Monday, November 15, 2010

Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants

Book Club Is Back: What Technology Wants


This week (November 15-19) members of our friendly music and culture blogger think tank are once again gathering around the computer, this time to reflect on Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants.
This wasn't in the book, but I sure hope technology wants
3-D printers that produce wine and cheese so these things can have sharable snacks in the near future.

In the meantime, to get everyone's appetite whetted, what the book does cover is not just the recent explosion of new technologies and how they are impacting our lives for better and worse, but how their increasing sophistication ties into the really long trajectories of evolutionary development reaching back to the Big Bang. In so doing, Kelly attempts to get a glimpse down the road a pace and see what various examples might indicate about where we and technology are headed. In Kelly's view, trying to put on the brakes is futile and, in fact, an active anticipation and embrace of these "wants" is to be encouraged. Technology is not a neutral force. There are bad and good uses, but new technology increases choice (which for Kelly is always a good), adding just enough weight to the plus side of the equation that over time such progress is always more good than bad.

Full piece here.

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