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