< Return to Video

How technology evolves

  • 0:00 - 0:04
    I don't know about you, but I haven't quite figured out
  • 0:04 - 0:07
    exactly what technology means in my life.
  • 0:07 - 0:14
    I've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about.
  • 0:14 - 0:17
    Should I be pro-technology? Should I embrace it full arms?
  • 0:17 - 0:22
    Should I be wary? Like you, I'm very tempted by the latest thing.
  • 0:22 - 0:24
    But at the other hand, a couple of years ago
  • 0:24 - 0:27
    I gave up all of my possessions,
  • 0:27 - 0:29
    sold all my technology -- except for a bicycle --
  • 0:29 - 0:35
    and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body,
  • 0:35 - 0:38
    fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food.
  • 0:38 - 0:39
    (Laughter)
  • 0:39 - 0:41
    And I've since then tried to keep technology
  • 0:41 - 0:45
    at arm's length in many ways, so it doesn't master my life.
  • 0:45 - 0:49
    At the same time, I run a website on cool tools,
  • 0:49 - 0:53
    where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology.
  • 0:53 - 0:59
    So I'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is
  • 0:59 - 1:03
    as it relates to humanity, as it relates to nature,
  • 1:03 - 1:06
    as it relates to the spiritual.
  • 1:06 - 1:10
    And I'm not even sure we know what technology is.
  • 1:10 - 1:16
    And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded.
  • 1:16 - 1:21
    This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find.
  • 1:21 - 1:25
    It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with
  • 1:25 - 1:31
    the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829.
  • 1:31 - 1:36
    Before that, obviously, technology didn't exist. But obviously it did.
  • 1:36 - 1:40
    I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology.
  • 1:40 - 1:44
    He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born.
  • 1:44 - 1:45
    (Laughter)
  • 1:45 - 1:49
    So it sums up a lot of what we're talking about.
  • 1:49 - 1:51
    Danny Hillis actually has an update on that --
  • 1:51 - 1:55
    he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet.
  • 1:55 - 1:56
    (Laughter)
  • 1:56 - 2:01
    Which also, I think, gets into a little bit of our current idea.
  • 2:01 - 2:04
    But I was interested in another definition of technology.
  • 2:04 - 2:08
    Something, again, that went back to something more fundamental.
  • 2:08 - 2:14
    Something that was deeper. And as I struggled to understand that,
  • 2:14 - 2:17
    I came up with a way of framing the question
  • 2:17 - 2:19
    that seemed to work for me in my investigations.
  • 2:19 - 2:22
    And I'm, this morning, going to talk about this for the first time.
  • 2:22 - 2:27
    So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud.
  • 2:27 - 2:31
    The question that I came up with was this question:
  • 2:31 - 2:34
    what does technology want? And by that, I don't mean,
  • 2:34 - 2:39
    does it want chocolate or vanilla? By what it wants, I mean,
  • 2:39 - 2:41
    what are its inherent trends and biases?
  • 2:41 - 2:46
    What are its tendencies over time? One way to think about this is
  • 2:46 - 2:50
    thinking about biological organisms, which we've heard a lot about.
  • 2:50 - 2:53
    And the trick that Richard Dawkins does, which is to say,
  • 2:53 - 2:57
    to look at them as simply as genes, as vehicles for genes.
  • 2:57 - 3:00
    So he's saying, what do genes want? The selfish gene.
  • 3:00 - 3:03
    And I'm applying a similar trick to say,
  • 3:03 - 3:06
    what if we looked at the universe in our culture
  • 3:06 - 3:11
    through the eyes of technology? What does technology want?
  • 3:11 - 3:13
    Obviously, this in an incomplete question,
  • 3:13 - 3:15
    just as looking at an organism as only a gene
  • 3:15 - 3:17
    is an incomplete way of looking at it.
  • 3:17 - 3:21
    But it's still very, very productive. So I'm attempting to say,
  • 3:21 - 3:25
    if we take technology's view of the world, what does it want?
  • 3:25 - 3:28
    And I think once we ask that question
  • 3:28 - 3:33
    we have to go back, actually, to life. Because obviously,
  • 3:33 - 3:36
    if we keep extending the origins of technology far back,
  • 3:36 - 3:38
    I think we come back to life at some point.
  • 3:38 - 3:41
    So that's where I want to begin my little exploration, is in life.
  • 3:41 - 3:44
    And like you heard from the previous speakers,
  • 3:44 - 3:47
    we don't really know what life there is on Earth right now.
  • 3:47 - 3:49
    We have really no idea.
  • 3:49 - 3:53
    Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt
  • 3:53 - 3:56
    to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great.
  • 3:56 - 3:59
    Brian Farrell's work is all part of this agenda to try
  • 3:59 - 4:01
    and actually discover all the species on Earth.
  • 4:01 - 4:04
    And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe
  • 4:04 - 4:09
    and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects,
  • 4:09 - 4:11
    just to see what's on life. And if we did that
  • 4:11 - 4:14
    with our little Martian probe, which we have not done on Earth,
  • 4:14 - 4:18
    we would begin to see some incredible species.
  • 4:18 - 4:20
    This is not on another planet. These are things
  • 4:20 - 4:22
    that are hidden away on our planet.
  • 4:22 - 4:27
    This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen.
  • 4:27 - 4:30
    Each one of these organisms that we've described -- that you've seen
  • 4:30 - 4:33
    from Jamie and others, these magnificent things --
  • 4:33 - 4:35
    what they're doing, each one of them,
  • 4:35 - 4:38
    is they're hacking the rules of life.
  • 4:38 - 4:43
    I can't think of a single general principle of biology
  • 4:43 - 4:47
    that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism.
  • 4:47 - 4:49
    Every single thing that we can think of --
  • 4:49 - 4:52
    and if you heard Olivia's talk about the sexual habits,
  • 4:52 - 4:55
    you'll realize that there isn't anything we can say that's true for all life,
  • 4:55 - 4:59
    because every single one of them is hacking something about it.
  • 4:59 - 5:03
    This is a solar-powered sea slug. It's a nudibranch
  • 5:03 - 5:09
    that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy.
  • 5:09 - 5:12
    This is another version of that. This is a sea dragon,
  • 5:12 - 5:18
    and the one on the bottom, the blue one, is a juvenile that has not yet
  • 5:18 - 5:20
    swallowed the acid, has not yet taken in
  • 5:20 - 5:27
    the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy.
  • 5:27 - 5:32
    These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape
  • 5:32 - 5:36
    of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus,
  • 5:36 - 5:40
    six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches: the plants,
  • 5:40 - 5:43
    the animals, the fungi, the protests -- the little things -- the bacteria
  • 5:43 - 5:46
    and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas.
  • 5:46 - 5:52
    Those are the general approaches to life. That's one way to look at life on Earth today.
  • 5:52 - 5:54
    But a more interesting way,
  • 5:54 - 5:57
    the current way to take the long view,
  • 5:57 - 6:00
    is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective.
  • 6:00 - 6:06
    And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution
  • 6:06 - 6:09
    go over the linear time, we have it coming out from the center.
  • 6:09 - 6:13
    So in the center is the most primitive, and this is a genealogical chart
  • 6:13 - 6:17
    of all life on earth. This is all the same six kingdoms.
  • 6:17 - 6:21
    You see 4,000 representative species, and you can see where we are.
  • 6:21 - 6:22
    But what I like about this is it shows that
  • 6:22 - 6:28
    every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved.
  • 6:28 - 6:32
    Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.
  • 6:32 - 6:34
    They've been around just as long and gone through
  • 6:34 - 6:38
    just the same kind of trial and error to get here.
  • 6:38 - 6:43
    But we see that each one of these is actually hacking,
  • 6:43 - 6:45
    and has a different way of finding out how to do life.
  • 6:45 - 6:49
    And if we take the long-term trends of life, if we begin to say,
  • 6:49 - 6:52
    what does evolution want? There's several things that we see.
  • 6:52 - 6:58
    One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth
  • 6:58 - 7:02
    have we ever been where we don't find life.
  • 7:02 - 7:06
    We find life at the bottom of every long-term,
  • 7:06 - 7:09
    long-distance drilling core into the center of rock
  • 7:09 - 7:13
    that we bring up -- and there's bacteria in the pores of that rock.
  • 7:13 - 7:17
    And wherever life is, it never retreats. It's ubiquitous and it wants to be more.
  • 7:17 - 7:20
    More and more of the inert matter of the globe
  • 7:20 - 7:23
    is being touched and animated by life.
  • 7:23 - 7:27
    The second thing is is we see diversity. We also see specialization.
  • 7:27 - 7:30
    We see the movement from a general-purpose cell
  • 7:30 - 7:34
    to the more specific and specialized.
  • 7:34 - 7:38
    And we see a drift towards complexity that's very intuitive.
  • 7:38 - 7:40
    And actually, we have current data that does show
  • 7:40 - 7:44
    that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time.
  • 7:44 - 7:46
    And the last thing, I bring back this nudibranch.
  • 7:46 - 7:49
    One of the things we see about life is that it moves
  • 7:49 - 7:53
    from the inner to increasing sociability. And by that it means
  • 7:53 - 7:57
    that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life.
  • 7:57 - 7:59
    Like those chloroplast cells --
  • 7:59 - 8:00
    they're completely surrounded by other life.
  • 8:00 - 8:06
    They never touch the inner matter. There is more and more co-evolution.
  • 8:06 - 8:09
    And so the general, long-term trends of evolution
  • 8:09 - 8:13
    are roughly these five: ubiquity, diversity, specialization,
  • 8:13 - 8:18
    complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said,
  • 8:18 - 8:23
    OK, what are the long-term trends in technology?
  • 8:23 - 8:27
    And again, my question is, what does technology want?
  • 8:27 - 8:30
    And so, remarkably, I discovered
  • 8:30 - 8:33
    that there's also a drift toward specialization.
  • 8:33 - 8:36
    That we see there's a general hammer,
  • 8:36 - 8:39
    and hammers become more and more specific over time.
  • 8:39 - 8:44
    There's obviously diversity. Huge numbers of things.
  • 8:44 - 8:46
    This is all the contents of a Japanese home.
  • 8:46 - 8:49
    I actually had my daughter -- gave her a tally counter,
  • 8:49 - 8:51
    and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around
  • 8:51 - 8:55
    and count the number of species of technology in our household.
  • 8:55 - 8:58
    And it came up with 6,000 different species of products.
  • 8:58 - 9:01
    I did some research and found out that the King of England, Henry VIII,
  • 9:01 - 9:04
    had only about 7,000 items in his household.
  • 9:04 - 9:05
    And he was the King of England,
  • 9:05 - 9:07
    and that was the entire wealth of England at the time.
  • 9:07 - 9:12
    So we're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things.
  • 9:12 - 9:16
    This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out
  • 9:16 - 9:19
    and he sees machines making machines. How depraved!
  • 9:19 - 9:23
    Well, this is actually what we're headed towards: world machines.
  • 9:23 - 9:26
    And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies.
  • 9:26 - 9:29
    Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology
  • 9:29 - 9:32
    and not non-technology, or even life.
  • 9:32 - 9:35
    And thirdly, the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex
  • 9:35 - 9:39
    is at this point a cliche. And I'm happy to say,
  • 9:39 - 9:41
    I was partly responsible for that cliche
  • 9:41 - 9:44
    that machines are becoming biological, but that's pretty evident.
  • 9:44 - 9:50
    So the major trends in technology evolution actually
  • 9:50 - 9:55
    are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see
  • 9:55 - 9:58
    towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization,
  • 9:58 - 10:02
    towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise
  • 10:02 - 10:07
    because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor,
  • 10:07 - 10:11
    you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree.
  • 10:11 - 10:16
    I suggest that, in fact, technology is the seventh kingdom of life.
  • 10:16 - 10:20
    That its operations and how it works is so similar
  • 10:20 - 10:24
    that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom.
  • 10:24 - 10:27
    And so it would be sort of approximately up there,
  • 10:27 - 10:33
    coming out of the animal kingdom. And if we were to do that,
  • 10:33 - 10:36
    we would find out -- we could actually approach technology in this way.
  • 10:36 - 10:41
    This is Niles Eldredge. He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould
  • 10:41 - 10:43
    of the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
  • 10:43 - 10:46
    But as a sideline, he happens to collect cornets.
  • 10:46 - 10:50
    He has one of the world's largest collections -- about 500 of them.
  • 10:50 - 10:53
    And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites, or snails,
  • 10:53 - 10:55
    and to do a morphological analysis,
  • 10:55 - 10:59
    and try to derive their genealogical history over time.
  • 10:59 - 11:01
    This is his chart, which is not quite published yet.
  • 11:01 - 11:04
    But the most interesting aspect about this
  • 11:04 - 11:07
    is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom,
  • 11:07 - 11:14
    those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet
  • 11:14 - 11:18
    that was no longer made. That does not happen in biology.
  • 11:18 - 11:21
    When something is extinct, you can't have it as your parent.
  • 11:21 - 11:24
    But that does happen in technology. And it turns out
  • 11:24 - 11:28
    that that's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree,
  • 11:28 - 11:31
    and you can actually use it to determine
  • 11:31 - 11:35
    that this is a technological system versus a biological system.
  • 11:35 - 11:39
    In fact, this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important
  • 11:39 - 11:43
    that I began to think about what happens with old technology.
  • 11:43 - 11:48
    And it turns out that, in fact, technologies don't die.
  • 11:48 - 11:50
    So I suggested this to an historian of science, and he said,
  • 11:50 - 11:55
    "Well, what about, you know, come on, what about steam cars?
  • 11:55 - 11:59
    They're not around anymore." Well actually, they are.
  • 11:59 - 12:06
    In fact, they're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile.
  • 12:06 - 12:09
    And this is a website of a guy who's selling brand new parts
  • 12:09 - 12:13
    for the Stanley automobile. And the thing that I liked
  • 12:13 - 12:16
    is sort of this one-click, add-to-your-cart button --
  • 12:16 - 12:17
    (Laughter) --
  • 12:17 - 12:22
    for buying steam valves. I mean, it was just -- it was really there.
  • 12:22 - 12:27
    And so, I began to think about, well, maybe that's just a random sample.
  • 12:27 - 12:30
    Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way.
  • 12:30 - 12:35
    So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward's catalog
  • 12:35 - 12:38
    and I randomly went through it. And I took a page -- not quite a random page --
  • 12:38 - 12:41
    I took a page that was actually more difficult than others
  • 12:41 - 12:43
    because lots of the pages are filled with things
  • 12:43 - 12:46
    that are still being made. But I took this page
  • 12:46 - 12:50
    and I said, how many of these things are still being made?
  • 12:50 - 12:55
    And not antiques. I want to know how many of these things are still in production.
  • 12:55 - 12:58
    And the answer is: all of them.
  • 12:58 - 13:05
    All of them are still being produced. So you've got corn shellers.
  • 13:05 - 13:07
    I don't know who needs a corn sheller.
  • 13:07 - 13:11
    Be it corn shellers -- you've got ploughs; you've got fan mills;
  • 13:11 - 13:14
    all these things -- and these are not, again, antiques. These are --
  • 13:14 - 13:17
    you can order these. You can go to the web and you can buy them now,
  • 13:17 - 13:22
    brand-new made. So in a certain sense, technologies don't die.
  • 13:22 - 13:29
    In fact, you can buy, for 50 bucks, a stone-age knife
  • 13:29 - 13:33
    made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago.
  • 13:33 - 13:37
    It's short, bone handle, 50 bucks. And in fact,
  • 13:37 - 13:40
    what's important is that this information actually never died out.
  • 13:40 - 13:42
    It's not just that it was resurrected. It's continued all along.
  • 13:42 - 13:45
    And in Papua New Guinea, they were making stone axes
  • 13:45 - 13:52
    until two decades ago, just as a course of practical matters.
  • 13:52 - 13:56
    Even when we try to get rid of a technology, it's actually very hard.
  • 13:56 - 14:00
    So we've all heard about the Amish giving up cars.
  • 14:00 - 14:02
    We've heard about the Japanese giving up guns.
  • 14:02 - 14:04
    We've heard about this and that. But I actually went back and
  • 14:04 - 14:07
    took what I could find, the examples in history
  • 14:07 - 14:10
    where there have been prohibitions against technology,
  • 14:10 - 14:13
    and then I tried to find out when they came back in,
  • 14:13 - 14:16
    because they always came back in. And it turns out that the time,
  • 14:16 - 14:18
    the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited,
  • 14:18 - 14:23
    is decreasing over time. And that basically, you can delay technology,
  • 14:23 - 14:26
    but you can't kill it. So this makes sense, because in a certain sense
  • 14:26 - 14:31
    what culture is, is the accumulation of ideas.
  • 14:31 - 14:34
    That's what it's for. It's so that ideas don't die out.
  • 14:34 - 14:40
    And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing
  • 14:40 - 14:46
    and add it to what the long-term trajectory -- again, in life's evolution --
  • 14:46 - 14:49
    we find that each case -- each of the major transitions in life --
  • 14:49 - 14:52
    what they're really about is accelerating and changing
  • 14:52 - 14:55
    the way in which evolution happens.
  • 14:55 - 14:58
    They're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated.
  • 14:58 - 15:02
    So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically,
  • 15:02 - 15:04
    the evolution of evolvability.
  • 15:04 - 15:06
    So what's happening over time in life is
  • 15:06 - 15:09
    that the ways in which you generate these new ideas, these new hacks,
  • 15:09 - 15:13
    are increasing. And the real tricks are ways
  • 15:13 - 15:16
    in which you kind of explore the way of exploring.
  • 15:16 - 15:18
    And then what we see in the singularity,
  • 15:18 - 15:21
    that prophesized by Kurzweil and others --
  • 15:21 - 15:25
    his idea that technology is accelerating evolution.
  • 15:25 - 15:28
    It's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas.
  • 15:28 - 15:31
    So if you have life hacking --
  • 15:31 - 15:33
    life means hacking, the game of survival --
  • 15:33 - 15:37
    then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game.
  • 15:37 - 15:41
    And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve.
  • 15:41 - 15:44
    That is what we call an "infinite game."
  • 15:44 - 15:47
    That's the definition of "infinite game." A finite game is play to win,
  • 15:47 - 15:50
    and an infinite game is played to keep playing.
  • 15:50 - 15:55
    And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force.
  • 15:55 - 15:58
    The origins of technology was not in 1829,
  • 15:58 - 16:01
    but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang,
  • 16:01 - 16:05
    and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe
  • 16:05 - 16:09
    were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot,
  • 16:09 - 16:12
    and it was so tight in there, there was no room for any difference at all.
  • 16:12 - 16:14
    That's the definition. There was no temperature.
  • 16:14 - 16:17
    There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang,
  • 16:17 - 16:20
    what it expanded was the potential for difference.
  • 16:20 - 16:23
    So as it expands and as things expand what we have
  • 16:23 - 16:28
    is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices,
  • 16:28 - 16:30
    opportunities, possibilities and freedoms.
  • 16:30 - 16:32
    Those are all basically the same thing.
  • 16:32 - 16:36
    And those are the things that technology brings us.
  • 16:36 - 16:40
    That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms.
  • 16:40 - 16:44
    That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences.
  • 16:44 - 16:48
    And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing.
  • 16:48 - 16:51
    And that's why we continue to grab technology --
  • 16:51 - 16:53
    because we want those things. Those things are good.
  • 16:53 - 16:57
    Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities.
  • 16:57 - 16:59
    And each time we make a new opportunity place,
  • 16:59 - 17:03
    we're allowing a platform to make new ones.
  • 17:03 - 17:06
    And I think it's really important. Because if you can imagine
  • 17:06 - 17:09
    Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented --
  • 17:09 - 17:11
    what a loss to society there would be.
  • 17:11 - 17:13
    Imagine Van Gogh being born
  • 17:13 - 17:16
    before the technologies of cheap oil paints.
  • 17:16 - 17:20
    Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film.
  • 17:20 - 17:25
    Somewhere, today, there are millions of young children being born
  • 17:25 - 17:30
    whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented.
  • 17:30 - 17:33
    We have a moral obligation to invent technology
  • 17:33 - 17:35
    so that every person on the globe has the potential
  • 17:35 - 17:38
    to realize their true difference.
  • 17:38 - 17:41
    We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals.
  • 17:41 - 17:44
    That's what technology really wants.
  • 17:44 - 17:46
    I'm going to skip through some of the objections
  • 17:46 - 17:50
    because I don't have answers to why there's deforestation.
  • 17:50 - 17:53
    I don't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be
  • 17:53 - 17:55
    bad technologies. I don't have an answer to
  • 17:55 - 17:59
    how this impacts on our dignity, other than to suggest that
  • 17:59 - 18:05
    maybe the seventh kingdom, because it's so close to what life is about,
  • 18:05 - 18:08
    maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life.
  • 18:08 - 18:10
    Maybe in some ways
  • 18:10 - 18:15
    the fact that what we're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it.
  • 18:15 - 18:18
    It's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields,
  • 18:18 - 18:20
    but it's a really good thing to use
  • 18:20 - 18:24
    to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village.
  • 18:24 - 18:27
    Our humanity is actually defined by technology.
  • 18:27 - 18:30
    All the things that we think that we really like about humanity
  • 18:30 - 18:35
    is being driven by technology. This is the infinite game.
  • 18:35 - 18:37
    That's what we're talking about.
  • 18:37 - 18:41
    You see, technology is a way to evolve the evolution.
  • 18:41 - 18:47
    It's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more.
  • 18:47 - 18:52
    And it's actually a way of playing the game, of playing all the games.
  • 18:52 - 18:54
    That's what technology wants.
  • 18:54 - 18:57
    And so when I think about what technology wants,
  • 18:57 - 19:02
    I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here -- and I really believe this --
  • 19:02 - 19:07
    every person here has an assignment. And your assignment is
  • 19:07 - 19:10
    to spend your life discovering what your assignment is.
  • 19:10 - 19:13
    That recursive nature is the infinite game.
  • 19:13 - 19:16
    And if you play that well, you'll have other people involved,
  • 19:16 - 19:20
    so even that game extends and continues even when you're gone.
  • 19:20 - 19:23
    That is the infinite game. And what technology is
  • 19:23 - 19:26
    is the medium in which we play that infinite game.
  • 19:26 - 19:29
    And so I think that we should embrace technology
  • 19:29 - 19:32
    because it is an essential part of our journey
  • 19:32 - 19:34
    in finding out who we are.
  • 19:34 - 19:36
    Thank you.
  • 19:36 - 19:37
    (Applause)
Title:
How technology evolves
Speaker:
Kevin Kelly
Description:

Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks "What does technology want?" and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
19:37
TED edited English subtitles for How technology evolves
TED added a translation

English subtitles

Revisions Compare revisions