I’ve read Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants two times now, and often re-read highlights from the book, and I’m always discovering new things I missed before.
I think one reason – among many – for the wonderful breadth and depth of his insights, is his ability to analyze technology as if it were a living, breathing, evolving super-organism.
There is no limit to the most complex things we will make. We’ll dazzle ourselves with new complexity in many directions. This will complexify our lives further, but we’ll adapt to it. There is no going back. We’ll hide this complexity with beautiful “simple” interfaces, as elegant as the round ball of an orange. But behind this membrane our stuff will be more complex than the cells and biochemistry of an orange. To keep up with this complexification, our language, tax codes, government bureaucracies, news media, and daily lives will all become more complex as well. It’s a trend we can count on. The long arc of complexity began before evolution, worked through the four billion years of life, and now continues through the technium
Here are more of my highlights.
And here are Derek Sivers’s highlights from the book, too.
One more mind-blaster:
There is nothing we have invented to date about which we’ve said, “It’s smart enough.”