Kevin Kelly tells technology's epic story

92,487 views ・ 2010-02-22

TED


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I want to talk about my investigations
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into what technology means in our lives --
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not just our immediate life, but in the cosmic sense,
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in the kind of long history of the world
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and our place in the world.
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What is this stuff?
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What is the significance?
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And so, I want to kind of go through my little story
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of what I found out.
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One of the first things I started to investigate
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was the history of the name of technology.
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In the United States, there is a State of the Union address
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given by every president since 1790.
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And each one of those is kind of summing up the most important things
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for the United States at that time.
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If you search for the word "technology," it was not used until 1952.
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So, technology was sort of absent from everybody's thinking until 1952,
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which happened to be the year of my birth.
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And obviously, technology had existed before then,
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but we weren't aware of it.
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And so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life.
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I actually did research to find out the first use of the word "technology."
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It was in 1829,
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and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum --
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a course, bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts, and industry --
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and he called it "Technology."
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And that's the very first use of the word.
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So what is this stuff
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that we're all consumed by and bothered by?
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Alan Kay calls it, "Technology is anything that was invented
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after you were born."
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(Laughter)
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Which is sort of the idea we normally have about what technology is:
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it's all that new stuff.
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It's not roads, or penicillin,
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or factory tires; it's the new stuff.
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My friend Danny Hillis says kind of a similar one,
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he says, "Technology is anything that doesn't work yet."
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(Laughter)
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Which is, again, a sense that it's all new.
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But we know that it's just not new.
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It actually goes way back,
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and what I want to suggest is, it goes a long way back.
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So, another way to think about technology, what it means,
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is to imagine a world without technology.
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If we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today --
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and I mean everything, from blades to scrapers to cloth --
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we, as a species, would not live very long.
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We would die by the billions, and very quickly:
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the wolves would get us, we would be defenseless,
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we would be unable to grow enough food or find enough food.
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Even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools.
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So, they had minimal technology,
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but they had some technology.
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And if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes
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and the Neanderthal, which are very similar to early man,
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we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology,
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and this is a kind of a curve of their average age.
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There are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old
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that we've ever found,
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and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30.
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There are very few young infants, because they die -- high mortality rate --
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and there's very few old people.
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So the profile is sort of for your average San Francisco neighborhood:
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a lot of young people.
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And if you go there, you say, "Hey, everybody's really healthy."
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Well, that's because they're all young.
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Same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man:
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you didn't live beyond the age of 30.
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So it was a world without grandparents.
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And grandparents are very important,
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because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information.
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Imagine a world where basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old.
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How much learning can you do?
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You can't do very much learning in your own life,
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it's so short,
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and there's nobody to pass on what you do learn.
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So that's one aspect.
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It was a very short life.
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But at the same time, anthropologists know
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that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world,
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with that very little technology,
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actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food they needed:
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three to six hours a day.
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Some anthropologists call that the original affluent society,
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because they had bankers' hours, basically.
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So it was possible to get enough food.
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But when the scarcity came,
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when the highs and lows and the droughts came,
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then people went into starvation.
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And that's why they didn't live very long.
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So what technology brought,
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through the very simple tools like these stone tools here --
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even something as small as this --
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the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction
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about 250 megafauna animals in North America
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when they first arrived 10,000 years ago.
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So, long before the industrial age,
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we've been affecting the planet on a global scale
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with just a small amount of technology.
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The other thing that the early man invented was fire.
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And fire was used to clear out, and again,
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affected the ecology of grass and whole continents,
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and was used in cooking.
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It enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things.
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It was, in a certain sense, in a McLuhan sense,
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an external stomach,
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in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise.
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And if we didn't have fire, we actually could not live.
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Our bodies have adapted to these new diets.
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Our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years.
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So, with that little bit of technology,
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humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so --
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the same number as Neanderthals everywhere --
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and we suddenly exploded.
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With the invention of language around 50,000 years ago,
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the number of humans exploded,
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and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet.
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And they migrated into the rest of the world
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at two kilometers per year
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until, within several tens of thousands of years,
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we occupied every single watershed on the planet
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and became the most dominant species,
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with a very small amount of technology.
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And even at that time, with the introduction of agriculture,
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8,000, 10,000 years ago,
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we started to see climate change.
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So climate change is not a new thing; what's new is just the degree of it.
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Even during the agricultural age, there was climate change.
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So already, small amounts of technology were transforming the world.
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And what this means, and where I'm going,
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is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world.
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All the things we see today that are changing our lives,
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we can always trace back
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to the introduction of some new technology.
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So it's a force,
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that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet,
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and in such a degree,
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that I think it's become who we are.
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In fact, our humanity and everything that we think about ourselves,
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is something we've invented.
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So we've invented ourselves.
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Of all the animals that we've domesticated,
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the most important animal has been us.
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So humanity is our greatest invention,
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but of course, we're not done yet.
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We're still inventing,
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and this is what technology is allowing us to do;
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it's continually to reinvent ourselves.
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It's a very, very strong force.
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I call this entire thing -- us humans as our technology,
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everything that we've made, gadgets in our lives --
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we call that the technium.
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That's this world.
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My working definition of technology is:
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anything useful that a human mind makes.
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It's not just hammers and gadgets, like laptops.
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But it's also law.
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And, of course, cities are ways to make things more useful to us.
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While this is something that comes from our mind,
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it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos.
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It goes back.
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The origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang,
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in this way, in that they are part of this self-organizing thread
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that starts at the Big Bang and goes through galaxies and stars,
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into life, into us.
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And the three major phases of the early universe
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was energy, when the dominant force was energy;
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then the dominant force, as it cooled, became matter;
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and then, with the invention of life four billion years ago,
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the dominant force in our neighborhood became information.
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That's what life is:
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an information process that was restructuring
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and making new order.
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So, energy and matter, Einstein showed were equivalent,
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and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information
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and matter and energy
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are all interrelated.
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So it's one long continuum.
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You put energy into the right kind of system,
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and out comes wasted heat, entropy,
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and extropy, which is order.
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It's the increased order.
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Where does this order come from?
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Its roots go way back.
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We actually don't know.
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But we do know
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that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long,
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and it began with things like galaxies;
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they maintained their order for billions of years.
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Stars are basically nuclear fission machines
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that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years:
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order against the extropy of the world.
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And flowers and plants are the same thing, extended,
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and technology is basically an extension of life.
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One trend that we notice in all those things
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is that the amount of energy per gram per second
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that flows through this
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is actually increasing.
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The amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence.
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And the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life
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is actually greater than a star --
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because of the star's long lifespan,
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the energy density in life is actually higher than a star.
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And the energy density that we see in the greatest amount
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anywhere in the universe
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is actually in a PC chip.
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There is more energy flowing through, per gram per second,
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than anything that we have any other experience with.
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And so, what I would suggest
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is that if you want to see where technology is going,
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we continue that trajectory,
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and we say, "Well, it's going to become more energy-dense,
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that's where it's going."
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And so what I've done is, I've taken the same kinds of things
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and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say,
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"What are the general trends in evolutionary life?"
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And there are things moving towards greater complexity,
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moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization,
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sentience, ubiquity, and most important, evolvability.
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Those very same things are also present in technology.
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That's where technology is going.
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In fact, technology is accelerating all the aspects of life.
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And we can see that happening;
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just as there's diversity in life, there's more diversity in things we make.
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Things in life start off being general cells,
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and they become specialized:
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you have tissue cells, muscle, brain cells.
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The same thing happens with, say, a hammer,
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which is general at first and becomes more specific.
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So I would like to say that while there are six kingdoms of life,
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we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life.
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It's a branching off from the human form.
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But technology has its own agenda, like anything, like life itself.
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For instance, right now, three-quarters of the energy that we use
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is actually used to feed the technium itself.
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In transportation, it's not to move us;
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it's to move the stuff we make or buy.
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I use the word "want." Technology wants.
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This is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power.
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Your cat wants more food.
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A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all,
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wants to move towards light.
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It has an urge, and technology has an urge.
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At the same time, it wants to give us things,
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and what it gives us is basically progress.
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You can take all kinds of curves, and they're all pointing up.
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There's really no dispute about progress,
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if we discount the cost of that.
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And that's the thing that bothers most people,
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is that progress is really real, but we wonder and question:
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What are the environmental costs of it?
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I did a survey of the number of species of artifacts in my house,
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and there's 6,000.
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Other people have come up with 10,000.
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When King Henry of England died,
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he had 18,000 things in his house,
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but that was the entire wealth of England, so ...
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(Laughter)
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And with that entire wealth of England,
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King Henry could not buy any antibiotics,
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he could not buy refrigeration,
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he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles,
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whereas this rickshaw wallah in India could save up and buy antibiotics
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and he could buy refrigeration.
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He could buy things that King Henry, in all his wealth, could never buy.
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That's what progress is about.
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So, technology is selfish; technology is generous.
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That conflict, that tension, will be with us forever:
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sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do,
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and sometimes it's going to do things for us.
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We have confusion about what we should think
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about a new technology.
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Right now the default position when a new technology comes along,
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is people talk about the precautionary principle,
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which is very common in Europe,
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which says, basically, "Don't do anything.
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When you meet a new technology, stop,
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until it can be proven that it does no harm."
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I think that really leads nowhere.
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But a better way is what I call the proactionary principle,
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which is, you engage with technology.
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You try it out.
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You obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests,
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you try to anticipate it,
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but after anticipating it,
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you constantly asses it,
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not just once, but eternally.
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And when it diverts from what you want,
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we prioritize risk, we evaluate not just the new stuff,
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but the old stuff.
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We fix it; but most importantly,
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we relocate it.
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And what I mean by that is,
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we find a new job for it.
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Nuclear energy, fission, is a really bad idea for bombs.
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But it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy
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for electricity, instead of burning coal.
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When we have a bad idea,
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the response to a bad idea
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is not no ideas, it's not to stop thinking.
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The response to a bad idea --
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like, say, a tungsten lightbulb --
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is a better idea.
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So, better ideas is really always the response
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to technology we don't like;
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it's basically better technology.
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And actually, in a certain sense, technology is a kind of a method
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for generating better ideas,
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if you can think about it that way.
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So, maybe spraying DDT on crops is a really bad idea.
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But DDT sprayed on local homes --
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there's nothing better to eliminate malaria,
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besides insect DDT-impregnated mosquito nets.
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But that's a really good idea; that's a good job for technology.
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So our job as humans is to parent our mind children,
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to find them good friends,
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to find them a good job.
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And so, every technology is sort of a creative force
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looking for the right job.
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That's actually my son, right here.
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(Laughter)
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There are no bad technologies,
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just as there are no bad children.
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We don't say children are neutral; children are positive.
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We just have to find them the right place.
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And so, what technology gives us over the long term --
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over this sort of extended evolution from the beginning of time,
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through the invention of the plants and animals,
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and the evolution of life, the evolution of brains --
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what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences:
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It's increasing diversity, it's increasing options,
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it's increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms.
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That's what we get from technology all the time.
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That's why people leave villages and go into cities --
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because they are always gravitating towards increased choices
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and possibilities.
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And we are aware of the price;
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we pay a price for that, but we're aware of it,
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and generally, we will pay the price for increased freedoms,
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choices and opportunities.
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Even technology wants clean water.
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Is technology diametrically opposed to nature?
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Because technology is an extension of life,
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it's in parallel and aligned with the same things
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that life wants.
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So that I think technology loves biology,
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if we allow it to.
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Great movement starting billions of years ago
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is moving through us and it continues to go,
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and our choice, so to speak, in technology,
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is really to align ourselves with this force
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much greater than ourselves.
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So, technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket;
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it's more than just gadgets,
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it's more than just things that people invent.
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It's actually part of a very long story -- a great story --
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that began billions of years ago.
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It's moving through us, this self-organization,
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and we're extending and accelerating it,
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and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it.
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And I really appreciate your attention today.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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