Radiolab - What Does Technology Want?

Episode Date: November 16, 2010

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts! From.

W. N. Y. C. C? Yes. And NPR. All right. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Chadabumrod.

I'm Robert Prelwich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. This week we're going to... I'm going live. You were going live. Sort of. From the New York Public Library, where they have a program called. New York Public Library Live.

So let's just to get the introductions done. When was it, by the way? When was it? It was in November. Was it on a Monday or a Thursday? I don't remember the day, but I do remember the people who are on the stage with me. They are wonderful, but irritating. They are Stephen Johnson, who's got a new book called Where Good Ideas Come From.

And then there's Kevin Kelly with a book that he entitles, What Technology Wants. So that's Kevin. That's just a weird question. question, right? I mean, what this? If I met a spoon, I know what it wants. It wants whatever I want. I take it, put it in the soup, bring it to my mouth, suck on it, put it down. When it's down, it's just nothing. It doesn't want anything. So, at least that's my notion. So when you ask this question, or actually, you don't even ask it. Your book title answers it. What technology wants? What does that mean?

So I think we view technology generally to mean all this new stuff. the schedule stuff and stuff that's in our pockets and kind of around our household. But I wanted to look at it, not the individual objects, because as a single object, doesn't want really anything, as you're suggesting. I wanted to look at the way in which that object, say, that iPhone, that iPhone requires thousands of different technologies to make that one other technology. So there is a web of technologies that are kind of interdependent interweaving into produce what I think of as sort of a superorganism

of technology. You mean all the spoons, all the forks, all the knives, and all the telephones? All the telephones, all the factories, all the roads, everything together, and us, together form a new thing that, like other superorganisms, have an emergent kind of agenda

that is beyond just the spoon. So the spoon itself is sort of like the bee or the ant in the colony. doesn't really mean much, but together all those spoons and everything else connected together, all the little chips, all the wires, all the roads, it does form something that does begin in a very small way to have the slimmest bit of autonomy and autonomy that wasn't there in the individual pieces. Autonomy and some kind of will? Well, so want. That's a strong word when I use the word want because we immediately think of what you want and what I want and say it's a deliberate

thinking about, hmm, what do I want? But I mean want in the way in which that flower, when it was alive, it's sort of hanging on. Wanted light. And so it kind of leans towards the light a little bit. It has a drift, it has a tendency towards the light. It's not intelligent, it's not conscious, but the plant itself is wants light. It leans toward the light.

So the technium, which is the word I used, to distinguish this whole superorganism of technology, it's leaning in certain directions. It has certain tendencies, so it wants to go in certain directions. We'll get to the directions where it may want to go. Let me ask you, your question is a little more modest than he is. I aim a little lower.

This is Steve Johnson. It's been my career path, has to aim just a little lower on Kevin. Figure out where Kevin is going and just steer right underneath that. So your question is, where do good ideas come from? So for you, let me look at the word idea. For you to use that word, what do you mean? Everything from, you know, scientific breakthroughs, technological breakthroughs,

breakthroughs in the creative arts, and also just kind of ordinary breakthroughs in our lives where we have a good idea that helps us kind of live a little bit better or be a little bit better in our jobs, you know, human innovation. But when you use the word innovation or idea, so for most people in the cartoon version, that's the light bulb going on. So some guy is sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, bing, and then they think, oh, E equals MC squared.

So for you, when you look into a brain, you don't see anything coming out of nothing. There's something a little bit more. Yeah, that's one of the biggest things I think you have to kind of undo when you approach a topic like this, which is this idea that the breakthrough idea, the light bulb moment, is a single thing happening in a single mind. and that it happens in an instant. For some reason, we want to tell the story that way. There's this kind of innate desire. I mean, as a storyteller, I want to tell the story that way, too.

And people do tend to build these elaborate fictions about their kind of moments of epiphany. But when you go back and look at the historical record and kind of rewind the tape and play it slowly, and so many of these breakthrough, allegedly, kind of breakthrough epiphanies, what you find is, in fact, that the idea was incubating for a very long period of time,

It actually builds upon other ideas by other people. It's more of a kind of a remixing of other people's concepts and other people's tools. And it kind of fades into view over a much longer period of time. This is what I call the slow hunch in the book. That it's not this kind of gut impression or this sudden moment of clarity, but this much more evolutionary, more kind of lingering process. Do you have the sense that there is never a eureka moment? Or do you have like one eureka moment and 50s,

slow, small interview. I think that there are moments where you do kind of advance in some clear fashion and you suddenly do see things in a new ways. A lot of them come in dreams. Actually, the book talks a lot about how many amazing empirical scientific discoveries

actually occur to people in dreams. But I guess part of what I'm trying to do with this argument is to kind of correct that the emphasis we place on those things. And the other thing about those eureka moments is that they may, in often usually do occur to at least 10 other people at the same time, which diminishes the eurekaness

of it. For example. For example, every single invention that we know about, for example, the telephone, the patents for the telephone, were submitted by Alexander Graham Bell and Gray within three hours of each other. Really? Yes. And the light bulbs were the light bulb that we associate with Thomas Edison.

He was the last of 23. other people. To me, there was no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, then a matter of a couple of years, lipo, everybody had the light bulb idea. What would explain the sudden ubiquity of an idea after a long, eternal silence? The precursor inventions that are required for that next step have all been done. So it's a kind of, it's like a growth where you need to be. to go through a certain stage

to get to the next stage, you have to have all the parts. And because no idea is alone, the light bulb required, you know, whatever is 100 other sub-inventions to sustain it, to even conceive of it, and when they're in place, and then it's like the

next idea is just there. And so, being too early with an idea is really is bad or worse than being too late. So we both use this, Kevin and I are both kind of fans of this phrase from Stuart Kaufman, this idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible.

Yeah, I mean, just bear with me. It's useful. And the idea is basically... So many syllables. At any given time, oh, come on. This is a very literary crowd. They can have the list of syllables. So the ideas at any given time,

both in the evolution of life and in the evolution of technology, there are kind of given the state of the current system, there are a finite set of moves that are possible. So imagine it like a chessboard, right? You're in the middle of a game. There's a certain number of moves that are possible, a much larger set of moves that are not possible.

The same is true of technological history. You cannot invent a microwave oven in 1650, just as you cannot invent an automobile in ancient Egypt. Just to make sure you could imagine one, but you can't build it. Yes, although it is remarkably hard to imagine one. That's part of the point here. I mean, I saw this in detail in Invention of Air,

the book about your friend Joe Priestley, who I like that you're a cloquial friend in terms of them. He killed a lot of mice. So Priestley is most famous for isolating oxygen for the first time, which is another case of a multiple discovery where three other people kind of discovered it right around the same time independently, more or less.

And the point was that they were able to think about isolating oxygen for the first time, partially because there were tools that there were scales and things that made it easier to kind of realize that this element was there. But the biggest one was conceptual leap, which is it only had become possible a couple of years before to even think about the air as being something you wanted to investigate scientifically. Up until that point,

they were like, well, I want to investigate wood and bodies and hearts and brains and rocks, but the stuff is pure. The stuff between all. Why would we study that? There's nothing there, right? And it was because of a number, partially because they discovered vacuums where they were like, not the cleaners, but the empty air, the lack of air, that they were like, okay, this is a vacuum, so there must be something in normal air that we can actually study and understand. And so conceptually, that became a platform that enabled Priestley to kind of think in a way

and his compatriots to think in a way that it was much harder to think even five decades before us. Well, do you think that when the environment is ready, in some sense, then it will happen? So it's almost as if the technium, your phrase, is kind of whispering, Yes. It is. It is an environment that we're in. And it is... It's creepy to me.

It is creepy. And it's also, because it's inevitable, too, that's also another creepy word that people get spooked by. Inevitable? Inevitable. Right. Do you believe that? Do you believe that a spoon is an inevitable thing that's bound to happen if you're hungry and you invent soup? Yes, definitely. So the question is, I don't think everyone would think of spoon at the same time. They probably did. Let me try this. We're going to win you.

So one very active evolutionary theory debate is something like the inevitability of evolution enough time evolving eyes, right? Light is the fastest way to transmit information. And so the idea is that given enough evolutionary time, creatures would evolve. the ability to kind of process and make sense of light and to somehow kind of act on that information, right? And it turns out what we find when we go back is that eyes independently evolved multiple times

in completely different lines because there was just something about the physics of the world that made that despite the fact that evolution didn't, on some level, there was no intelligent designer saying eyes would be good, light waves moved very fast, that would be a good thing to do it. But evolution kept stumbling its way towards that innovation on these separate paths. And I think that's where I 100% agree with Kevin.

But no one says that eyes wanted to be there. No one said that there was a niche called the eye niche waiting for eyes. The very serious question, which I think is real, is then how do you describe that? How do you describe that inevitability of a system not being directed, somehow ending up again and again? If you rewind the tape and ran it again, you would have eyes. Eyes would just keep showing up. So Kevin, I think, is picked as provoked as. but I think useful way of describing it, which is that there is this tendency of that system to go towards those attractors.

There are kind of magnets that the system will gravitate towards. Look, what he's done? He's there. Spoons! No, but there's spoons are the point. Eventually people will invent spoons as well. Spoons are an attractor. No, he's saying that the spoons will get together.

Why does this bother you so much? I mean, I mean... Because, for the obvious reason that you are crossing a line here, you are saying that living systems, which have a line here, you are saying that living systems, which have a lot of logic, which he describes very well, that the logic of living systems also belongs to these inanimate things. The history of technology sounds like from both of you, sounds suspiciously like the history of life. Right. And I think... Well, I'm very suspicious of this. Yeah, you should be because the Mac does not look like a sunflower, but there are tremendous similarities in many ways. And there was a famous

evolutionary biologist Niles Eldridge, or is, he's still alive, and Niles's specialty is studying tribalites, mapping the morphology of them as a change. He can make kind of trilobites. Trialobites. He can make trees, genealogical trees, showing

them. His hobby is collecting cornettes from around the world. Cornets as in exactly, trumpets. And so he uses the same techniques. apply to the forms of these and actually traces out the little heritage trees. And he can show that to a rough degree, the evolution of these technological forms

resemble in many ways the kind of tracing of life as it works and speciates. And so there is one sense in which the things that we make are really just an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And that really shouldn't really be a surprise. So for example, here, let me show you, this is from the book. This is a picture, a graph of what happened to underwater animals in the long time ago called trilobites. This is how they changed. And here, next to it, is a drawing showing what has happened in the history of cornet making.

So I'm seeing here two branching trees, which look kind of similar, actually. Yeah. So let me ask. I think we're selling you on this one. Well, no, but now let me get a little harder. How far are you willing to push this biology pattern? Kevin, it seems to me when I read your book, it seems like you almost think that ideas are kind of alive or almost a lot.

You even say that if you were to look at the living systems of the world, the kingdoms of animals and plants and all those little guys, of which there are six, you then like, you know a little map, you plop this technium thing. So you call it the seventh kingdom. No, no, no, no. Because the first six,

are all have mommies and daddies. I'm not sure how to explain the seventh. Yeah, so I call it the seventh because I think it is, I mean I place, again, the question I'm asking in a larger context is what is this stuff that

we're making and surrounding ourselves with it? It's not just little bunches of gadgets. It's just not wires. We have to see that it's really part of something that's been going on for a long time. And so... There's a very big difference between a spoon. in a whale. I'm not talking about the spoon. I'm talking about the whole super organisms of all the

technology. It's a lot of spoons. It's a lot of spoons. And what that, what connects them is actually the fact that we have this stream of things that are organizing themselves, maintaining order, and in some cases increasing their order, in the face of the rest of the universe running down. And the spoons that you're obsessed with have come from that same strength. There is a strand of these galaxies and stars, and here's a little corner of the planet, where this self-organizing system has been making more and more order, and it made these animals, and then in more and more order and structure and complexity and diversity, and it made minds, and these minds have made another thing that has high degree of order and complexity and stuff,

and may itself be starting to make other things, other minds. It may have made, I don't. Does that seem scary? Well, worry you? Let me read to you. Let me read to you what some of your reviewers have said. Kelly's central thesis is this. Technology has its own internal logic and rhythms that are distinct and sometimes adverse to the desires of the humans that create it.

Technology creates itself using humans to do its bidding. Or humans cannot direct or prevent technology's course, at least not in the long run. Like water contained behind a dam, relentlessly seeking escape, technology will eventually find its own way. Doesn't that creep you out a little? No, no, no, I know. You're just you. No, no, I'm seriously, it's like if you said the same thing about life,

would that bother you? No, I'm part of life. I'm just worried about the thing. No, you're part of technology, too. Don't you understand that we humans have made, have invented ourselves, that, you know, we have this external stomach we call it cooking. that has changed our diets, that has changed our teeth or jaws. We have remade ourselves.

When we become literate, our brains are rewired, we think differently. We're not the same people that left Africa. We have domesticated ourselves. We are going to continue doing that. So why is that, you are technology. Does that bother you? Well, but when you say, what does technology want? I'm not sure I'm in that sentence.

That's what keeps me out. What would happen if by your logic, and maybe as a fellow traveler by your logic, you could imagine a situation where the things that we have created, not only our ideas, but the things we have made, will have by the same processes that describe the evolution of life, will have developed a will of their own, and then there will be either a evolution at our command or an evolution, a will. away from us or a revolution, an evolution that might somehow compete with us. I don't know. To some extent, aren't we already in that kind of imagined future state? I mean, you think about the Internet right now. If we wanted to turn it off, it would be extremely difficult to do. It's impossible.

And if we did, the catastrophic, non-linear, unpredictable effects of turning this thing off would be unbelievably devastating, right? We would have no idea what would happen. All the things would be turning off at that point. would we be turning off something we use, something we need. But at the moment when, I don't know where this gets this far, but at the moment when to turn off the machine is to commit a murder, that is that the machine will have come somehow sentient or full of feeling,

that would be very morally troubling. But Kevin is very clear also to defend him again. When you say want, and this is, I mean, this is the danger of want, right? Because he's not talking about consciousness. He's not talking about sentence. Well, not yet. Right. And it's like in the sense that you would say,

know, a little bacterium, you know, wants to kind of float up a nutrient stream or something like that, right? The bacterium, presumably, is not conscious of what it is doing. It's not sitting there saying, like, hmm, yummy nutrients here. This is great. If I only had a spoon, you know, it's not thinking like that, right? But nonetheless, you have to look at it and say, it is happy going up this little gradient sucking in all these nutrients, and somehow that thing is driven towards that.

And so maybe the problem is we don't quite have that I want, but there's no I. Right. We don't have the kind of the verb or maybe the subject. I usually want, you know, provocatively and deliberately, but partly so that we can rehearse this idea as things acquire more autonomy. Right now, the amount of autonomy and the things we make is minuscule. It's about the size of a bacteria or a grasshopper. But it won't be. It will increase.

And so we have to prepare ourselves for the fact. that someday we're going to make something that will have a want. And how do we deal with that? When we make something that declares to us, oh, I am a child of God, what's our response to it? And so I use want to help us really prepare ourselves for that eventuality. Let me just end. Let me finish with this.

You're like one of the happiest people I know. So you've often thought, said that if it in contemplating these future problems you just seem to always look on the you know that that's that the from the life of Brian always look on the bright side of line um in this case if you were to give the technium a mind of its own is is your thought that it will work out great yes I I think that what evolution moves towards is increasing setience of all sorts. So we see that, we see throughout life, mind being invented all time. I think what we are doing is we're kind of evolution's way to invent minds that evolution biological evolution could not make. So we're going to invent all kinds of ways of thinking that evolution in a biological sense

could not reach. And the reason why we're doing to do that is we're going to invent all kinds of mind, different kinds of thinking because our mind alone is probably not sufficient to completely comprehend the universe. We need other species of thinking. So we're going to populate the universe as far as we can with other ways of thinking so that collectively we can comprehend the universe. And those other ways of thinking are ways that biological evolution probably couldn't get to itself. So I think that, yes, the more kinds of minds are, the better. I think part of the problem is, When you're saying, are we going to be okay?

Kevin is saying absolutely on the 10,000-year scale. We're going to be great. But what about next Tuesday? Both are valid concerns. Things in life are bad, they can really make you made. Other things just make you swear and curse. When you're chewing on life's gristle, that grumble, give a whistle. And this will help things turn out for the best.

Ain't. Always look on the bright side of life. Always look on the light side of life. Special thanks to Paul Holden Graber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library in New York City. And, of course, to Stephen Johnson, whose new book is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and Kevin Kelly, his book,

What technology wants. I'm Chad I'm Ombud. I'm Robert Crillich. Thank you for listening. Hello, this is Rachel Ruket, a radio lab listener and supporter in Brooklyn, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Afroid P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.s.org. Thanks, guys, that just made my week.