakes is probably the best metric we have for discovering new possibilities of choice and freedom.
First the technium expands the range of possible choices, and then it expands the range of agents that can make choices. The more powerful a new technology is, the greater the new freedoms it opens up. Multiplying options goes hand in hand with multiplying liberty. Nations of the world with plenty of economic choices, abundant communication options, and high education possibilities tend to rank highest in available liberty. But this expansion includes possible abuse as well. Present in every new technology is the potential to make new mistakes. The freedom to choose increases in many ways as the technium grows.
Three strands of increasing mutualism weave through evolution, or what is properly called coevolution.
1. As life evolves, it becomes increasingly dependent on other life. The oldest bacteria eke out their livelihood from lifeless rock, water, and volcanic fumes. They touch only inert matter. Later, more complex microbes, such as E. coli, will spend their entire life inside our guts, surrounded by our living cells, eating our food. They touch only other living things. Over time, the home environment for a creature is more likely to be living rather than inert. The entire animal kingdom is a fine example of this trend. Why bother to produce food from the elements yourself when you can just steal it from other living organisms? Animals are more mutualistic than plants in this way.
2. As life evolves, nature creates more opportunities for dependencies between species. Every organism that creates a successful niche for itself also creates potential niches for other species (all those potential parasites!). Let’s say an alpine meadow enriches its mix over time with an additional new species of bee to pollinate the crocus. That addition increases the numbers of possible relationships between all the meadow creatures.
3. As life evolves, possibilities for cooperation between members of the same species increase. The superorganism of an ant colony or beehive is an extreme case of intraspecies cooperation and mutualism. Greater sociality among organisms is a stabilizing ratchet in evolution. Once socialization is acquired, it is rarely let go.
Human life is immersed in all three mutualisms. First, we are remarkably dependent on other life for survival. We eat plants and other animals. Second, there is no other species on this planet that uses the variety and number of other living species that we do to stay healthy and prosperous. And third, we are famously a social animal, requiring others of our species to raise us, teach us how to survive, and keep us sane. In this way our life is deeply symbiotic; we live inside of other life. The technium pushes these three varieties of mutualism even further.
The technium is moving toward increased symbiosis between humans and machines.
There is a natural progression of increased connectivity among humans. Groups of people start off simply sharing ideas, tools, creations, and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step the amount of coordination increases.
haring serves as the foundation for the next higher level of communal engagement: cooperation
With more highly evolved technology, additional value can emerge from the group’s efforts as a whole. For instance, tagged photo snapshots of the same tourist scene from different angles by different tourists can be assembled into a stunning three-dimensional rendering of the original location. No individual would bother to make that.
Each time we reinvent something, we’ll make it yet more mutualistic.
 As utilitarian technologies age, they tend to become recreational. 
Some of our hardest-working technology today will achieve beautiful uselessness in the future.
All the inventions we have constructed to assist our own minds—our many storage devices, signal processing, flows of information, and distributed communication networks—all these are also essential ingredients for producing new minds.
different ways in the technium:
1. Mind infiltrates matter as ubiquitously as possible.
2. Exotropy continues to organize more complex types of intelligences.
3. Sentience diversifies into as many types of minds as possible
However, the snowballing success of search engines such as Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will most likely not be confined in a stand-alone supercomputer but will be birthed in the superorganism of a billion CPUs known as the web. It will run on the global megacomputer that encompasses the internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. Any device that touches this web AI will share—and contribute to—its intelligence.
 First, insinuate intelligence into all matter. Second, bring all those embedded minds together. Third, increase the diversity of minds. 
What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather, over the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible.
The primary thrust of exotropy is to uncover the full diversity of intelligences. Each type of thinking, no matter how large it is scaled up, can only understand in a limited way. The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job is to invent a million, or a billion, varieties of comprehension.
The trajectory of the technium is pointed toward a million more minds inhabiting the least bits of matter, in a million new varieties of thinking, subsumed with our own multiple minds into a planetary thought—on the way to comprehending itself.
The information about and from a process will grow faster than the process itself. Thus, information will continue to grow faster than anything else we make.
The technium is fundamentally a system that feeds off the accumulation of this explosion of information and knowledge. 
Nowhere is this increasing structure as visible as in science. Despite its own rhetoric, science is not built to increase either the “truthfulness” or the total volume of information. It is designed to increase the order and organization of knowledge we generate about the world. Science creates “tools”—techniques and methods—that manipulate information such that it can be tested, compared, recorded, recalled in an orderly fashion, and related to other knowledge. “Truth” is really only a measure of how well specific facts can be built upon, extended, and interconnected.
They “discovered” previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge
Columbus’s encounter put America on the map of the globe, linking it to the rest of the known world, integrating its own inherent body of knowledge into the slowly accumulating, unified body of verified knowledge. Columbus joined two large continents of knowledge into a growing consilient structure.
The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many “facts” that don’t fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. 
We say knowledge increases not only when the number of facts increases, but also, and more so, when the number and strength of relationships between facts increases. 
The technium keeps adding connections among facts and more complex relations among ideas.
New tools enable new ways of discovery, different ways of structuring information.
 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.
Life kept evolving for four billion years because it discovered ways to increase its own evolvability
At the start of life, natural selection operated on molecules, later on population of molecules, and eventually on cells and colonies of cells. Eventually, evolution selected organisms out of a population, favoring the most fit. So over biological aeons, the focus of evolution shifted upward to more complex structures. In other words, over time, the process of evolution became a conglomeration of many different forces working at many levels. By slow accumulation of tricks, the system of evolution acquired a diversity of ways to adapt and create. Imagine a shape-shifter that can change the areas in which it changes!
If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. So the presence of sentience in life vastly increased its evolvability.
This is more than simply the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe.

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p-raj commented 5 years ago

Section 4 (Directions ): Chapter 14 (Playing the Infinite Game)

How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances.
Choice works best when it has values to guide it
However, if we fail to enlarge the possibilities for other people, we diminish them, and that is unforgivable. Enlarging the scope of creativity for others, then, is an obligation
An infinite game has no boundaries. James Carse, the theologian who developed these ideas in his brilliant treatise Finite and Infinite Games, says, “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
“Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation. . . . So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal.”
No one person can become all that is humanly possible; no one technology can capture all that technology promises. It will take all life and all minds and all technology to begin to see reality. It will take the whole technium, and that includes us, to discover the tools that are needed to surprise the world. Along the way we generate more options, more opportunities, more connection, more diversity, more unity, more thought, more beauty, and more problems. Those add up to more good, an infinite game worth playing.
That’s what technology wants.