The Technium

Evolution of the Space Station

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:03:49 -0800

This will be how all space stations are built: Not as one piece, but accumulated in bits and pieces. Smaller stations will be symbiotically combined into larger stations. View this mesmerizing animation by USA Today for a timelapse account of the ten year growth of the first International Space Station. I realized from watching this wonderful summary that space stations will be like cities: ever changing, ever accumulating, ever growing. Some may grow to be a century old, full of new layers but and contain ancient parts they cannot shed.

Extropy

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:56:34 -0800

Extropy is neither wave nor particle, nor pure energy. It is an immaterial force that is very much like information. Since extropy is defined as negative entropy — the reversal of disorder — it is, by definition, an increase in order. But what is order? Despite our intuitive sense, we lack a good operational definition of order, which seems to be tied up with complexity (see Ordained Becoming). For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don't have useful metrics for extropy. The best we can say is that extropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information.

We can not make an exact informational definition of extropy because we don't really know what information is. In fact the term "information" covers several contradictory concepts that should have their own terms. We use information to mean 1) a bunch of bits, or 2) a meaningful signal. When entropy (disorder) increases, it produces "more information" as in more bits. But when entropy decreases, it is the same as a rise in extropy (negative entropy) which produces "more information" as in more structured meaningful bits. Until we clarify our language the term information is more metaphor than anything else. I try use it in the second meaning here (not always successfully): as in bits that make a difference.

Mudding the waters further, information is the reigning metaphor of the moment. We tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature was described as a body, then a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine in the industrial age. Now in the "digital age" we apply the computational metaphor (see The Computational Metaphor). To explain the how our minds work, or how evolution advances, we apply the pattern of a very large software program processing bits of information. None of these historical metaphorical pictures are wrong; just incomplete. Ditto for computation. But extropy must be more than information alone. We have thousands of years of science ahead of us. Information and computation can't be the most complex immaterial entity there is, just the most complex we've discovered so far. We might eventually discover that extropy involves quantum dynamics, or gravity, or even quantum gravity. But for now, information (in the sense of structure) is a better analogy than anything else we know of for understanding the nature of extropy. Following information will reveal a larger pattern.

In the initial era of the universe, energy dominated existence. At that time radiation was all there was. The universe was a glow. Slowly, as space expanded and cooled, matter took over. Matter was clumpy, unevenly distributed, but its crystallization generated gravity which began to shape space. With the rise of life (in our immediate neighborhood) information ascended in influence. The informational process we call life took control of the atmosphere of Earth several billion years ago. Now the technium, another informational processing, is reconquering it. Extropy's rise in the universe (from the perspective of our planet) might look like this chart, where E=energy, M=mass, and I=information.

The billion-years rise of extropy — as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind and the technium — can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.

This is more clearly seen at the extreme. The difference between four bottles of amino acids on a laboratory self and the four amino acids arrayed in your chromosomes lies in the additional structure, or ordering, those atoms get from participating in the spirals of your replicating DNA. Same atoms, more order. Those atoms of amino acids acquire yet another level of structure and order when their cellular host undergoes evolution. As organisms evolve, the informational code their atoms carry is manipulated, processed, and reordered. In addition to genetic information, the atoms now convey adaptive information. Over time, the same atoms can be promoted to new levels of order. Perhaps their one cell home joins another cell to become multicellular — that demands the informational architecture for a larger organism as well as a cell. Further transitions in evolution — the aggregation into tissues and organs, the acquisition of sex, the creation of social groups — continue to elevate the order and increase the structure of the information flowing through those same atoms.

The technium can be understood as a way of structuring information beyond biology. Foremost among all inventions is language, and its kin writing, which introduced a parallel set of symbol strings to those found in DNA. But the grammar and syntax of language far outstrips the flexibility of the genetic code. Literary inventions like the book index, punctuation, cross-references, and alphabetic order permitted incredibly complex structures within words; printing broadcast them. Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music. The invention of the scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques. Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated. The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium. Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization. The invention of paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of information. Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we've ever built - say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information. There are many more hours of design poured into them than hours in manufacturing. Finally, the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information. The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

For four billion years evolution has been accumulating knowledge in its library of genes. You can learn a lot in four billion years. Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell. That thread (DNA) learns something new each generation, and adds that hard-won knowledge to its code. Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage. Now multiply the unique information held by every individual organism by all the organisms alive in the world today and you get an astronomically large treasure. Imagine the Noah's Ark that would be needed to carry the genetic payload of every organism on earth (seeds, eggs, spores, sperms). One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information. That's a lot.

And that is only the biological information. The technium is awash in its own ocean of information. Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10^20) of information, many orders smaller than nature's total, but growing. Technology expands data by 66% per year, overwhelming the growth rates of any natural source. Compared to other planets in the neighborhood, or to the dumb material drifting in space beyond, a thick blanket of learning and self-organized information surround this orb.

This store of order is a surprise. Earth's great heap of structure, complexity and knowledge does not seem to be contained "in" the physics that govern non-extropic stuff. Where do you hide 10^29 bytes of organization? The rules behind the fundamental behavior of the elemental particles and energies that make up our reality are very spare, almost naked. It might take books and books to explain them in words, but the laws themselves can be compressed into a very small amount of information. If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk. Amazingly, one plastic plate could contain the operating code for the entire universe. Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times bigger, it would fit onto one high-density "disk" in a few years from now. The total code for matter/energy is an infinitesimal fraction compared to mountain of extropic information that has accumulated on this planet. In fact the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics.

Another way to say this is that the laws of physics don't (as far as we know) improve with time, but extropic systems like life, mind and the technium do. Over billions of years they gain order, complexity, and their own self-organized autonomy — all things not present in the universe before. As Paul Davies points out, "life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history." Life, and by extension mind and the technium, are only loosely governed by physics (just 1%); mostly they are ruled by their own self-creation.

But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow "built into" that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years. This is true to some extent, but not entirely.

In an important way, this unfolding information is not contained in the physical realm. To be clear, I do not mean that it is supernatural. Either extropy must exist in the universe it is transforming, or it must exist outside of it as a supernatural force. If outside, then its dynamics are outside the range of science and of this book. I make the assumption that extropy is not a mystical supernatural force but operates in the lawful realm of physical reality. That is, we can measure it.

However it is immaterial. It is immaterial in the way that a bit is immaterial even though every bit must be incarnated in a physical medium of mass and energy. It takes measurable energy to accomplish computation, to self-organize, to add order. And that work must be stabilized, ratcheted, in matter. So information and extropy must flow through the physical world. Yet the results of that flow through matter and energy is a set of immaterial qualities: knowledge, increasing order, increasing diversity, and increasing sentience.

Another way to read the long-term trajectory of extropy is to view it as an escape from the material and the transcendence to the immaterial. In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned. The rules of chemistry, torque, electrostatic charges and other such reversible forces were all that mattered. There was no other game. Self-organization introduced a new vector into the world. Evolution and life open up possibilities for matter and energy that did not exist in the pre-extropy universe. These possibilities (like a living cell) did not contradict the rules of chemistry and physics, but in a certain sense they allowed the new forms to escape the ordinary strictures of these laws, which would otherwise lead to simple mechanical forms. Paul Davies summarizes it well: "The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis…Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives."

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move towards the immaterial. (Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more valuable.) In six years the average weight per dollar of US exports (the most valuable things the US produces) dropped by half. Forty percent of US exports today are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). Disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium. We substitute intangible design for heavy atoms, making materials simultaneously stronger and lighter, or devices smaller and more powerful. Generally we make things more valuable by adding intangibles such as design, flexibility, innovation and smartness.

Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium's ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial. For instance, science (starting with Newton) has been able to abstract massive amounts of evidence about movement into the very simple law f=ma. Likewise, Einstein reduced enormous numbers of empirical observations into the very condensed container of E=mc^2. Every scientific theory is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries stacked with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated information.

As extropy self-organizes the universe into more complex structures, with more abstraction, and greater compression of information, it overthrows the constraints of the material realm. The arc of extropy is the slow, yet irreversible, liberation from the imperative of matter and energy. It shifts dominance to informational processes such as evolution, learning, and invention. It unleashes the intangible and immaterial.

Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirit." But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well. Although it may not dominate matter's behavior, information must rest in the essence of matter. That's a lot less intuitive. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating.

Once scientists built large scopes to examine matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, they saw the world was incorporeal. They discovered that matter is, at the bottom, empty space and waves of quantum uncertainties. A particle's existence is a continuous field of probabilities, which blurs the sharp distinction between is/is not. Yet this fundamental uncertainty resolves as soon as information is added (that is, as soon as it's measured). At that moment of knowledge, all other possibilities collapse to leave only the single state of "is" or "is not." Indeed, the very term "quantum" suggests an indefinite realm constantly resolving into discrete increments, precise yes/no states. Quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are mostly made of nothing but binary logic.

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term "black hole") claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of 1's and 0's. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, "Its are from bits." He elaborated: "Every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits." All movement, all actions, all nouns, all functions, all states, all we see, hear, measure, and feel are elaborate cathedrals built out of bits. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains of the primeval "it" is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, "Who are you?" the being says, in effect, "Am." One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible.

All creation is assembled from irreducible bits. The bits are like the "atoms" of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life. Everything that is! Movement, energy, gravity, dark matter, and antimatter are elaborate circuits of 1/0 decisions. Every mountain, every star, each flight of a thrown ball, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together.

Wheeler adds, "What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions." In this new perspective, as two hydrogen and one oxygen bind together to form a water molecule, each hydrogen atom uses quantum processes to decide yes/no for all possible courses toward the oxygen atom, until they arrive at the optimal 104.45 degrees union. Thus every chemical bond is thus "calculated."

Computation is the muscle of extropy. Computation is a type of self-organization that juggles and manipulates these primal information bits. It silently employs a small amount of energy to rearrange symbols into greater order. The input of computation is energy and information; the output is order, structure, extropy. The final result of a material computation is a signal that makes a difference — a difference that can be felt as a bruised knee.

"Computation is a process that is perhaps *the* process," says Danny Hillis, whose book, The Pattern on the Stone, explains the formidable nature of computation. "It has an almost mystical character because it seems to have some deep relationship to the underlying order of the universe. Exactly what that relationship is, we cannot say. At least for now." There is even a suspicion, though no one has proved it, that life's self-organization may rely on computation.

If the essence of creation is a bit, then gravity, the speed of light, Higgs bosons, relativity, evolution, quantum mechanics, human emotions, and the thoughts in your mind at this moment would all be squirming piles of intersecting loops of yes/no bits, and each phenomenon would need a computational explanation. We are a long way from having a unified theory of everything in the language of bits, but we have a couple of hints that the process of computation may lie at the center.

Our awakening to the true power of computation rests on three suspicions. The first is that computation can describe all things. To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation. With the advent of digital signal processing, we can capture video, music, and art in the same bit form. There is a lot of debate about how much of art can be reduced to bits, but clearly much can be. Even emotion is not immune. As one example, researcher Cynthia Breazeal at MIT built Kismet, a computational robot that exhibits primitive feelings in response to human actions. Less controversially, formal creations in mathematics, music, and language can be expressed as a valid computer program.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. Surprisingly almost any kind of material can serve as the matrix for a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well. So can sticks and strings. In 1975, as an undergraduate student, Danny Hillis constructed a digital computer out of skinny Tinkertoys. In 2000, Hillis designed a binary computer made of only steel and harden alloys that is indirectly powered by human muscle. This slow-moving device computes time in a clock intended to tick for 10,000 years. Hillis hasn't made a computer with pipes and pumps, but, he says, he could. Recently, scientists have used both quantum particles and minute strands of DNA to perform computations. Many other complex systems have been shown to be capable of computation.

The third postulate is: All computation is one. In 1937, Alan Turing and Alonso Church proved a theorem now bearing their names. The Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration. One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC, or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. A Dell laptop could, if anyone wanted it to, emulate an iPhone. In other words, all computation is equivalent. Turing and Church called this universal computation. Mathematician Stephen Wolfram takes this idea even further and suggests that many very complex processes in the realms of biology and technology are basically computationally equivalent. The physics of person munching on a banana is computationally equivalent to the best possible virtual simulation of the same act. Both phenomenon require the same degree of universal computation, one in particles, and one in electrons.

The consequence of these three propositions — that computation is universal, ubiquitous, and equivalent — suggests that the logical processing of bits is the most potent form of self-organization at work in the universe. While not all self-organization reaches the threshold of computation, universal computation can potentially erupt anywhere. There is currently a lot of research investigating how computation might fare in quantum dimensions and whether quantum computation might be the basis for human consciousness. It's still an open question, but the three axioms also suggest a rather spooky corollary: If everything can compute, and all computation is equivalent, then there is only one universal computer. All the human-made computation, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggyback on cycles of the Great Computer, also known as the Universe.

No one wants to see themselves as someone else's program running on someone else's computer. Put that way, life seems a bit secondhand. But doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, "at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source." This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

The flow of intangible bits is at the core of the astounding complexity we see in this part of the universe. The trend toward increasing order, diversity and intelligence over time, beginning 14 billion years ago and accelerating now, is driven by the increasing structure of information. It is compressed, computed, layered, and lifted to new levels. This emergent self-organization is an immaterial quality arising from physics that continually gains in the face of increasing entropy. This long trajectory — from the beginning till now — is the arc of extropy.

[For those who care, portions of this posting were recycled from an earlier Wired article I wrote.]

Ratcheting Up Autonomy

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:42:42 -0800

We don't usually lose technologies. In the annals of the technium there are extremely few cases where a society has given up a working technology without substituting something superior. Occasionally specific know-how may disappear. In the 6th century Byzantine empire some pyrotechnical wizards invented a incendiary weapon called Greek Fire, or warfire. This fire could not be extinguished by water, in fact it would burn on top of water, and it would eat itself while incinerating anything it touched, a most miraculous and handy weapon at that time. From a distance of up to 50 feet soldiers would shoot the spectacular fire onto ships and forts, which spread fiercely, and quickly consumed targets with unquenchable flames. But warfire's exact chemical composition, always a highly guarded military secret shared by a few keepers in the Asia Minor, was lost during the medieval ages. The current consensus is that warfire was crude oil shot through a long bronze pump, and alternatively lobed by a catapult in clay jars wrapped in burning cloths. Perhaps because warfire required crude oil seep wells found only in the mid-east, this technology died out as the most advance warfare technology drifted to Europe.

Another three well-known examples of lost technology: Around 100 BC tinkerers in ancient Greece, maybe even Archimedes himself, invented a "laptop" astronomical calculator, now called an antikythera, that could predict eclipses and serve as a kind of portable planetarium to determine the positions of celestial bodies. There were at least four models of this small analog computer made in ancient times, but all were lost with no influence on subsequent technology. Two thousand years later scuba divers found a corroded remains in an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the sea in Greece. The precision, miniaturization, and ingenuity of its metal parts and fine gears of the original calculator were not equaled again until 18th century clocks, yet somehow this sophisticated technology was abandoned for cruder technology.

In the 10th century Arabs compiled a nine-volume encyclopedia of medical knowledge and philosophical notes written by the renowned physician Al Razi, said to be longest medical text ever written by a single person. Two hundred years later this book was forgotten in the Islamic world. No copies in Arabic have ever been found. We only know about it through a Latin translation made in 1279. While some of its wisdom was found in other writings, the bulk of it disappeared in the Islamic world, the center of civilization at the time.

Japan gave up gun technology for 200 years. The first guns in Japan were imported by Portuguese traders in 1543. Within 50 years Japanese master metal smiths had cloned them and were exporting firearms for cash. Even before 1600 guns and cannons were deciding battles in Japan. In a extremely chivalrous culture (10% of Japanese men were samurai) the gun was assigned to low-class uneducated foot soldiers, while the art of the sword was the more honorable choice for rulers. As the gun became common it became unfashionable, vulgar, despicable in its ability to kill indiscriminately. Its slow removal was a type of arms control — the gun was seen as too deadly for civilized people. Europe made similar, but ineffectual, attempts to ban the gun around the same time. Martin Luther called firearms "devilish." King Henry IV in France prohibited non-royal manufacture of gunpowder and King Henry VIII in England outlawed firearm ownership by anyone earning less than 100 pounds per year. Neither edict was successfully enforced. However, Japan was able to centralize gun production and banish the weapon from their island by 1668. The Japanese reverted to their beloved swords, and since they were closed to outside influence during this period and only fought among themselves, the gun did not return until Commodore Perry forced it in 1879. For two centuries the Japanese retreated from the manufacture of complex firearms and instead perfected the manufacture of the world's most sophisticated swords (they could slice through a barrel of machine gun).

These four examples of reversal are fascinating primarily because they are so scarce. Despite these exceedingly rare retreats, the technium moves relentlessly forward. Generally, a society does not abandon a new technology to return to an earlier version. When a current technology is suspended in the natural course of evolution it is usually displaced by a more complex variation, and the old version is swept aside as a viable minor alternative, or at least a curiosity, but rarely goes extinct. For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren't really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.

Rather than a series of linear displacements climbing a ladder of evolution, the technium progresses as a widening field of accumulation. Existing technologies keep operating almost intact, but are subsumed under additional new, more complex layers. Beneath the fancy hi-tech digital world a viable industrial foundation provides rare-earth metals, electricity, copper wire, and plastic keyboards. Beneath the industrial foundation a viable agriculture swells. As any modern farmer will tell you, the glories of virtual worlds and e-commerce depend upon a rather primitive cycle of poking seeds into dirt and harvesting the replicants into large bins, a routine that has not changed much in 8,000 years. The agriculture era has not disappeared.

Because human population is still growing, the size of the agricultural layer of the technium continues to spread. The shrinking cohort of farmers in the developed world is more than offset by their growing numbers elsewhere. There is more agriculture on this planet than ever before (one third of land surface). In the past 40 years of the industrial revolution alone, cropland has increased globally by 12%. At the same time, and for the same reasons, the widening base of farms and foodstuffs permits industry to expand. The industrial age is nowhere near ending. Its continual expansion permits new post-industrial technologies to expand. The leading edge of technology (lightweight, disembodied, highly leveraged stuff — solar panels, gene therapies, and quantum computers) races forward, but only because its subsumed foundations also march forward.

But why does the technium so rarely go backwards? Why are forgotten calculators, weapons, and medical encyclopedia so uncommon? Why is there a one-way directionality to technical progress, so that in its broadest outlines it inexorably moves towards the more complex with so little retreat?

Four reasons. First, the natural momentum won by any entrenched system bestows a directionality. The more established a process is, the harder it is to change, the more it proceeds along its path. Big technology is hard to stop. For instance, the US electrical system achieved technological momentum by the time it set its standards for voltages and frequencies in 1900, and they have not changed since. For all practical purposes the flexibility of a technological system is eliminated once its initial choices and defaults are fixed. As systems scale up they acquire inertia. The components of global technologies like container freight shipping, or integrated circuit design, or hospital x-ray equipment, tend to create a kind of autonomous movement simply because of their size.

The scale of many technologies dwarfs us individually. The span of pulsating power lines continue beyond our vision to wrap around the earth. This grid, built 100 years ago, lighted your grandparent's home, and our parents', and now brightens mine, and will light the lights of our grandchildren and probably their grandkids. The wires, towers, circuit breakers, and network of connections might eventually persevere as long as the aqueducts of Segovia, Spain built in 100 CE. That technology conducted drinking water for 75 generations. Roman roads outlived the Romans. This technological longevity is almost a kind of immortality that transcends our comparatively brief lives. The technium's scope exists outside of our oversight, especially outside of our personal oversight. Its omnipresence together with its relative immortality grants it a version of autonomy.

The second way that technology gains a measure of autonomy is through its self-creation of needs. When we purchase a mobile phone that is just the beginning. The cell phone "needs" a voicemail box, a charger, an ear piece. Previously phones did not need apps but now phones are defined by their cousins, computers, so they do. As historian David Nye observes, the mobile phone and by extension any tool, "enters into the determination of its own utilities, suggesting new ideas for its own definition." The more ways a technology insinuates itself into the existing fabric of the technium, the more autonomy it can acquire. As its supporting web is cast wider, it can come to rely upon hundreds of technologies, and in turn sustain hundreds itself. And of course each of those assisting technologies is subsidized by a web of others devices. In many cases inventions co-support each other. The entire ecosystem of interrelated technologies begins to act as a whole.

In that curious way of life, growth triggers more growth. The web of technologies is ever expanding because a particular technology will self-generate new needs, new demands, and new appetites. David Landes summarized the technium's emergent self-making with this succinct story in Unbound Prometheus, his history of the industrial revolution: "The invention and diffusion of machinery in the textile manufacture and other industries created a new demand for energy, hence for coal and steam engines; and these engines, and the machines themselves, had a voracious appetite for iron, which called for further coal and power. Steam also made possible the factory city, which used unheard-of quantities of iron (hence coal) in its many-storied mills and its water and sewage systems... And all of these products--iron, textiles, chemicals--depended on large-scale movements of goods on land and on sea, from the sources of the raw materials into the factories and out again to near and distant markets. The opportunity thus created and the possibilities of the new technology combined to produce the railroad and the steamship, which of course added to the demand for iron and fuel while expanding the market for factory products. And so on, in ever widening circles."

These multiplying connections and ramifications thicken into a whole that exhibits idiosyncratic quirks, and expresses its own needs. We are all familiar with the temperamental gasoline engine that won't start unless kicked, or the laptop that doesn't like to go to sleep. A few years ago MIT graduate student Eric Brende dropped out of technological society to imitate the Amish. With each power tool he discarded he came to see machines as autonomous children: "A modern technology machine is no mere tool. It is a complex fuel-consuming being with needs of its own. It gobbles up energy, it demands care and maintenance; it even has bouts of temperament. In many cases no diaper will contain its mess. For these reasons, it not only serves but must be served. But it is more than another mouth to feed; as it becomes more involved and involving, it can easily invade the living space we formerly reserved for ourselves, taking on functions once our own."

Autonomy in technology is encouraged in a third way: we design it in. Science fiction guru Isaac Asimov offers a good analogy: "A chipped pebble is almost part of the hand it never leaves. A thrown spear declares a sort of independence the moment it is released… The whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct control and more and more seem to have the beginning of a will of their own." Clever engineers have designed the calculator that turns itself off, and the rice cooker that turns itself on. Anything "smart" has a bit of autonomy designed into it. Our smart modern kitchens are remodeled with semi-autonomous appliances that decide on their own how much to wash dishes, or toast bread, or make ice cubes. Technicians first engineered autonomy into transportation by creating "auto mobility" in the first automobiles; now cars have the semi-autonomy of cruise control which drives at a steady speed. The next escalation in autonomy is a car that can drive itself. Experimental vehicles such as Stanford University's Stanley can navigate itself across country without a human driver. You can also buy self-parking car prototypes. Unmanned auto-piloted airplanes now form combat units in the US Air Force. Asimov's thrown spear declaring its own independence is now a launched missile that completely steers itself as a bird might. If this is not a full measure of autonomy, what is?

But the fourth reason autonomy arises in technological systems is the most important. Every technology (even an early Sapien's hammer) is assembled of parts. When the web of parts contributing to a technology reaches a sufficient degree of complexity, the whole can spontaneously self-organize. Out of this self-organization springs autonomy.

We know from thousands of controlled experiments in many fields of science that complex systems can reliably self-organize. Not in every case, but under certain conditions, stable forms will emerge from messy networks. We've seen this emergent order happen in chemical systems, ecosystems, complicated communication networks, biological processes, in human social webs, celestial dust clouds, in evolution and in tens of thousands of computer simulations. "Order out of nothing" emerges when outputs from one process are diverted as inputs into another, and then circulated back as outputs in an amplifying loop. As an example, anaerobic algae in a warm pond may breed furiously producing a toxin which kills off competing water plants, depleting the oxygen plants normally make, which boosts the growth of anaerobic algae, which kills more plants and so on encourage algae growth, as if the algae had organized the pond. The results of these "strange loops" and recursive circuitry in many complex systems — including technical systems such as computers and the internet — is that a higher level order materializes out of the disorder among many component parts.

The examples of self-organization are legion, and many books have been written about this paradoxical phenomenon, including a very long book that I wrote 15 years ago. At that time I could find no better example of emergent self-organization than a bee hive. Without any central command, thirty thousand individual honeybees can select a new home, manufacture a palace of precise comb for a queen they choose, and oversee the colony's surplus fuel storage (honey) — tasks that the bees are incapable of doing individually. Critically, individual bees need the colony to reproduce since all honeybees, except the queen, are sterile. The bee colony is an emergent self-organized form. A beehive can remember nectar locations longer than any bee can, it will outlive the short life span of individual bees, and as a colony it is a warm-blooded animal maintaining a constant temperature while the tiny bees are cold-blooded. Yet, no where in the outward behavior or internal structure of a bee do we see the form of a hive. Where do the plans for the beehive hide? The order of the colony only emerges from the complex interactions between the honeybees. Its form is not imposed from without, or mimicked from the parts, or dictated by the beehive brain, or the queen, but rather the hive is organized by the emergent autonomous "self" of the whole.

Autonomous self-organization can occur in relatively simple physical systems like a sand dune (self-organization is what gives the dune its shape), in the dendritic pattern of a draining river in a delta, in a boiling pot of water (creating tiny vortexes), or in bits of iron that spontaneously magnetized. Specific solutions of chemicals can form themselves into tubular structures (micelles), or into clock-like oscillating reactions, or even self-assemble into more complicated compounds. Life abounds with self-organized patterns such as the leopard's spots, the spiral coil of snail shells, and the geodesic spheres of diatoms. We know these are patterns that direct themselves and not patterns dictated by the organism itself because the same pattern can be replicated using random inputs. In other words, if you could take a million blank white zebras and supply their skins with a few simple rules governing how to darken their hides as camouflage, the familiar solution of black and white stripes would appear over and over again. Rather than being designed by the zebra's brain, or even governed by their genes, the stripes self-organize from the uncoordinated, decentralized actions of millions of pigment cells in the skin interacting together according to a small set of conditions.

Real zebra left, self-organized model right.

Similar autonomous patterns emerge on the patterns of mollusk shells, and in the bark of trees, and in colonies of fungi. Beautiful dynamic patterns reminiscent of microscopic creatures autonomously emerge in a simple mathematical visualization (called a cellular automata), completely independent of any physical form, strongly suggesting that these kind of emergent patterns are inherent in any kind of complex adaptive system — including the technium.

There is only one technium on Earth, and it does not lend itself it to easy experiments. But we can demonstrate the technium's inherent tendency towards autonomous self-organization by modeling the system in computers. At the Santa Fe Institute economist Brian Arthur crafted such a model of simplified technium. His model is based on the idea that in the real world different technologies serve as inputs or outflows for dozens of other technologies. A large factory drillpress might be used to manufacture many smaller retail tools. Your laptop relies on the input of your phone line. The engine in your car needs a water pump which in turn supports a radiator which in turn cools the engine. Each machine might prop up hundreds of others. Recall all the technology that goes down when the electricity goes off! In Arthur's simulation, each so-called "machine" is a bit of elemental computer logic. Alone, one scrap of logic can do nothing, but when these elements of logic are strung together the abstract "machine" will accomplish a task, such as sorting a large pile of numbers. Just as in the real technium, tens of thousands of machines in various degrees of interdependencies create a vast dynamic web of relationships. So in the model technium one logic machine might spawn ten other logic machines. It is impossible to unravel the full consequences of removing or adding just one technology, but as in the experiment with zebra stripes, when Arthur re-runs such simulations multiple times, mixing up the combinations of machines and inventions at random, he finds that stable patterns of complex "machines" emerge again and again. These autonomous forms are not reflections of constituent pieces, but are independent of them because if you remove or add a few, you get the same results. In the artificial technium, the specific arrangements between inventions don't matter. The patterns are inevitable in this sense. Just as important, the patterns are autonomously self-generated.

Computer scientist Abbe Mowshowitz reminds us that "to assert that technology has become an autonomous agent of change is not to attribute an occult quality to the growth of modern society which transcends human choice. It simply means that mechanization… creates a foundation for further development along certain lines." This is what large systems can do: they develop new organizational modules.

Nobelist Herbert Simon conjured a timeless fable to illustrate this principle. Imagine two old watchmakers assembling a batch of fine gold watches built from 1,000 tiny parts each. One of the watchmakers (call him Tempus) starts with the first gear and keeps adding the next part until the watch is done. If Tempus gets a phone call and puts down his work, the delicate assembly falls apart and he has to start over again. However the other watchmaker (Hora) assembles the watch in subgroups of 10 pieces each. Now if Hora is interrupted and puts down his work he loses no more than one hundredth of his progress. Simon calculated that if there was a one in ten chance that the watchmaker's next step might be interrupted (since both watchmakers had many loyal customers clamoring for their quality craftsmanship) then it would take Tempus on average 4,000 times as long to make the same watch as Hora.

In Simon's fable, Hora's invention of modularity forms a ratchet which prevents his progress from backsliding. Science philosopher Jacob Bronowski calls that ratcheting "stratified stability." Risky innovations are stabilized by operating as modules. The worst that can happen is that complexity will collapse down to the stratum of the previous stable unit. This modular method of advancement is widely used in modern manufacturing for the same reasons of efficiency. Modularity was the key to the unlocking the power of factory mass production in the 1860s when it was first used to make guns: assemble all the firing mechanisms first, then all the handles, then all the barrel sections, then assemble these interchangeable units into rifles. Today large factories that "manufacture" automobiles don't make anything; instead factories are the interchange where hundreds of pre-assembled modules (reduced risk) are brought together as the final step. Engineers like Hora usually design the modularity. But in large-scale complex systems, such as a living organism, or in evolution, or in the technium itself, modularity is an emergent pattern.

Modularity is ubiquitous in life, and essential in evolution. The disbelievers in the fact of biological evolution are right about one thing: the chances of all the little atoms found in the first living organism coming together randomly is nil. Even if they did come together once, they would degrade instantly. For life to succeed many such unlikely molecules would have to randomly assemble many times. Such a coincidence is statistically impossible. That's true if you calculate the probability of all the parts acting independently. But that is not how life works. Evolution progresses by self-organizing in a modular fashion. It creates complexity by stabilizing and building upon rare combinations when they happen. For example, a pool of pre-biotic compounds might occasionally self-assemble the complicated molecule A, which sadly, is unstable. Yet while A exists it can produce molecule B, which is also short lived, but B degrades into C, which is rare yet fairly stable. But as it happens in this case, C acts as a catalyst for the creation of molecule A! It's a loop! Because C is stable, it can keep making a steady supply of unstable A and B, which pumps up the quantity of C. Suddenly this self-organized recursive circuit fills the pool with persistent, unlikely complex molecules. The probability of the whole is paradoxically greater than the sum of its improbable parts. These stable auto-catalytic molecules serve as modules for more complex compounds in the same self-generating manner.

In the same way, a million monkeys in a million years will never type out Hamlet if they type only letters. But if their typing system evolves a mechanism that organizes keystrokes to type random words — a new modular unit — then suddenly Hamlet is not so unlikely. If further self-organization created keystrokes for random sentences — a yet more complex modular unit — then over a million years Hamlet is almost certain. The progression from modules of letters to words to sentences is stratified stability, and a product of self-organization.

Brian Arthur realized that technology, too, got its traction from the ratcheting buildup of modular units. "New technologies are never created from nothing." Arthur observed. "They are constructed—put together—from components that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building blocks—for the construction of further new technologies." A modern jet engine is composed of a dozen extremely complex subunits like compressors, turbines, and combustion chambers, which themselves are composed of dozens of smaller, equally complex components. Some of these modules have not changed in function since the first jet engines a century ago. New technologies, Arthur points out, are mostly "fresh combinations of what already exists." Successful older combinations of simple technologies become foundational modules that are reused, recycled, and retained. The combination of an electric motor plus pulley was invented shortly after electricity was tamed, but can be found in your car today.

The technium today is entirely populated with combinations of primitive technologies that have been ratcheted up into more complex devices. A century ago scientists combined existing modular components such as the triode vacuum tube and paper foil capacitor into the first amplifier circuit. The amplifier then became a new module that was combined with resistors, ear phones, and other components (themselves assembled from many parts) to produce a radio receiver. The radio found hundreds of uses; combined with other modular ingredients it made a radar; the radar unit, mixed with thousands of other subassemblies, yielded a battleship.

Arthur's artificial technium was able to invent incredibly complex logic circuits capable of adding 8 bits, a significant feat even for a human programmer. "Complicated circuits constructed themselves from simpler ones," Arthur writes. But these complex inventions came about only because the system created stable intermediate modules along the way. When it discovered a particularly useful logic circuit, like a 2-bit adder, it would then recombine them to produce more complex forms. Arthur calculated that odds of all 9 varieties of 16 logic units assembling at once in the correct combination to a produce working 8-bit adder circuit was one in 10^177,554 — or a certain impossibility. Yet here the 'miraculous" machine was, operating in his tiny world. The ratcheting in his artificial technium produced improbable novelty.

In the technium, as in other complex systems, self organization regularly yields improbable novelty, a ratcheting up of levels, a rise in autonomy, and an unsettling sense of the inevitable. Over time, self-organizing also generates a non-mystical directionality. This last result may take a bit of explaining:

A long arc flows through the cosmos. It begins with the first bits of matter, then is lifted by life, and passes through the technium today. Presumably it continues into the future. The course and direction of this great arc began long ago in the physics of the big bang. Most of universe then, as well as today, operates in the realm of the very very tiny, and includes most of what we consider real: atoms, light, radiation, chemistry, gravity. With few exceptions the laws governing this microworld are reversible. A time-lapse movie of atomic particles colliding into each other, or zooming around space, would be indistinguishable played backwards or forward. This physical reversibility at the smallest scale is an essential trait of the material world. In a formal sense, time does not have a direction in this realm.

Time only gains direction in the macroworld, the scale at which we live. In the realm of planets, stars, volcanoes, periwinkles, elephants, and of course movies, we see an ineradicable direction, which we call time. However it is not the larger scale of the macroworld per se which points time one way. Sensual time gets its direction from extropy. Extropy (also known in physics as negentropy, or negative entropy) is the cosmic force behind the great arc that assembles complexity into larger and larger visible scale, and that builds up the universe while entropy drains it down. The contrast between the two — entropy and extropy — gives us our embodied sense of time.

Narrow window of feasibility (white area) in trajectories of expanding Universe. (From Rees)

The seeds of extropy are infused into the particulars of the micro world. Ours is a very precise universe. The uniformity of motion and mass from one end of the universe to the other is astounding. Furthermore, if the strength of the forces between parts of the universe, the invisible energies binding its myriad particles together, had varied even infinitesimally from the values it does have, the universe (as we know it) would not hold together. These exact values hold a surprise. The precise settings of the 30 most important constants in the universe — like the value of gravity, the energy density, the strength of electromagnetism — enable bits of matter and energy to organize themselves into structures which can not only persist in the face of entropy, but persist with modification. Extropy is the innate inclination buried in the very fundamentals of reality for small things — starting at the subatomic level — to cooperate as a larger unit (could be an electron, an atom, molecule, or a cell) long enough to extend the inclination toward yet larger units. It is a self-ballooning force that bootstraps its way into greater existence.

The very slow cooperation of subatomic particles to form the hundred or so elements in the furnace of stars took several billion of years. The massive self-organization of stable planets took several more billions of years. Because extropy is a self-creating cycle it ramps up slowly from almost nothing. But the more structure it creates, the faster it creates more structure. Biological evolution accelerated extropy in at least one local area (Earth); technology even more so. The technium is overrun with self-generating powers.

"What has brought life by slow steps up a ladder of increasing complexity is stratified stability," says Jacob Bronowksi in his Ascent of Man lectures. "And we know this is true not only of life but of matter. If the stars had to build a heavy element like iron, or a super-heavy element like uranium, by the instant assembly of all the parts, it would be virtually impossible. No. A star builds hydrogen to helium; then at another stage in a different star helium is assembled to carbon, to oxygen, to heavy elements; and so step by step up the whole ladder to make the ninety-two elements in nature."

The self-organization that is common to chemistry, life, and the technium moves through the universe and time in the same way. From myriad parts extropy organizes structures that lock-in order at a higher level — stratified stability. The new emergent order stabilizes as a new "whole" which then serves as a component part for the next round of self-organization. So the atoms that build themselves into a glycine molecule are subsumed into a protein; then that protein, with millions of other proteins, is subsumed into the higher order of a whole cell. And so on. The technium, too, is built this way.

It is this stratified stability created by extropy, evolution, and self-organization which prevents the collapse of complexity. If complexity had to re-assemble itself at every instance, nothing really complex would be possible. Structures as sophisticated as ourselves would be unthinkable. How could our bodies, let alone our minds, arrange themselves from a billion atoms at once? The modular nature of self-organization encourages complexity to bootstrap creations, and it prevents backsliding. Extropy keeps things moving forward. In Bronowski's lovely phrase, it "gives the arrow of time a barb, which stops it from running backward."

That's a gorgeous image. It's the irreversibility of extropy that gives us a sense of things going forward, and supplies the "barb of time" that sets our world apart from the reversible microcosm of the quantum world. All the time-lapse sequences that fail to play backwards are sequences generated by extropy: the development of a toddler from an infant, the evolution of a fish from a sea worm, even the slow aggregation of this planet from sun dust. Billions of these parallel narratives, all impelled by the extropic barb of time, smother us with the impression that universe flows in only one direction (even if it is only the things we care about that actually do).

But extropy does even more than illuminate the temporal. The ratchet of its self-organization is the "barb" which pushes progress. Progress is not an mirage. Progress is what evolution and extropy do. Complex systems tend to get more complex because the levels of emergent order keeps systems from devolving in reverse. Order doesn't retreat (on average) while it remains pushed by extropic system. The stratified stability of evolution and self organization act as a valve, constantly directing change in one direction — towards higher levels. On average biological organisms rarely devolve into simpler organisms. Almost always categories of living creatures evolve towards more complexity, more specialization, more diversity, more sociality, more sentience, and ubiquity. The same is true of individuals. We start off as a single undifferentiated cell and develop into more complex beings. Likewise our institutions, which tend to get more complex in their own lifespans.

The technium too advances through an escalation of stable coherent forms. Once crops are domesticated they almost never go wild again. Once a society adopts agriculture it rarely surrenders its farms to return to hunting; most farm societies evolve crafts and more technology. Once money is common, it rarely disappears. Instead coins beget banking, investment, interest. Once electricity is installed in a region, it does not dim. Yes, wars and bandits can rip out its wires in a temporary illness, but in general electrification forms a stable base upon which the complexities of industry stand.

This is why the loss of a technology is so rare. The ratchet of self-organization prevents technological backsliding, and so we marvel at how an ingenious weapon like Greek warfire could have been lost, or how an analog computer built 2,000 years ago could have been forgotten. The particulars are perplexing, but these are the statistically expected exceptions. Evolution is a probabilistic function, and there will be outliers like the retreat on guns in Japan. The real marvel, instead, is the remarkable consistency of cosmic progress.

From the moment of their genesis at the big bang, matter and energy have coalesced into increasingly complicated units — despite the relentless resistance of entropy. Quantum particles clump into subatomic particles, and these in turn clump into lightweight atoms. In the fires of stars 12 billion years ago massive quantities of lightweight atoms combine with more cosmic particles under their own self-generated stellar gravity to generate heavier elements. These heavy elements self-organized into planets, some exhaling self-sustaining atmospheres. All the while entropy nibbles at these islands of self-order. In small pockets on a planet, atoms self-organize a most remarkable molecule: a self-replicating double helix. While self-organization continues to birth emergent order in the cosmos, the double helix unleashes an additional generative force: evolution. Now self-organization is amplified by the learning that evolution brings, and extropy is accelerated. The resilient molecule of DNA creates a stable base for the invention of millions of adaptable organisms, and each of these creatures — every one of the trillions that have lived — create more order in one corner of the universe, and pay the price with more entropy. Through innumerable stages of increased structure (limbs, nerves, eyes), the biosphere continues to arrange itself in greater units of order until it learns to improve its learning with a brain. Biology forms an irreversible base for the launch of mind, which can now generate more complexity, faster, then ever before. The mind adds another force to extropy. It unleashes the technium, which multiples conscious learning, broadcasting its ability to create new levels of complexity and structure completely around the planet. The technium stands upon the base of biology (and therefore must nurture it). Biology stands upon the base of self-organized matter in the swirling galaxies and twirling planets. And all these layers rest upon the precise initial conditions at the big bang that still solicit this billion-years unfolding.

Matter and energy's propensity to self-organize propels them outward in celestial forms, life, mind and the technium. Self-organization ascends the levels of complexity and bequeaths the great thrust not only its directionality, which gives it an disconcerting sense of inevitability, but also with its increasing autonomy, which also unsettles us.

The circle of my closest friends are fans and boosters of technology. They unleash the technium for a living. Their job is to discover new forms of machines, to invent new ways to leverage intelligence, and to create entirely new stuff. When I asked them about the inherent value in technology, the majority of the technophiles I interviewed claim that technology is a means to an end, and therefore neutral. They generally hold an upscale version of "guns don't kill, people do." We have a choice in how technology is applied, but fundamentally, they would say, technology is neither good nor bad, it's neutral. The good in technology comes from wise decisions in employing it.

To be honest, I used to feel the same way. History counseled that dynamite could be used to carve tunnels or blow up schools. Insecticides could boost crops or poison drinking water. GPS satellites can guide you if you are lost, or track you down with no place to hide. Surely the sum value of new invention was up to us. And the idea that we choose the valence of technology's charge is very appealing to our egos. But it does not match the evidence of technology's rise, nor its deep roots in life and the cosmos.

Nothing that re-arranges energy in the face of entropy; that builds up dynamic forms lasting billions of years (galaxies); that is able to bootstrap self-replication from inert molecules (DNA); that stabilizes increasing complexity (life), that crystallizes permanent change in the form of a mind (you), that amplifies learning with tools (technology) — nothing like that can be neutral. Is life neutral? Is your mind neutral? Is a baby neutral? While we might list certain species or ideas as negative, we understand that in general the more life and ideas, the better. The technium is in the same class, only more so. Technology is as neutral as the biosphere, which is to say that it is not neutral. It comes with biases and autonomy.

There are good and bad uses for television, but the media of television itself is biased toward certain uses — and certain abuses. As Jerry Mander argued in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, the physical nature of television of the 1960-1970s— its flickering cathode ray screen images broadcast one-way over a centralized network — induced a bias of physiological passivity. There was nothing to do but sit back and receive. TV as it was structured was biased to producing couch potatoes. It was also an effective propaganda device. In the west most of the propaganda was generated by corporate advertising. In Mander's view television manipulates our psyche with clever emotional pitches to convince us we need more technology in our lives; that we can't be happy without a cellphone or car. Among the gadgets it persuades us we need are more media devices, which in turn will manufacture more desires for more technology. Thus technology encourages (or forces) us to produce more technology , so we become mere vehicles in technology's takeover.

That wasn't television's only bias, because TV also accelerated the transition to the middle class in developing countries like Brazil and India. The addictive soap operas that seemed to recycle a small set of human dramas, also acted as incredibly effective role models for illiterate women, who decided their daughters should be like the women on TV. More than any government contraception program, the passive consumption of mindless TV persuaded women into having smaller families and educating their daughters. As Jerry Mander pointed out, as a propaganda device, television is unrivaled.

Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, puts it nicely: "tools insist on being used in particular ways." Neil Postman, who wrote says "the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself." He argues that each technology's architecture suggest the metaphors we use to manage it, its speed biases the politics and the economics it generates. Mander declared that "Many technologies determine their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form." Thus, if devices have ideologies built into them, big technology may require big centralized government. Alfred Chandler, a die-hard capitalist who wrote a monumental history of American business, argues that the construction and day-to-day operation of the technium's industrial subunits, such as its sprawling transportation network, skyscraper cites, food and water systems, and communication grid all required large-scale, centralized hierarchical organizations. He says matter-of-factly, "the operational requirements of railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business." Die-hard environmentalist Dennis Hayes takes it to the next step: Because nuclear power relies on many layers of fail-safe security, and heavy doses of police and soldiers to guard it from terrorism, "the increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state."

Like in the emerging internet today, the emerging electrical grid a century ago was seen as vehicle for ideology. David Nye reports that Charles Steinmetz, the leading scientist at General Electric in its first decades a century ago, "expected socialism to emerge along with a national electrical grid." Steinmetz claimed: "The electric power is probably today the most powerful force tending toward coordination, that is cooperation [socialism]." And, "Lenin famously declared that only when the Soviet Union had been completely electrified could it attain full socialism."

We know that large-scale technologies can sport fundamental biases because they have been deliberately designed to do so. In a famous example, the legendary New York urban planner Robert Moses restricted the public — that is the poor, lower class public — from new city parks and beaches by a clever and subtle technological discrimination. According to his biographer, Moses lowered the clearance on the 200 overpasses he built on the Long Island Parkway so that public buses (the untidy poor) were unable to use this highway to get to Jones beach, but (middle class) cars could. If intentional bias can be inserted so effortlessly, couldn't inadvertent bias emerge just as easily?

Ironically, those who most clearly see that technology is not neutral are those who recoil from it. The writings of technology critics Neil Postman, Wendell Berry, Jerry Mander, Langdon Winner, Eric Brende, Marshall McLuhan offer keen insights into the autonomous nature of the technium. But they also rail against it. They worry about it's momentum. No one has written about the autonomous nature of the technium with more clarity, nor with more alarm, than Jacques Ellul.

Ellul was a French theologian born in 1912 of aristocratic European parents. He was educated in an Eastern Orthodox school (his grandmother was Serbian) and as a young man he experienced a mystical religious conversion when he was 22. After delving deep into Christian theology, he came under the spell of Karl Marx, and later joined the French Resistant movement against the Nazis, where he worked to rescue Jews. Theologically his ideas breached the usual denominational categories, so he was never fully embraced by any church, sect, or even secular movement. For instance, he preached universal salvation, meaning everyone is saved no matter what they do, a dogma that did not endear him to the orthodoxy. He identified himself as a Christian Anarchist, which meant he belonged to a church of one. Yet he was a prolific theologian, and wrote almost 50 books on Christian theology. But Ellul is best known for his one monumental book on the technium published in 1954, and released in English in 1964 as The Technological Society.

In French Ellul called it la Technique, and he meant what I mean by the technium — all the hardware, instruments, and cultural inventions, institutions and technological infrastructure that flow from our inventions. For Ellul, the rise of technique, or the technium, was a sacrilege against God. Our collective creation, the technium, had taken on a autonomous life of its own, a life much bigger than our own, and we were beginning to idolize it. We were being bewitched by this most powerful earthly force, and it was our most holy duty to see the technium for what it was — a spiritual "tyrant" — and resist its dominance. Ted Kaczynski, the disgruntled math teacher who built postal bombs aimed at murdering prominent technologists claimed to have read Ellul's book five times while hiding out in his remote Montana cabin.

To Ellul the emerging autonomy of the technium was starkly obvious, though in the early 1950s it was not so obvious to others. Throughout La Technique, Ellul sounds his alarm: "Technique has become autonomous… It is a power endowed with its own peculiar force… a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its own special laws and is own determinations… It is an end in itself." "Technique pursues its own course more and more independently of man. This means that man participates less and less actively in technical creation, which, by the automatic combination of prior elements, becomes a kind of fate. Man is reduced to the level of catalyst." Ellul argued the rising technological autonomy of the technium lowers the human being to "a slug inserted into a slot machine." In fact, Ellul declares, "there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy."

Of course, Ellul was not alone. He had compatriots and disciples. Rene Dubos: "Technology cannot theoretically escape from human control, but in practice it is proceeding on an essentially independent course." John Kenneth Galbraith: "I am led to the conclusion, which I trust others will find persuasive, that we are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us." Martin Heidegger: "No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain and drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other--these forces...have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision… Technology is in no sense an instrument of man's making or in his control. It is rather that a phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history."

These technophobes are right about so many things. The technium is the phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history. It is outgrowing our capacity of understanding. It is advancing faster and faster without end. It is proceeding on an autonomous course. It is an end in itself. It is a kind of fate.

This is scary. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing off to remake our essential nature, yet it zooms beyond our capacity to understand or control, accelerating in power, yet biased in its direction. No wonder the autonomy of the technium provokes such genuine concern.

Yet the very same innate forces of extropy and self-organization that nurture the technological imperative, also are responsible for real progress. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing the advance of diversity and intelligence, it multiples on its own, yet it is headed in the direction we'd all like to go — more options, choices, possibilities and free-will.

The very best things in the known universe are products of this thrust. Redwoods, the milky way, dolphins, antibiotics, garage door openers, the members of your family, the internet, and the 5 kilogram organ now reading this have all been summoned forth by the process of extropy and self-organization. The real advances in human society in the last 8,000 years — increasing longevity, increasing literacy, increasing knowledge of our home, increasing circle of empathy for others — have all been due to the same essential force that also scares us: the inevitable technological imperative.

This cosmic drive — this measurable, falsifiable, actual, non-mystical organizing principle — creates the mechanical autonomy that worries us, and the sense of inevitable that unsettles us; yet this same cosmic organizing principle also generates the progress we want and will always head towards. We can't have one without the other, and this stirs up an irreconcilable tension.

I believe this Janus-faced god is the source of our great unease. We fear the technium for its otherness and lack of control, and yet we crave it for its blessings. We hate it for it usurping our autonomy, yet we love it for increasing our freedoms. We deny its inevitable progression, yet we expect its inevitable progress. The deal seems to be that technology can improve our lot, only if it can improve its own at the same time.

Ellul, I am sure, would state the deal different terms. He might say: The cost of human progress (and let's grant it is real) is the loss of human autonomy.

Would that be worth it? If humanity never changed, if human nature was fixed, immovable, or sacred it would not be. Sacrificing such a gem would too steep a price for progress. But is human nature taboo? There are many among us who define the current state of humanity as sacred, and worth protecting, and will refuse progress because it will inevitably tamper with our spirits. I am not one of them.

I think that humanity is our own invention, that we are a technology ourselves, particularly as we live in the modern world. Humans are tools disguised as animals. We have long ago ceased to be independent beings, and as a species are symbiotically dependent on the technium. If all technology were to disappear tomorrow — and by that I mean all — stone points, clothes, control of fire, spears included — most of humanity would disappear in a matter of weeks, and the remnant that survived without any tools whatsoever would not be called human by any of us now.

As the technium rises, so does its gift of progress. But as progress rises, so does the technium's autonomy. As a self-made invention, we are an element of technology's rise. "To quarrel with technology is to quarrel with the nature of man," says Jacob Bronowski. Based on our current direction, humans will move closer to symbiotic union with technology each year forward. Because of this deep dependency we will redefine ourselves, just has we have been doing for 8,000 years. The technium's long arc will widen our circle of identity and I suspect we'll come to see the technium's autonomy as part of our own.

The Most Powerful Force in the World

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:14:42 -0800

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

From the moment Sapiens emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, their inventions began to alter their environment. Sapien's hunting tools and techniques had far reaching affects: their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of people shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick — burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains — disrupted vast regions of the continents.

Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100 km (60-mile) wide atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO2. Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept the next ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle which would have ordinarily refrozen the northern most portions of the planet by now. In other words, agriculture made (and still makes) the world safe for more agriculture. Like most complex technologies, agriculture — the integrated system of domesticated crops and animals, irrigation infrastructure and soil management — is self-sustaining and will alter its environment to further its own benefit.

Long before the industrial age, humans were altering the Earth's climate.

Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO2 furthered altered the balance of the atmosphere as the number of machines multiplied. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum eating machines not only transformed the ease, productivity, and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), machines also drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO2 exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals, and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces. Alan Weisman, writing in the World Without Us, suggest that the modern technium is the geological equivalent to a series of ceaseless volcanoes: "by tapping the [fuels of the] Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s." And this impact is not only global, but extremely persistent: "Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we're gone is our redesigned atmosphere." Climatologist Tyler Volk estimates that a natural geological cycle — with no technological mitigation — would take 100,000 years to return the agricultural and industrial induced CO2 atmosphere to pre-technium levels.

Each year the technium consumes more than 40 trillion pounds of coal, 1.6 trillion pounds of iron, 200 billion pounds of gypsum, and 1.2 trillion pounds of wheat, just four inputs among thousands of others needed to appease its appetite, and all those totals grow more than 5% per year. On average the technium must process twenty tons of atoms per year to support each man, women and child in the modern world.

The technium gains its immense power not from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, like books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!) which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul) which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift. That shift will often suggest another idea to someone else (use a cow to pull the wheeled sled), which in turn produces yet another disturbance, another rebalancing, another shift. Once started the teetering continues for many generations. As one ideas sparks two new ones and two ideas spark four, and four eight, this chain reaction of technology reverberates through the society, always gaining in accumulating energy and ceaseless movement. Efficient machines enable industry to make even more efficient machines. Smart chips assist humans in making even smarter chips. These virtuous circles are like rubbing the genie's lamp and getting three more wishes for the last wish. Magical self-amplification is a story retold in every domain of technology.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.

On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

All change in society can be traced back to the products of our minds. The history of civilization is an ever up-cascading sequence of social organization that we invent. Societies begin as leaderless bands of hunter-gatherers, and over generational time acquire chiefs, put down roots (literally) with farms, land and water rights adjudicated by authorities, hatch cities, and eventually become states and nations. Each step in civilization is characterized by more social organization, more different kinds connections between people (beyond family relations), more webs of interdependence, producing more of what Robert Wright, author of Non Zero, calls "non-zero-sumness," that is, self-reinforcing mutual benefit. Each emergent organization in the evolution of society serves as a platform for citizens to birth yet more new ways to organize. This self-improving recursive "3-more-wishes" loop goes round and round, amplifying its original force.

The power of cooperation is not new, but this virtuous circle is more than ordinary altruism, because participants are often not consciously cooperating, and may in fact compete, or even be parasitic. A merchant in Athens selling a barrel of raisins is not cooperating with the grower of grapes in Macedonia, or the speculator in Corinth hoarding stock, but the three form a system (an emergent market) that expands all their interests. It's a win-win condition. This kind of accumulating social organization exhibits an almost mathematical flavor that transcends neighborly kindness. Rather than happy camaraderie, this increasing structure is built on information flows that tighten both trust and rivalries into a web of interdependence. As these links increase, so does the power of amplification and acceleration.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that evenly applied laws, rather than nepotic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions and as much products of our minds as light bulbs and telegraphs.

The larger point is that this cyclotron of social betterment is not propelled by ethics or religion, but by technology. Society is evolved by injecting it with incremental doses of that most powerful force in the world; each rise in social organization throughout history is driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, "Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history." In White's view the adoption of the foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry, and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup was not the only technological cause blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."

Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice, and launched a global economy. The invention of the contraception pill in 1960 aided the blossoming of feminism. The invention of moveable type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion's founding text themselves, make their own interpretations, and launched the very idea of "protest" within and against religion. Way back in 1620 Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three "practical arts" — the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — that had changed the world. He declared that "no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." Bacon help launch the scientific method which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium.

Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divvied up an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science, and all it's many cultural descendents. He says, "The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began."

It's never a good idea to assign a single cause to any large scale cultural change. The greater the number of people a change effects the more likely numerous factors are behind it. A web of complex conditions must converge to produce the hallmark transitions in a complex society. But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.

That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents. The technologies of ultrasound fetal inspection and routine abortion enabled sexual selection of children so that now males outnumber females in the youth of China and India. This imbalance will leave an immense surplus of unmarried males in society, an excess which in the past has been a source of unrest, crime, and war. Still young, their story has not fully played out yet, but because of the sheer numbers involved (hundreds of millions in Asia) its concluding effect will be global. Whatever the consequences of this sex-ratio excess are — an increase in international prostitution, a surge of ambitious entrepreneurs and military recruits, or a massive outward migration to places like Africa — the effects will be broader, and less technological that what might be expected from the invention of ultrasound equipment.

Name a disruption in culture today, either positive or negative, and if you press far enough back you'll find an tangible invention that sets off the imbalance. Globalism? Cheap, ubiquitous global communications. Social Security overhang? Medical advances for increasing longevity and decreasing fertility. Obesity epidemic? Cheap monoculture food system combined with passive entertainment technology. Gay rights? Emboldened by science showing gender preferences are biological. Celebrity obsessions? Broadcast media. Militant jihadism? Islam has been around 1500 years. But an imbalance between a medically enabled population explosion without a corresponding explosion in economic or political progress disrupts the former social equilibrium.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both realized from reading Malthus's work on population that natural selection is propelled by the difference between two growth patterns in the wild: population versus food. The greater propulsion of population growth could not be contained in the lesser geometric gains of its food production. This tension between the overwhelming multiplication of population and the slower expansion of its material container is the drive behind evolution.

The evolution of the technium likewise gains its unmatched power from the difference between two growth rates. The number of ideas and their transmission via computers, books, telephone lines, patents, and so on increases in an exponential fashion. Information is, in fact, the fastest growing thing on this planet. Information is especially conducive to amplification and compounding. As the number of facts increase, the connections between facts increases exponentially faster. Because the mathematical law of combinations, the number of links between pages explodes faster than the number of pages increases. New inventions in certain fields like communication, which are powered by increasing combinations of connections, can increase the speed of invention overall, revving the engines of creation. Everywhere we look, the technium is wired with self-amplifying loops ballooning up the scale of change. Fundamentally, discoveries in the science of how to discover, and inventions in how to invent (the genie process we call science) accelerate the rate of discovery and invention everywhere.

But our human ability to absorb or process this explosion of ideas increases only linearly at best. Despite years spent in education, or bathed in the best nutrition, our brains are not doubling in speed, memory, and insight every 18 months, as computers do. In fact, biologically speaking, our brains are remarkably similar to the brains of the first Sapiens 50,000 years ago. The smartest humans are not exponentially smarter than the average ones, and the average IQ of a human is only slowly increasing over time by the most minute amount (a few percent per decade in modern times). Even collectively, unaided human intelligence is only growing in tandem with the number of humans. The gap between the escalating growth of information generated by us and our machines, and our tiny marginal improvements in being able to understand the oceans of information and make meaning from it is the driver behind the rapid evolution of the technium.

The work of understanding all this information is migrating from humans to the technium. We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions. The technium contains an elaborate knowledge processing system consisting of encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext, and the web. These technologies organize the output of our collective minds — both intangible ideas and tangible inventions — into a semantic structure, much like an ecosystem. This incredibly complicated mesh of connections, interdependencies, associations, and emergent structure gives the technium a "meaning" that is outside our of understanding.

It's reasonable to figure that since the technium is simply "that which the mind produces" then at its root the most powerful force in the world must not be technology but the human mind. If this were so we'd have to recalibrate the equation above to state that the origin of all change in our lives lays in the mysterious force of intelligence and consciousness hiding between our ears. (That assertion reminds me of a joke I heard from a friend who said "whenever I get the idea that human mind is the most powerful thing in world I just remember what it is that is telling me this.") But the claim that the human mind is foremost power is not valid. No matter how much we use our biological mind's awareness to reflect upon our mind's workings, this type of mental introspection and self-improvement leads to extremely limited improvement at best, and usually none at all. Contemplation (even in a zen position) to optimize our own mind just doesn't scale up. Unaided, the mind makes very little headway in amplifying itself.

However, the technium, which is a product of our brain, can alter the circuits that produced it. People who grow up immersed in the technologies of writing and reading think differently. I don't mean humans think differently while reading. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain memorizes facts and conceptualizes ideas, and these changes stimulate abstract thinking. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences in how their brains work whether or not they are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that "the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general… not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking." Literacy — a human invention — rewires the human mind.

It is not just writing. Music, another invention, also alters the brain in a sustainable way. Many studies have shown how listening to music strengthens the communication wiring between brain hemispheres. Beside fostering an expected growth in auditory regions of the brain, regularly playing musical instruments significantly strengthens the thickness of the corpus callosum fibers and activates the cerebral cortex. Our mind makes a drum and flute, and the drum and flute remakes our mind.

Certainly, other tools that we devote lots of attention to should also alter our brain to a similar degree. How could a brain which spends 7 hours per day (!!) watching the fine flickering lines of television not find its perception circuits permanently rewired? The average adult American spends one hour per day driving a car. Cruising through terrain at 60 mph is not a skill the Sapien brain was evolved for. So the technology of the automobile must reshape our plastic brains, too.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a 2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

Progress of any type, especially literacies such as reading and writing, or web surfing, are not inherited in our genes (so far), nor re-invented each generation. Rather literacies are carried forwarded by the technium. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don't quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.

Technology may not only be the most powerful force in the world; it may the most powerful force in the universe. If an embryonic amount of technology can so affect a planet, unintentionally, the same force applied intentionally several centuries from now could be aimed a star, and with time, at a galaxy. The libraries of science fiction are filled with plausible schemes by which advanced civilizations terraform planets, tame stars into generators, reroute stellar orbits, and re-arrange matter and energy on astronomical scales. Vast space colonies, death stars, ring worlds, and Dyson Spheres are some of the imagined projects that indicate the cosmic power of technology. If these ambitions are at all possible, they would be direct extensions of the same compounding circuits operating in the technium today. To manage these galactic-scale manipulations, our minds would have to amplify themselves by creating artificial minds smarter than us, just as we have amplified our bodies by creating artificial machines stronger than us, machines such as cranes, trucks, and robot arms. A technium populated with machines capable of their own indefinite upcreation could keep progressing way beyond our current understanding. This complex system would invent a system superior to itself in an infinite loop until the whole cycle reached its natural limits (which all real things have). Many believe that a technium like this is already operating at galactic scale somewhere else in the universe; this speculation is to only point out the technium is not solely an Earth-bound, human phenomenon.

Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child.

The force of this uroborous is incomparable. There is no nuclear energy, fusion, plasma bolt, black hole, white dwarf, cosmic nebula anywhere in the universe that can uplift itself in the way that technology can. For certain there will be further evolutions of the technium. The great story that begins with the big bang and bootstraps itself up into persistent evolving systems that keep building up more complex systems will certainly keep going. First persistently dynamic planets hatch life, which uplifts itself to make minds, which then uplifts itself to make technology. Technology will uplift itself to create the next level of extropy. But it will continue the same arc. The same big history. Whatever technology evolves into, it will carry on in the direction it has been headed so far for the past 14 billion years: towards greater complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, socialization, consilience, energy density, and sentience. A future meta-technology will be unrecognizable on its face, but fundamentally continue these trends.

As far as we can see, for at least a hundred light years in all directions, there appears to be only the bleak unbending forces of physics at work: radiation, heat, gravity, momentum, and always, entropy. But we are lucky. We live on a membrane of floating sphere that is infected with a rampant case of the most powerful force in the universe, a force that is curiously more potent that the immense powers governing the stars around us. Unlike the eternal constancy delivered by the universal laws, this most powerful force is in constant change. The technium is in fact, changing the nature of change, an ongoing process of becoming, and we are, to a statistical approximation, right in the middle of it.

As a biological species born of life, we embrace our origins in life. And as a thinking species, we embrace our mindfulness. But now in the middle of this long evolution it has become clear that we are a technological species as well. Our self image says that we are a thinking animal that reluctantly produces the most powerful force in the world. That is true. But actually something more wondrous is going on. In reality we human beings are the product of the most powerful force in the universe. We are technology. The self-manufactured uroborous.

So far, humanity is our greatest invention, and we aren't done yet.

Expansion of Free Will

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:13:09 -0800

The evolution of the technium is self-directed. Over time it unfolds a sequence of self-organizing forms. Because these self-organized forms are inevitable, we can prepare for them. But the inevitable aspect of the technium provokes resistance because it appears to be opposed to human free will.

The author Isaac Singer once declared, only half in jest, that "we have to believe in free will. We've got no choice." That kind of mad desperation often crops up in the almost reflex denial of directionality in technological evolution. "We have to reject an inherent direction in the technium because it reduces the sacred role of humans to decide our own fate."

But what does science say? While the evidence for evolution's self-direction is only circumstantial today, the claim of directionality is testable one way or the other. We might be able to prove that biological evolution is self-directed by employing synthetic biology to induce life's self-assembly numerous times in the laboratory and measuring how often parallel evolution occurs. Or, someday we could scout the galaxy for other planets with life, and when we find living systems, we can tally up the degree to which those alien evolutionary paths parallel our own. These findings would be falsiable evidence. If science did prove that biological evolution was self-directed along a certain universal trajectory, we would not reject that fact just because human choice had no impact on life's direction. The scope of human choice and evolution's direction are independent assertions. Yet if science gains evidence that the technium, which is a quickening of evolution, is also self-directed by its own emergent order, humans want to refute this fact because they believe that directionality in the technium denies human choice. But whether it diminishes the scope of human choice should not influence the facts of whether the technium is self-directed or not.

In fact, the worry about diminishing human choice is misplaced. Free will is not hampered by a technological imperative; instead it is expanded by it. The inherent imperative merely shifts the venue of our freedoms. Once inexpensive communication systems circle the globe, as they have recently done, knitting a thin cloak of nervous material around the planet, an electronic "world brain" of some kind is inevitable. The choice for humans is: what kind of internet do we choose to make out of this envelope? Is the system default open, or closed? Is it easy to participate, modify procedures, share, and hide, or is it difficult, burdensome, proprietary? The details of the web can go in a hundred different ways, although the technologies themselves will bias us in certain directions. Yet how we express the inevitable global web is a significant choice we own.

More importantly, the arrival of this inevitable technological stage opens up vast new territories in which we can exercise our free will, despite the inherent inevitabilities in its path. The arc of the technium's progression contains a clear bias towards increasing free will, options and possibilities. Technology wants choices. The internet, to a greater degree than any technology before it, offers choices and options. While the web itself is still embryonic, hardly 6,000 days old as I write this and still a prototype, we can see in this infantile neuronal layer many ways in which this technology can expand the sphere of choices for us personally.

But the technium is expanding not only human choice. It is also extending the long-term expansion of free will in general, non-human and mechanical. This enlargement of volition was first ignited 4 billion years ago by the arrival of life and the birth of tiny things that choose to go here or there, and do this or that. In fact, like the other extropic trends, the increase in free will really began at release of atomic particles in the big bang. As theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson has noted, the exact moment when a subatomic particle decays, or the direction it chooses to spin, must be described as an act of free will. All the microscopic motions of a particle are reversible and predetermined by the laws of physics from the particle's previous position/state. Yet a particle's spontaneous dissolution into sub particles and energy rays, or the choice of its direction of rotation are not. Its moment of decay or change in spin is not reversible or predetermined by laws of physics. We call this decay into cosmic rays, or direction of spin, a truly "random" event in an otherwise deterministic realm but this indetermined " randomness" is really the manifestation of the tiniest quantum bit of free will. Mathematician John Conway, inventor of a computer life-like display known as the Game of Life, argues that you can't explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left. He writes,

Some readers may object to our use of the term "free will" to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.

There are other technical arguments for free will in particles. Theoretical biologist and physicist Stuart Kauffman suspects this non-random indeterminism, or free will, is a result quantum decoherence and recoherence of the kind we see in the famous delayed-choice two-slit particle experiment. In this classic demonstration a single photon is fired towards two parallel slits. But the photon, which is a wave/particle only chooses (note the verb) whether to pass through the slits as either a wave or as a particle after it has already done so and is measured. In the lingo of quantum physics, the decoherence of being both wave/particle (a superposition) is collapsed to a singular choice when the particle is measured later. According to Kauffman the shift in quantum coherence is the source of volition. It's a wild idea, but the idea that particles have free will is not.

Very long ago as quantum matter clumped into larger structures such as atomic compounds and spinning clouds of dust and eventual nucleic acids, the tiny slices of quantum volition inherent in particles were leveraged by that increase in organization. For instance, a cosmic ray blasted from a spontaneously decaying particle can trigger a mutation in the highly ordered structure of a DNA molecule. When a "random" cosmic ray knocks a hydrogen atom off of a Cytosine base, say, that indirect volition can birth an innovative protein sequence. Most innovation bring death sooner, but with luck a mutation will confer a survival advantage to the whole organism. Since beneficial traits are retained and built upon by the DNA system, the positive effects of free will can accumulate. Volitional cosmic rays also trigger synapse firings in neurons, which introduce novelty signals into nerves and brain cells, some of which indirectly nudge an organism to do this or that. By the complex machinery of evolution, these remotely induced "choices" are captured, retained, and amplified as well. Mutations triggered by the free will of particles, in aggregate and over billions of years, evolve organisms with more senses, more limbs, more degrees of freedom. As usual, this is a virtuous self-amplifying circle.

Following the long-arc of evolution, the leading edge of life becomes more complex. The prime way that complexity is revealed is in the increasing ways that an organism can choose. A bacterium has a few choices — perhaps to slide toward food, or divide. A plankton, with more complexity, more cellular machinery, has more options. It can detect and follow more chemical gradients, move toward light, or not. A star fish can wiggle its arms, flee (fast or slow?) or fight a rival, choose a meal, or a mate. A mouse has a million choices to make in its life. Right or left? Now or later? It has a longer list of things it can move (whiskers, eyeballs, eyelids, tail, toes), and a wider range of environments to exert its will upon, as well as a longer duration of life to decide in. More complexity expands the degrees of possible choices.

A mind, of course, is a choice factory, often creating options and demanding decisions that are internally generated (rather than coming from outside). Artificial systems likewise generate a zillion new options, and like bacterium, these systems make unconscious, but real choices. Whenever you send an email, an extremely complex systems of data servers, rules, protocols, and fancy algorithms decide the path of intermediate relays your message will hop along to get to its destination. The path of stepping stones (one out of millions of possible ones) is chosen in real time to minimize congestion, and maximize speed of the network over all. So a second email sent to the same long-distant address even a moment later will require a second choice and is not likely be routed along exactly the same path. The internet is making billions of these non-deterministic free will decisions every day.

A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago, the total freedom available within the fine mist of light atoms and zipping particles drifting in the universe was stifling narrow. The possible arrangements between them were dreadfully few. You could count the actionable options for a helium atom on one hand. Compared that prison to the universe one billion years ago (at least in the neighborhood of Earth), when life unleashed an overwhelming explosion of freedoms. Millions of species, each of them an engine of options, filled the surface of a planet with staggering choices. The same restricted hydrogen atoms could now bind with a hundred new elements (created by the stars), in innumerable compounds. Compare that relative cornucopia to today. The technium takes the magnitude of choices unleashed by life and ups it by many exponential orders. We have invented many new ways to arrange chemical elements that do not readily occur in nature, and we have invented new kinds of life, and we have invented machines with new kinds of behavior, never before witnessed in the universe. (Think of hundreds of avatars in a virtual world collectively constructing a treasure hunt.) Once machines unleashed possibilities as fast we could think them up; now they unleash possibilities without waiting for us.

Not only do all these inventions widen the space of what is possible, and stretch the parameters in which decisions can be made, but just as important, the technium creates new mechanisms which can exercise free will. Gadgets such as fuzzy-logic appliances make real choices. Their tiny chip brains weigh competing factors and in a non-deterministic way the fuzzy logic circuits make a decision about when to turn off the dryer, or what temperature to heat the rice. Many kinds of complex adaptive contraptions — for example the sophisticated computerized auto pilot that flew the 747 jet you rode the other day — expand the range of free will by generating new kinds of behaviors out of reach of either humans or other living creatures. An experimental robot at MIT can catch a tennis ball using a brain and arm that is manyfold faster than a human brain/arm combo. This robot shifts so fast while deciding where to put its hand, that our eyes can't even see it move. Here free will has expanded into a new realm of speed. When you type a keyword into Google it considers approximately a trillion documents before it chooses (and that is the correct word) the page it believes you want. No human can possibly encompass that planetary volume of material. In this way, a search engine gives free choice a scale way beyond the human.

In the world of tomorrow, say a hundred years from now, artificial intelligences and smart stuff will stream self-directed decision-making deeply into the technium. Hi-tech automobiles that park themselves will make as many free-will choices as we do when we park. To varying degrees, technology will practice free will at greater levels than it does today.

New ideas, new technologies contain new freedoms —an expanded range for action. The more powerful a new technology, the greater the new freedoms. This expansion includes possible abuse as well. New technology provides new avenues for freely-chosen horror, as well as good. Present in every new technology the is the potential to make new mistakes. In fact, unless a powerful technology can be powerfully abused, it is not powerful. Nonetheless, as technology expands so does the space in which our free will operates.

Starting at the big bang, self-organization has steadily increased the range of volition from the tiny choice inherent in elemental particles, to the more visible choices made constantly by living organisms. The self-directed trajectory of evolution continues that expansion into the technium. The technium is designed to expand free will. First by expanding the range of possible choices, and secondly by expanding the range of agents which can make choices.

Although we cannot say that increased technology causes increased freedom, it is clear that multiplying options goes hand in hand with multiplying liberty. Nations of the world with plenty of economic choices, abundant communication options, and high education possibilities, tend to rank highest in available liberty.

"With more choices, we have more opportunities," declared Emmanuel Mesthene, a technology philosopher at Harvard. "With more opportunities, we can have more freedom, and with more freedom we can be more human."

While every advance in the technium reduces some options (our electronic age provides fewer choices for steam cars), and while evolution converges on invariant forms that may seem to limit human choice, in reality, the technium continues to expand free will as it unrolls into the future. What technology wants is more freedom, expanded free will.

Progression of the Inevitable

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:04:49 -0800

This year the world celebrated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin to honor his theory's impact upon our science and culture. Overlooked in the celebrations was Alfred Wallace, who also came up with the same theory of evolution, at approximately the same time. Weirdly, both Wallace and Darwin found the theory of natural selection after reading the same book on population growth by Thomas Malthus. Darwin did not publish his revelation until provoked by Wallace's parallel discovery. Had Darwin died at sea on his famous voyage (a not uncommon fate at that time) prior to publication, or been killed by his many illnesses during his quite years in London, we would be celebrating the birthday of Wallace as the sole genius behind the theory. Wallace was a naturalist living in Southeast Asia, and he endured many serious tropical illnesses. Indeed he was suffering a debilitating jungle fever during the time he was reading Malthus. If poor Wallace, too, had succumbed to his Indonesian infection, and Darwin gone, it is clear from other naturalist's notebooks that someone else, perhaps Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, would have arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection, even if they never read Malthus. Some think Malthus himself was close to recognizing the idea. None of them would have written up the theory in the same way, or used the same arguments, or cited the same evidence, but one way or the other today we would be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the mechanics of natural evolution.

What seems to be an odd coincidence is repeated many times in technical invention as well as scientific discovery. Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray both applied to patent the telephone on the same day, Feb 14, 1876. This improbable simultaneity (Gray applied 3 hours before Bell) led to mutual accusations of espionage, plagiarism, bribery, and fraud. Gray was ill-advised by his patent attorney to drop his claim for priority because his attorney said the telephone "was not worth serious attention." But whether the winning inventor's dynasty became Ma Bell, or Ma Gray, either way we would have telephones strung across our countryside, because while Bell got the master patent, at least three other tinkerers beside Gray had made working models of phones years before. In fact Antonio Meucci had patented his "teletrofono" more than a decade earlier in 1860, using the same principles as Bell and Gray, but because of his poor English, poverty, and lack of business acumen, he was unable to renew his patent in 1874. And not far behind them all was the inimitable Thomas Edison, who inexplicably didn't win the telephone race, but invented the microphone for it the next year.

The procession of technological discoveries is inevitable. When the conditions are right — when the necessary web of supporting technology needed for every invention is established — then the next adjacent technological step will emerge as if on cue. If inventor X does not produce it, inventor Y will. The invention of the microphone, the laser, the transistor, the steam turbine, the waterwheel, and the discoveries of oxygen, DNA, and Boolean logic, were all inevitable in roughly the period they appeared. However the particular form of the microphone, its exact circuit, or the specific design of the laser, or the particular materials of the transistor, or the dimensions of the steam turbine, or the peculiar notation of the formula, or the specifics of any invention are not inevitable. Rather they will vary quite widely due to the personality of their finder, the resources at hand, the culture of society they are born into, the economics funding the discovery, and the influence of luck and chance. An incandescent light bulb based on a coil of carbonized bamboo filament heated within a vacuum bulb is not inevitable, but "the electric incandescent light bulb" is. The concept of "the electric incandescent light bulb" abstracted from all the details that can vary while still producing the result — luminance from electricity, for instance — is ordained by the technium's trajectory. We know this because "the electric incandescent light bulb" was invented, re-invented, co-invented, or "first invented" dozens of times. In their book "Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention", Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs prior to Edison. It might be fairer to say that Edison was the very last "first" inventor of the electric light.

Three independently invented electric light bulbs: Edison's, Swan's, and Maxim's.

Any claim of inevitability is difficult to prove. Convincing proof requires re-running a progression more than once and showing that the outcome is the same each time. That no matter what perturbations thrown at the system, it yields an identical result. To claim that the large-scale trajectory of the technium is inevitable would mean demonstrating that if we re-ran history, the same abstracted inventions would arise again, and in roughly the same relative order. Without a time machine, there'll be no indisputable proof, but we do have three types of evidence that suggest that the paths of technologies are inevitable. They are 1) that quantifiable trajectories of progress don't waver despite attempts to shift them (see my Moore's Law); 2) that in ancient times when transcontinental communication was slow or null, we find independent timelines of technology in different continents converging upon a set order; and 3) the fact that most inventions and discoveries have been made independently by more than one person.

This last claim is important. If discoveries were inevitable we would expect the people making them to be interchangeable, if not almost random. We would expect multiple instances of the same discovery occurring to more than one person, as if the invention just had to happen. And this is what we find.

Park Benjamin, author of the Age of Electricity, observed in 1901 that "not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honor of its origin has been claimed by more than one person." Dig deep enough in the history of any type of discovery in any field and you'll find more than one claimant for the first priority.

In fact you are likely to find many parents for each novelty. Sunspots were first discovered by four separate observers, including Galileo, in the same year, 1611. We know of six different inventors of the thermometer, and three of the hypodermic needle. Edward Jenner was preceded by four other scientists who all independently discovered the efficiency of vaccinations. Adrenalin was "first" isolated four times. Three different geniuses discovered (or invented) decimal fractions. The electric telegraph was re-invented by Henry, Morse, Cooke, Wheatstone, and Steinheil. The Frenchman Daguerre is famous for inventing photography, but three others (Niepce, Florence, and Talbot) also independently came upon the same process. The invention of logarithms is usually credit to two mathematicians, Napier and Brigs, but actually a third mathematician, Burgi, invented them three years earlier. Several inventors in both England and America simultaneously came up with the typewriter. The existence of the 8th planet, Neptune, was independently predicted by two scientists in the same year, 1846. The liquefaction of oxygen, the electrolysis of aluminum, and the stereochemistry of carbon, for just three examples in chemistry, were each independently discovered by more than one person, and in each case their simultaneous discovery occurred within a month or so.

Columbia University sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas combed through scientist's biographies, correspondence and notebooks to collect all the parallel discoveries and invention they could find between 1420 and 1901. They write, "The steamboat is claimed as the 'exclusive' discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington. At least six different men, Davidson, Jacobi, Lilly, Davenport, Page and Hall, claim to have made independently the application of electricity to the railroad. Given the railroad and electric motors, is not the electric railroad inevitable?"

The prevalence of ubiquitous simultaneous, independent, and equivalent discovery suggests so. If the direction of technological progress is inevitable, one new invention preparing the ground for the next, then individual human discoverers and inventors are replaceable conduits, and their individual success a matter of luck to some degree. We should see evidence for chance in the distribution of discovery. With that suspicion in mind psychologist Dean Simonton took Ogburn and Thomas' catalog of simultaneous invention before 1900 and aggregated it with several other similar lists to map out the pattern of parallel discovery for 1,546 cases. Simonton plotted the number of discoveries found by 2 individuals compared to the number of discoveries found by 3 people, or 4 people, or 5, or 6 co-finders. The number of 6-person discoveries were of course fewer, but the exact ratio between these multiples produced a pattern known in statistics as a Poisson distribution. This is the pattern of events you see in mutations on a DNA chromosome, and other rare chance events in a large pool of possible agents. The Poisson curve suggested that the system of "who found what" was essentially random.

Yet talent is unequally distributed. Some innovators (like Edison, or Newton, or Kelvin) are simply better than others. But if genius is not jumping ahead of the inevitable, where do the "greats" fit in? Simonton discovered that the higher the prominence of a scientist (as determined by the number of pages their biography occupies in encyclopedias) the greater number of simultaneous discoveries they are involved with. Kelvin was involved in 30 sets of simultaneous discoveries. Great discovers not only contribute more than the average number of "next" steps, but are heavily involved in those steps that have greatest impact, which naturally are the areas of investigation that attract many other players, and so produce multiples. If discovery is a lottery, the great buy lots of tickets.

Simonton's set of historical cases reveals that the number of duplicated innovations has been increasing with time - simultaneous discovery is happening more often. Over the centuries the velocity of ideas accelerated, speeding up co-discovery as well. The degree of synchronicity is also gaining. The gap between the first and last discovery in a concurrent multiple has been shrinking over the centuries. Long gone is the era when 10 years could elapse between the public announcement of an invention or discovery and the date the last researcher would hear about it.

Synchronicity is not just a phenomenon of the past, when communication was poor, but very much part of the present. Scientists at AT&T Bell Labs won a Nobel prize for inventing the transistor in 1948, but two German physicists independently invented a transistor two months later at a Westinghouse Laboratory in Paris. Conventional wisdom credits John von Neumann with the invention of a programmable binary computer during the last years of World War II, but the idea and a working punched-tape prototype were developed quite separately in Germany a few years earlier in 1941 by Konrad Zuse. In a verifiable case of modern parallelism, Zuse's pioneering binary computer in wartime Germany went completely unnoticed by the US and UK until many decades later. The inkjet printer was invented twice; once in Japan in the labs of Canon, and once in the US at Hewlett-Packard, and the key patents were filed by each company within months of each other in 1977. "The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances." writes anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. "There may be those who see in these pulsing events only a meaningless play of capricious fortuitousness; but there will be others to whom they reveal a glimpse of a great and inspiring inevitability which rises as far above the accidents of personality."

The strict wartime secrecy surrounding nuclear reactors during World War II created a model laboratory for retrospectively illuminating technological inevitability. Independent teams of nuclear scientists around the world raced against each other to harness atomic energy. Because of the obvious strategic military advantage of this power, the teams were isolated as enemies, or kept ignorant as wary allies, or separated by "need to know" secrecy within the same country. In other words, the history of discovery ran in parallel. Each discrete team's highly collaborative work was well documented, and progressed through multiple stages of technological development. Looking back researchers can trace parallel paths as the same discoveries were made. In particular, physicist Spenser Weart examined how six of these teams each independently discovered an essential formula for making a nuclear bomb. This equation, called the four-factor formula, allows engineers to calculate the critical mass necessary for a chain reaction. Working in parallel, but in isolation, the formula was simultaneously discovered in France, Germany, the Soviet Union and three teams in the United States. Japan came close but never quite reached it. This high degree of simultaneity — six simultaneous inventions — strongly suggests the formula was inevitable at this time.

However when Weart examined each team's final formulation, he saw that the equations varied. Different countries used different mathematical notation to express it, emphasized different factors, varied in their assumptions and interpretation of results, and awarded the overall insight different status. In fact the equation was chiefly ignored as merely theoretical on four teams. In only two teams was the equation integrated into experimental work — and one of those was the team that succeeded in making a bomb.

The formula in its abstract from was inevitable. Indisputably, if it had not found by one, five others would find it. But the specific expression of the formula was not at all inevitable, and that evitable expression can make a significant difference. The political destiny of the country that put the formula to work is vastly different from those that failed to exploit the discovery. The particulars of how an inevitability is manifested is often more important to us than the inexorable.

Details matter. Although both the French and Americans independently invented the transistor at the same time, the French chose to invest their science funds in refining nuclear power (and now have a more climate-friendly energy system) rather than develop their analog telephone system. Envisioning no home market for transistors, Westinghouse closed the Paris lab that co-discovered the transistor. In contrast the US chose to modernize its phone system (and keep burning coal while outlawing nuclear plants) and invested heavily in semiconductor R&D.

Both Newton and Leibnitz are credited with inventing (or discovering) calculus, but in fact their figuring methods differed, and the two approaches were only harmonized over time. Priestly's method of generating oxygen differed from Scheele's; using different logic they uncovered the same inevitable next stage. The two astronomers who both correctly predicted the existence of Neptune (Adams and Leverrier) actually calculated different orbits for the planet. The two orbits just happen to coincide to the same point in 1846, so they found the same body by different means.

But aren't these kinds of anecdotes mere statistical coincidences? Compared to the hundred thousand of thousands of inventions in the annals of discovery we should expect a few to happen at once, yes? The problem is most multiples are unreported. Sociologist Robert Merton says "all singleton discoveries are imminent multiples." Many potential multiples are aborted. A typical notebook entry goes like this one found in the records of Mathematician Jacques Hadamard in 1949 "After having started a certain set of questions and seeing that several authors had begun to follow the same line, I happen to drop it and to investigate something else." Or, a scientist will record their discoveries and inventions but never publish the work due to busyness, or their own unsatisfaction with the results. Only the notebooks of the great get a careful examination, so unless you are either Cavendish or Gauss (the notebooks of both reveal several unpublished multiples), your unreported ideas will never be counted. Further concurrent work is hidden by classified or state-secret work. Much is not disseminated because of fear of competitors, and until very recently, many examples of duplicated discoveries and inventions remain obscure because they were published in obscure languages. A few coexistent inventions are unrecognized because they are described in hard-to-decipher, impenetrable, mystifying language. And occasionally a discovery is so contrarians or politically incorrect that it is ignored.

Furthermore once a discovery has been revealed and entered into the repository of what is commonly known, all later investigations which arrive at the same results are reckoned as mere corroborations of the original — no matter how they are actually arrived. A century ago the failure of communication was in its slow speed; a researcher in Moscow or Japan might not hear about an invention for decades. Today the failure is due to volume. There is so much published, so fast, in so many areas, that it is very easy to miss what has already been done. Re-inventions arise independently all the time, sometimes in full innocence centuries later. But because their independence can't be proven, these johhny-come-latelies are counted as confirmations and not as evidence of inevitability.

By far the strongest bits of evidence for ubiquitous simultaneity of invention are scientists' own impressions. Most scientists consider getting scooped by another person working on the same ideas as the unfortunate and painful norm. In 1974 sociologist Warren Hagstrom surveyed 1,718 US academic research scientists, and asked them if their research had ever been anticipated by others. He found that 46% believed that their work had been anticipated "once or twice" and 16% claimed they were preempted three or more times. Jerry Gaston, another sociologist, surveyed 203 high energy physicists in the UK, and got similar results: 38% claimed to be anticipated once, and another 26% more than once.

Unlike scientific scholarship which places a huge emphasis on previous work and proper credit, inventors tend to plunge ahead without methodically researching the past. This means re-invention is the norm from the patent office's viewpoint. When inventors file patents they need to cite previous related inventions. One third of inventors surveyed claimed they were unaware of prior claims while developing their own invention. They did not learn about the competing patents until preparing their application with the required "prior art." More surprising, one third claimed to be unaware of the prior inventions cited in their own patent until notified by the survey takers. (This is entirely possible since patent citations can be added by the inventors patent attorney or even the patent office examiner.) Patent law scholar Mark Lemley states that in patent law "a large percent of priority disputes involve near-simultaneous invention." One study of these near-simultaneous priority disputes by Adam Jaffe, at Brandeis University, showed that in 45% of the cases both parties could prove they had a "working model" of the invention within 6 months of each other, and in 70% of the cases within a year of each other. Jaffe writes "These results provide some support for the idea that simultaneous or near-simultaneous invention is a regular feature of innovation."

Quite a few scientists and inventors, and many outside of science, are repulsed by the idea that the progress of technology is inevitable. It rubs them the wrong way because it contradicts a deeply and widely held belief that human choice is central to our humanity, and essential to a sustainable civilization. Admitting to "inevitable" anything feels like a cop-out, a surrender to invisible non-human forces beyond our reach. Such a false notion may lull us into abdicating our responsibility for shaping our own destiny. On the other hand, if technologies really are inevitable then we have only the illusion of choice, and we should smash all technologies to be free of this spell. I'll address these central concerns later, but I want to note one curious fact about this belief. While many people claim to believe the notion of technological determinism is wrong (in both senses of that word), they don't act that way. No matter what they rationally think about inevitability, in my experience ALL inventors and creators act as if their own invention and discovery is imminently simultaneous. Every creator, inventor, and discoverer that I have known is rushing their ideas into distribution before someone else does, or they are in a mad hurry to patent before their competition does, or they are dashing to finish their masterpiece before something similar shows up. Has there ever been an inventor in the last two hundred years who felt that no one else would ever come up with his idea (and who was right)?

Nathan Myrvold is a polymath and serial inventor who used to direct fast-paced research at Microsoft but wanted to accelerate the pace of innovation in other areas outside of the digital realm -- such as surgery, metallurgy, or archeology — where innovation was often a second thought. Myrvold came up with an idea factory called Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold employs an interdisciplanrian team of very bright innovators to sit around and dream up patentable ideas. These eclectic one-or-two day gatherings will generate 1,000 patents per year. In April 2009, The New Yorker author Malcolm Gladwell profiled Myrvold's company in the context of simultaneous invention to make the point that it does not take a bunch of geniuses to invent the next great thing. Once an idea is "in the air" its many manifestation are inevitable. You just need a sufficient number of smart, prolific people to start catching them. And of course a lot of patent lawyers to patent what you generate in bulk. Gladwell observes, "The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

But if parallel invention is the norm, then Mryvold's brilliant idea of creating a patent factory should have occurred to others at the same time. And of course it has. Years before the birth of Intellectual Ventures, internet entrepreneur Jay Walker launched Walker Digital Labs. Walker is famous for inventing Priceline, a "name your own price" reservation system for hotels and air flights. In his invention laboratory Walker set up an institutional process whereby interdisciplanrian teams of brainy experts sit around thinking up ideas that would be useful in the next 20 years or so — the time horizon of patents. They winnow the thousands of ideas they come up and refine a selection for eventual patenting. How many ideas do they abandon because they, or the patent office, find that the idea has been "anticipated" by someone else? "It depends on the area," Walker says. "If it is a very crowded space where lots of innovation is happening, like e-commerce, and it is a 'tool,' probably 100% have been thought of before. We find the Patent Office rejects about two-thirds of challenged patents as 'anticipated.' Another space, say gaming inventions, about a third are either blocked by prior art or other inventors. But if the invention is a complex system, in an unusual space, there won't be many others. Look, most invention is a matter of time....of when, not if."

Danny Hillis, another polymath and serial inventor is co-founder of an innovative prototype shop called Applied Minds, which is another idea factory. As you might guess from the name, they use smart people to invent stuff. Their corporate tag line is "the little Big Idea company." Like Myrvold's Intellectual Ventures, they generate tons of ideas in a very interdisciplinary areas: bioengineering, toys, computer vision, amusement rides, military control rooms, cancer diagnostics, and mapping tools. Some ideas they sell as unadorned patents, others they complete as physical machines or running software. I asked Hillis "what percent of your ideas do you find out later someone else had before you, or at the same time as you, or maybe even after you?" As a way of answering Hillis offered a metaphor. He views the bias toward simultaneity as a funnel. He says "there might be tens of thousands of people who conceive the possibility of the same invention at the same time. But less than one in ten of them imagines *how* it might be done. Of these who see how to do it, only one in ten will actually think through the practical details and specific solutions. Of these only one in ten will actually get the design to work for very long. And finally, usually only one of all those many thousands with the idea will get the invention to stick in the culture. We engage in all these levels of discovery, in the expected proportions." In other words, in the conceptual stage, simultaneity is ubiquitous and inevitable, and your brilliant ideas will have lots parents. But there's less parentage at each reducing stage. When you are trying to bring an idea to market, you may be alone, but by then you are a mere pinnacle of a large pyramid of others who "all had the same idea."

(Click to bigify)

Any reasonable person would look at that pyramid and say, the likelihood of someone getting a light bulb to stick is 100%, although the likelihood of Edison being the inventor is, well, one in 10,000. Hillis also points out another consequence. Each stage of the incarnation can recruit new people. Those toiling in the later stages may not have been among the earliest pioneers of the idea. Given the magnitude of reduction, the numbers suggest that it is improbable that the first person to make an invention stick was also the first to think of the idea.

Another way to read this chart is to recognize that ideas start out abstract and become more specific over time (see my post Increasing Specialization). As universal ideas become more specific they become less inevitable, more conditional, and more responsive to human volition. Only the essence of an invention or discovery is inevitable. The specifics of how this essential core (the "chairness" of a chair) is manifested in practice (in plywood, or with rounded back) are likely to vary widely depending on the resources available to the inventors at hand. The more abstract the new idea remains, the more universal and simultaneous it will be shared (by tens of thousands). As it steadily becomes embodied stage by stage into the constraints of a very particular material form, it is shared by fewer people, and becomes less and less predictable. The final design of the first marketable light bulb, or transistor chip, or could not have been anticipated by anyone, but the concept was inevitable.

What about great geniuses like Einstein? Doesn't he disprove the notion of inevitability? The conventional wisdom is that Einstein's wildly creative ideas about the nature of the universe, first announced to world in 1905, were so out of the ordinary, so far ahead of his time, and so unique that if he had not been born we might not have a his theories of relativity even today, a century later. Einstein was a unique genius no doubt. But as always, others were working on the same problems. Hendrik Lorentz, a theoretical physicists who studied light wave, introduced a mathematical structure of space-time in July 1905, the same year as Einstein. In 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincare pointed out that observers in different frames will have clocks which will "... mark what on may call the local time. ... as demanded by the relativity principle the observer cannot know whether he is at rest or in absolute motion." And the 1911 winner of the Nobel prize in physics Wilhelm Wien proposed to the Swedish committee that Lorentz and Einstein be jointly awarded a Nobel prize in 1912 for their work on special relativity. He told the committee "…While Lorentz must be considered as the first to have found the mathematical content of the relativity principle, Einstein succeeded in reducing it to a simple principle. One should therefore assess the merits of both investigators as being comparable..." (Neither won that year.) However, according to Walter Isaacson, who wrote a wonderful biography of Einstein's ideas in "Einstein: His Life and Universe", "Lorentz and Poincare never were able to make Einstein's leap even after they read his paper. Lorentz still clung to the existence of the ether and its 'at rest' frame of reference. Until his death in 1912, Poincare never fully gave up the concept of the ether or the notion of absolute rest. In other words, Einstein made a conceptual leap that Poincare and Lorenz could not make even after Einstein explained it." But Isaacson, a celebrator of Einstein's special genius for the improbable insights of relativity admits that "someone else would have come up with it, but not for at least ten years or more." So the greatest icon genius of the human race is able to leap ahead of the inevitable maybe 10 years. For the rest of humanity, the inevitable happens on schedule.

The technium's trajectory is more fixed in certain realms than others. "Mathematics has more apparent inevitability than the physical sciences," wrote Simonton, "and technological endeavors appear the most determined of all." The realm of artistic inventions — those engendered by the technologies of song, writing, media, and so on — is the home of idiosyncratic creativity, the antithesis of the inevitable, but it also can't fully escape the currents of destiny.

Shakespeare, like Einstein, is considered the paragon of inimitable genius: No one else could have written what he wrote. In the search for the historical person behind Shakespeare's writing, some literary experts have creatively assigned the authorship of his works to three or four known contemporaries, such as Francis Bacon. These scholars make an entertaining case that each could have written these plays. The truth is these alternative candidates are extremely unlikely to be the author of Hamlet, but that fact that they are considered at all indicates that other writers at that time might have possessed a similar skill, and so Shakespeare was not unique in that regard. But would anyone have produced King Lear and Romeo and Juliet?

Like most great artists, Shakespeare stole from others. He "borrowed" stories, phrases, and themes from earlier writers like Petrach. He recycled plots. He lifted "Romeo and Juliet" from Arthur Brooke's epic poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet." We tend to assume this duplication is enlightened copying because we don't have very good records from that era, but in more recent times we see that much of this artistic "copying" is similar to simultaneous invention: the same artistic idea "in the air" will come more than one person at once.

Hollywood movies have an unnerving habit of arriving in pairs: two movies that arrive in theaters simultaneously featuring a apocalyptic hit by asteroids (Deep Impact and Armageddon), or starring the hero as an ant (A Bug's Life and Antz), or a harden cop and his reluctant dog counterpart (K9 and Turner & Hooch), or profiling the Zodiac serial killer? Is this similarity due to simultaneous genius or to greedy theft? One of the few reliable laws in the studio and publishing businesses is that a successful movie or novel will be immediately sued by someone who claims the winner stole their idea. Sometimes it was stolen, but just as many times two authors, two singers, two directors came up with similar works at the same time. Mark Dunn, a library clerk, wrote a play, "Frank's Life," that was performed in 1992 in a small theater in New York City. "Frank's Life" is about a guy who was unaware his life was a reality TV program. In his suit against the producers of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, Dunn lists 149 similarities between his story and theirs — which is a movie about a guy who is unaware his life is a reality TV program. However The Truman Show producers claim they have a copyrighted dated script of the movie from 1991, a year before "Frank's Life" was staged. It is not too hard to believe that the idea of a movie about an unwitting reality TV hero was inevitable.

Writing in The New Yorker, Tad Friend tackled the issue of synchronistic cinematic expression by suggesting that "the giddiest aspect of copyright suits is how often the studios try to prove that their story was so derivative that they couldn't have stolen it from only one source." The studios say: every part of this movie is a cliche stolen the plots/stories/themes/jokes that are in the air. Friend continues,

You might think that mankind's collective imagination could churn up dozens of fictional way to track a tornado, but there seems to be only one. When Stephen Kessler sued Michael Crichton for "Twister," he was upset because his script about tornado chasers, "Catch the Wind," had placed a data-collection device called Toto II in the whirlwind's path, just like "Twister"'s data-collecting Dorothy. Not such a coincidence, the defense pointed out: years earlier two other writers had written a script called "Twister" involving a device called Toto.

Plots, themes, and puns may be inevitable once they are in the cultural atmosphere, but we yearn to encounter completely unexpected creations. Every now and then we believe a work of art must be truly original, not ordained. Its pattern, premise, and message originates with a distinctive human mind and shines as unique as they are. J.K. Rowling, author of the highly imaginative Harry Potter series launched in 1997 successfully rebuffed a law suit by an American author who published a series of children's books in 1984 about Larry Potter, an orphaned boy wizard wearing glasses surrounded by Muggles. In 1990 Neil Gaiman wrote a comic book about a dark-haired English boy who finds out on his 12th birthday he is a wizard and is given an owl by a magical visitor. Or a 1991 story by Jane Yolen about Henry, a boy who attends a magical school for young wizards and must overthrow an evil wizard. Then there's The Secret of Platform 13, published in 1994, which features a gateway on a railway platform to a magical underworld. There many good reasons to believe J.K. Rowling when she claims she read none of these (for instance very few of the Muggle books were printed and almost none were sold; teenage boy comics don't appeal to a single mom), and many more reasons to accept the fact that these ideas arose in simultaneous spontaneous creation. Multiple invention happens all the time in the arts as well as technology, but no one bothers to catalog similarities until a lot of money or fame is involved.

If stories of boy wizards in magical schools with pet owls entering otherworlds through railway station platforms are inevitable, there must be true originals whose plots and details could not be anticipated. I thought of the delightfully fantastic novel The Life of Pi, about a boy who is lost at sea in a lifeboat that he shares with a tiger. I was sure that hadn't been done before! But after doing some research, it had. Twenty years before "Life of Pi", a Brazilian author had written a story (in Portuguese) about a Jewish zookeeper who crossed the Atlantic in a lifeboat with a panther. Even the most outlandish idea is never alone. Further digging revealed the author of Pi had once read a unenthusiastic review of the Brazilian book, so the far-fetched premise was not independently created. But was the Brazilian's story copied, or emergent as well?

Just as in technology, the abstract core of an art form will crystallize into culture when the solvent is ready. It may appear more than once. But any particular species of creation will be flooded with unreplicable texture and personality. If Rowling did not write Harry Potter, someone else would have written a similar story in broad outlines, because so many have already produced parallel parts. But the Harry Potter books, the ones that exist in their exquisite peculiar details, could not have been written by anyone else than Rowling. "Distinctive discoveries, in this or that field of activity, [are] not directly contingent upon the personalities of the actual inventors that graced the period, but would be made without them," writes Alfred Kroeber. Yet "it is highly unlikely that Beethoven put in Newton's cradle would have worked out calculus, or the latter have given the symphony its final form." It is not the particular genius of human individuals that is inevitable, but the unfolding genius of the technium.

Until rapid communication networks wrapped the globe in stunning instantaneity, progress in civilization unrolled chiefly as independent strands on different continents. Earth's slippery continents, floating on tectonic plates, are giant islands on a vast ocean planet. Although connected in places, the continents are surrounded by seas which reduces interactions between them. This geography produces a laboratory for testing parallelism. From 50,000 years ago, at the birth of Sapiens, until 1,000 CE when sea travel and land communication ramped up, the sequence of inventions and discoveries on the four major continental land masses — Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas — marched on as independent progressions. In prehistory the diffusion of innovations might travel a few miles a year, consuming generations to transverse a mountain range, and centuries to cross a country. An invention born in China might take a millennia to reach Europe, and it would never reached America. For thousands of years, discoveries in Africa trickled out very slowly to Asia and Europe. The American continents and Australia were cut off from the other continents by impassable oceans until the age of sailing ships. Any imported technology for America came over via a land bridge in a relatively short window between 20,000 and 10,000 BC, and almost none thereafter. Any migration to Australia was also via a geologically temporary land bridge that closed 30,000 years ago, with only marginal flow afterwards. Ideas primarily circulated within one land mass. The great cradle of institutional discovery two millennia ago — Egypt, Greece, and the Levant — sat right between continents, making the common boundaries in that crossover spot meaningless. Yet despite ever speedy conduits between adjacent areas, inventions still circulated slowly within one continental mass, and rarely crossed oceans.

Shooting a blow gun in the Amazon (left) and in Borneo (right).

The blowgun was invented twice, once in the Americas and once in the islands of Southeast Asia. It was unknown anywhere else outside of these two distant regions. Because of this abrupt separation, the birth of the blowgun is a prime example of convergent invention by two independent origins, propelled by convergent environments. For hunters constrained by a thick jungly understory with plentiful game overhead in the canopy, the blow dart made more sense than "costly" arrows which can easily get deflected and lost. The gun as devised by these two separate cultures is expectedly similar — a hollow tube, often carved in two halves, then bound together. In essence it is a bamboo or cane pipe, so it can't be much simpler. What's remarkable is a nearly identical set of inventions supporting the air pipe. Tribes in both the Americas and Asia use a similar kind of dart padded by a fibrous piston, they both coat the ends with a poison deadly to animals yet which does not taint the meat, both carry the darts in a quill to protect the poisoned tip from being accidentally pricked, and both employ a similarly peculiar stance when shooting. The longer the pipe the more accurate the trajectory, but the longer the pipe the more it wavers during the aim. So both in America and in Asia the hunters hold the pipe in a non-intuitive stance with both hands near the mouth, elbows out, and gyrate the shooting end of the pipe in small circles. On each small revolution the tip will briefly cover the target. Accuracy, then is a matter of the exquisite timing of when to blow. All this invention arose twice, like the same crystals found on two worlds.

In prehistory, these parallel paths are played out again and again. From the archeological record we know the Chinese enjoyed paper money centuries before Europe thought of it. Technicians in West Africa developed steel centuries before the Chinese. Native Americas independently domesticated native ruminants like llamas, their equivalent of cattle. More importantly, the record shows the same invention is reborn more than once. Bronze is discovered independently in each continent. Steel invented more than once. Archeologist John Rowe compiled a list of 60 parallel cultural innovations common to two civilization separated by 12,000 kilometers: the ancient Mediterranean and the high Andean cultures. Included on his list of parallel inventions are sling shots, boats of made of bundled reeds, circular bronze mirrors with handle, pointed plum bobs, and pebble counting boards , or what we call abacus. We see the same pattern as in individual recurrent inventors, and for the same reasons. Multiples are the norm.

Yet there is resistance to this idea. The notion that inventions, like individuals or snowflakes, must appear only once has an elegant appeal. This perspective assumes inventions require rare non-repeating genius, or are highly improbable. But the opposite is more common. Even the most sophisticated inventions happen again and again, where ever conditions are ripe for them. Anthropologists Laurie Godfrey and John Cole says "the ubiquity of many [common] 'traits' is a strong argument that cultural evolution followed similar trajectories in various parts of the world."

Proving the absence of anything is difficult, but proving the absence of knowledge in pre-history is particularly challenging since, by definition, knowledge was not recorded. Can we say for sure whether goats were domesticated in China in ignorance of nomadic shepherds slowly drifting from Africa, or because of them? Hard physical evidence for (or against) the independent, equivalent, simultaneous origins of ancient inventions is slim. But we do have some hints. The wheel was invented in 3000 BCE but not invented (or re-invented) in the Americas. Archeologists can find no wheeled carts (except in toys), no spinning potter's wheel, no rotating millstones. The absence of the wheel can be considered evidence of an independent origin for much technology in the New World, for if, as some believe, all key innovations were imported from the old world, why not the wheel? Why didn't the Native Americans upgrade the hoe into a plow, as the rest of the world did if they simply borrowed everything?

With little evidence, but much creativity, a few minority theories claim Mesoamerican civilizations maintained substantial transoceanic trade with China (called the Shang-Olmec hypothesis). Other speculations suggest extended cultural exchange between Maya and west Africa. Or Aztec with Egypt (those pyramids in the jungle!), or even Maya with the Vikings. Most historians discount these possibilities and similar theories about deep on-going relations between Australia and South America, or Africa and China before 1400. Beyond some superficial similarities in a few art forms, there is no empirical archeological or recorded evidence of sustained transoceanic contact in the ancient world. Even if a few isolated ships from China or Africa might have reached, say, the shores of the new world pre-Columbian, these occasional landings would not be sufficient to kindle the many parallels we find. It is highly improbable that the sewed-and-pitched bark canoe of the northern Australia aborigines came from the same source as the sewed-and-pitched bark canoe of the American Algonquin. So we have to accept they are examples of convergent invention, and arose independently as part of parallel tracks.

When viewed along continental tracks, a familiar sequence of inventions plays out. To a rough approximation, each isolated progression around the world maintains a remarkably similar general order. Stone flakes yield to control of fire, then to cleavers, and ball weapons. Next, ochre pigments, human burials, fishing gear, light projectiles, holes in stones, sewing, and figurine sculptures. The order is fairly uniform. Knife points always follow fire, human burials always follow knifepoints, the arch precedes welding. A lot of the ordering is "natural" mechanics. You obviously need to be able to master blades before you make an ax. And textiles always follow sewing, since threads are needed for any kind of fabric. But many other sequences don't have a simple casual logic. There is no obvious reason why the first rock art always precedes the first sewing technology, yet it does each time. Metalwork does not have to follow claywork (pottery), but it always does.

Geographer Neil Roberts examined the parallel paths of domestication of crops and animals on four continents. Because the potential biological raw material on each continent varies so greatly (a theme explored in full by Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel") only a few native species of crops or animals are first tamed on more than one land mass. But contrary to earlier assumptions, agriculture and animal husbandry were not invented once and then diffused around the world. Rather, as Roberts states, "Bio-archeological evidence taken overall indicates that global diffusion of domesticates was rare prior to the last 500 years. Farming systems based on the three great grain crops — wheat, rice, and maze — have independent centers of origin." The current consensus is that agriculture was invented six times. Agriculture is actually a series of inventions, a string of domestications. Of the crops and animals domesticated in more than one region, the order of taming is similar. For instance, on different continents humans domesticated dogs before camels, and grains before root crops. This repetition may be due to the inherent propensity of domestication in each species; nonetheless the order of unfolding remains uniform.

Archeologist John Troeng cataloged 53 prehistoric innovations beyond agriculture that independently originated not just twice, but three times in three distinct separate regions of the globe: Africa, Western Eurasia, and East Asia/Australia. Twenty two of the inventions were also discovered by inhabitants of the Americas, meaning these innovations spontaneously erupted on four continents. The four regions are sufficiently separated that Troeng reasonably accepts any invention in them is an independent parallel discovery. As technology invariably does, one invention prepares the ground for the next, and the technium in every corner evolves in a seemingly predetermined sequence. When I analyzed the degree to which the four sequences of these 53 inventions paralleled each other I found they correlated to an identical sequence by coefficiency of 0.93 for the three regions, and 0.85 for all four regions. That degree of overlap is significant given the incomplete records and the loose dating inherent in prehistory. In essence, the direction of technological development is the same anytime it happens.

To confirm this direction, research librarian Michelle McGinnis and I also compiled a list of the dates which pre-industrial inventions, such as the loom, sundial, vault, magnet first appeared on each of the five major continents: Africa, Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Some of these novelties arrived during eras when communication and travel were more frequent than in pre-historic times, so the independence of each invention is less certain. We found historical evidence for 83 innovations between that were invented on more than one continent. And again, when lined up, the sequence of technology's unfolding in Asia follows a similar order in the Americas and Europe. Technologies with globally distinct origins converge along the same developmental path. Independent of the different cultures that host it, or the diverse political systems that induce it, or the different reserves of natural resources that feed it, technology develops along a universal path. The large-scale outlines of its course are predetermined.

"Inventions are culturally determined. Such a statement must not be given a mystical connotation. It does not mean, for instance, that it was predetermined from the beginning of time that type printing would be discovered in Germany about 1450, or the telephone in the United States in 1876," warns Kroeber. It means only that when all the required conditions generated by previous technologies are in place, the next technology can precipitate. "Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate," says sociologist Robert Merton, who studied simultaneous inventions in history. The ever thickening mix of existing technologies in a society create a supersaturated matrix, charged with restless potential. When the right idea is seeded within, the inevitable invention practically explodes into existence, like an ice crystal freezing out of water. Yet, as convention and science have shown, even though water is destined to become ice crystals when it is cold enough, no two snowflakes are the same. The path of freezing water is predetermined, but there is great leeway, freedom and beauty in the individual expression of its predestined state. The actual pattern of each snowflake is unpredictable. For such a simple molecule, its variations upon a theme are endless. That's even truer for extremely complex inventions today. The crystalline form of the incandescent light bulb or the telephone, or the internet, will vary in a million possible formations, depending on the conditions evolving it. In practice, its appearance is unpredictable.

It is not much different from the natural world. The birth of any species depends on an ecosystem of other species in place to support, divert, and goad its metamorphosis. We call it co-evolution because of the reciprocal influence of one species upon another. In the technium many discoveries await the invention of another technological species: the proper tool. The moons of Jupiter were discovered by a number of folks only a year after the telescope was invented. But instruments by themselves don't make discovery. Celestial bodies were expected by astronomers. Because no one expected germs, it took 200 years after the microscope was invented before Leeuwenhoek spied microbes. In addition to instruments and tools, a discovery needs the proper beliefs, expectations, vocabulary, explanation, know-how, resources, funds, and appreciation to appear.

An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is worthless. Ideally an innovation opens up the next adjacent step from what is known, and invites the culture to move forward. If a visionary moves too far ahead no one can follow. An invention overly futuristic can fail first (it may lack critical not-yet-invented materials, or a critical market), yet succeed later. A discovery too unconventional for one time (too many steps ahead) will not be believed, or understood, at first, only to be revived later. Gregor Mendel's theories of genetic heredity in 1865 were correct, but ignored for 35 years. His insights did not explain the problems biologists had at the time, nor did his explanation operate by known mechanisms, so his discoveries were out of reach. Later when the culture caught up, and science prepared itself with urgent questions that Mendel's discoveries could answer, his insights were enthusiastically shared because they were only one step away. Within a few years of each other, three scientists (De Vries, Correns, and Tschermak) independently rediscovered Mendel's forgotten work. And if you had prevented those three from rediscovery and waited another year, says Kroeber, probably six minds, not just three, would had made the then obvious next step.

The laws of genetics, like other inventions and discoveries, are crystals inherent in the technium, awaiting to materialize. There is nothing magical about these patterns, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. Every technology in the abstract is a latent structure primarily generated by the extremely complex system of extropy we call evolution. All complex adaptive systems that maintain a persistence disequilibria — from galaxies, to starfish, to a human mind — will exhibit emergent self-organized forms. The technium is evolution accelerated, so it is crammed with emergent self-created forms. These patterns have nothing to do with consciousness or awareness. They emerge in the dumbest systems sufficient complex to adapt. We call these forms inevitable, because like a spiral vortex in draining water, or snowflakes in a winter storm, they will manifest themselves whenever the conditions are right. But, of course, they never render themselves in the same details exactly.

The recurring forms of simultaneous inventions in human history are dots on a long connected line that stretches from the big bang to the deep future. The parallel tracks of independent technological development on different continents trace, and re-trace, and re-trace again a similar trajectory — of a semi-autonomous system headed somewhere. The technium is not a random meandering. It is not an accident of human preferences, foibles, and once-in-a-millennial genius. The technium has a direction. At a macro scale, it is leaning towards increasing complexity, sentience, consilience, specialization, possibilities and choices. As it flows in that direction it unfolds its inevitable progression. Yet at the micro scale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty.

Was Moore's Law Inevitable?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:54:12 -0800

In the early 1950s the same thought occurred to many people at once: things are improving so fast and so regularly, there might be a pattern to the improvements. Maybe we could plot technological progress to date, then extrapolate the curves and see what the future holds. Among the first to do this systemically was the US Air Force. They needed a long-term schedule of what kinds of planes they should be funding, but aerospace was one of the fastest moving frontiers in technology. Obviously they would build the fastest planes possible, but since it took decades to design, approve, and then deliver a new type of plane, the generals thought it prudent to glimpse what futuristic technologies they should be funding.

So in 1953 the Air Force Office of Scientific Research plotted out the history of the fastest air vehicles. The Wright Brothers' first flight reached 6.8 kph in 1903, and jumped to 60 kph two years later. The air speed record kept increasing a bit each year and in 1947 the fastest flight passed 1,000 kph in a Lockheed Shoot Star flown by Colonel Albert Boyd. The record was broken four times in 1953, ending with the F-100 Super Sabre doing 1, 215 kph. Things were moving fast. And everything was pointed towards space. According to Damien Broderick, the author of "The Spike", in 1953 the Air Force...

Charted the curves and metacurves of speed. It told them something preposterous. They could not believe their eyes. The curve said they could have machines that attained orbital speed... within four years. And they could get their payload right out of Earth's immediate gravity well just a little later. They could have satellites almost at once, the curve insinuated, and if they wished -- if they wanted to spend the money, and do the research and the engineering -- they could go to the Moon quite soon after that.

It is important to remember that in 1953 none of the technology for these futuristic journeys existed. No one knew how to do go that fast and survive. Even the most optimistic die-hard visionaries did not expect a lunar landing any sooner than the proverbial "Year 2000." The only voice telling them they could do it was a curve on a piece of paper. But the curve was right. Just not politically correct. In 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, right on schedule. Then US rockets zipped to the Moon 12 years later. As Brokderick notes, humans arrived on the Moon "close to a third of century sooner than loony space travel buffs like Arthur C Clarke had expected it to occur."

What did the curve know that Arthur C Clarke did not? How did it account for the secretive efforts of the Russians as well as dozens of teams around the world? Was the curve a self-fulfilling prophesy, or a revelation of a trend rooted deep in the nature of the technium? The answer may lay in the many other trends plotted since then. The most famous of them all is the trend known as Moore's Law. In brief, Moore's Law predicts that computing chips shrink by half in size and cost every 18-24 months. For the past 50 years it has been astoundingly correct.

This trend was first noticed in 1960 by Doug Englebart, a researcher at SRI in Palo Alto, California, who would later go on to invent the "windows and mouse" interface that is now ubiquitous on most computers. When he first started as an engineer Englebart worked in the aerospace industry testing airplane models in wind tunnels where he learned how systematic scaling down led to all kinds of benefits and unexpected consequences. The smaller the model, the easier to fly. Englebart imagined how the benefits of scaling down, or as he called it "similitude," might transfer to a new invention SRI was tracking -- multiple transistors on one integrated silicon chip. Perhaps as they were made smaller, circuits too might deliver a similar kind of similitude magic: The smaller a chip, the better. Englebart presented his ideas on similitude to an audience of engineers at the 1960 Solid State Circuits Conference that included Gordon Moore, a researcher at Fairchild Semiconductor.

In the following years Moore began tracking the actual statistics of the earliest prototype chips. By 1964 he had enough data points to extrapolate the slope of the curve so far. But as Moore recalls,

I was not alone in making projections. At a conference in New York City that same year [1964], the IEEE convened a panel of executives from leading semiconductor companies: Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild, General Electric, Zenith, and Westinghouse. Several of the panelists made predictions about the semiconductor industry.

Patrick Haggerty of Texas Instruments, looking approximately ten years out, forecast that the industry would produce 750 million logic gates a year. I thought that was perceptive but a huge number, and puzzled, "Could we actually get to something like that?" Harry Knowles from Westinghouse, who was considered the wild man of the group, said, "We're going to get 250,000 logic gates on a single wafer." At the time, my colleagues and I at Fairchild were struggling to produce just a handful. We thought Knowles's prediction was ridiculous. C. Lester Hogan of Motorola looked at expenses and said, "The cost of a fully processed wafer will be $10."

When you combine these predictions, they make a forecast for the entire semiconductor Industry [for 1974]. If Haggerty were on target, the industry would produce 750 million logic gates a year. Using Knowles's "wild" figure of 250,000 logic gates per wafer meant that the industry would only use 3,000 wafers for this total output. If Hogan was correct, and the cost per processed wafer was $10, that would mean that the total manufacturing cost to produce the yearly output of the semiconductor industry would be $30,000! Somebody was wrong.

As it turned out, the person who was the "most wrong" was Haggerty, the panelist I considered the most perceptive. His prediction of the number of logic gates that would be used turned out to be a ridiculously large underestimation. On the other hand, the industry actually achieved what Knowles foresaw, while I had labeled his suggestion as the ridiculous one. Even Hogan's forecast of $10 for a processed wafer was close to the mark, if you allow for inflation and make a cost-per-square-centimeter calculation.

The trends were telling them something no one else was, impossible as it seemed. Moore kept adding data points as the semiconductor industry grew. He was tracking all kinds of parameters -- number of transistors made, cost per transistor, number of pins, logic speed, and components per wafer. But one of them was cohering into a nice curve: The number of components per chip. In 1965, at the invitation from the editor of the trade journal Electronics, Moore wrote a piece on "the future of microelectronics." In this short article he pointed out the curve of progress in chip fabrication is increasing by a exponential power every year. As Moore noted in his internal memo to the Fairchild patent officers, he took current trend and "extrapolated into the wild blue yonder." But in fact, how far would it really go?

Moore's original plot

Moore hooked up with Carver Mead, a fellow Caltech alumnus. Mead was an electrical engineer and early transistor expert. In 1967 Moore asked Mead what kind of theoretical limits were in store for microelectronic miniaturization. Mead had no idea but as he did his calculations he made an amazing discovery: The efficiency of the chip would increase by the cube of the scale's reduction. The benefits from shrinking were "exponential." Microelectronics would not only become cheaper, they would also become better. As Moore puts it "By making things smaller, everything gets better simultaneously. There is little need for tradeoffs. The speed of our products goes up, the power consumption goes down, system reliability improves by leaps and bounds, but especially the cost of doing things drops as a result of the technology." Carver Mead was so caught up in Moore's curves that he began to formalize them with physics equations and he named the trend Moore's Law. He became an evangelist for the idea, traveling to electronics companies, the military, and academics preaching that the future of electronics lay in ever-smaller blocks of silicon, and trying to "convince people that it really was possible to scale devices and get better performance and lower power" -- and that there was no end in sight for this trend. "Every time I'd go out on the road," Mead recalls, "I'd come to Gordon and get a new version of his plot."

Today when we stare at the plot of Moore's Law we can spot several striking characteristics of its 50 year run. The first surprise is that this is a picture of acceleration. The straight line descending slope of the "curve" indicates a ten fold increase in goodness for every tick on vertical log axis. Silicon computation is not simply getting better, but getting better faster. Relentless acceleration for five decades is rare in biology and unknown in the technium before this century. The explosion of good stuff is revealed in a line. So this graph is as much about the phenomenon of cultural acceleration as about silicon chips. In fact Moore's Law has come to represent the principle of an accelerating future which underpins our expectations of the technium: the world of the made gets better, faster.

Secondly, even a cursory glance reveals the astounding regularity of Moore's line. From the earliest points its progress has been eerily mechanical. Without interruption for 50 years, chips improve exponentially at the same speed of acceleration, neither more nor less. It could not be more straight if it had been engineered by a technological tyrant. Yet, we are to believe that this strict nonwavering trajectory came about via the chaos of the global marketplace and uncoordinated ruthless scientific competition. The line is so straight and unambiguous that it seems curious anyone would need convincing by Moore and Mead to "believe" in it. The question of faith lies in whether one believes the force of this "law" lies within the technology itself, or in a self-fulfilling social prophecy. Is Moore's law inevitable, a direction pushed forward by the nature of matter and computation, and independent of the society it was born into, or is it an artifact of self-organized scientific and economic ambition?

Moore and Mead themselves believe the latter. Writing in 2005, on the 40th anniversary of his law, Moore says, "Moore's law is really about economics." Carver Mead made it clearer yet: Moore's Law, he says, "is really about people's belief system, it's not a law of physics, it's about human belief, and when people believe in something, they'll put energy behind it to make it come to pass." In case that was not clear enough he spells it out further:

After [it] happened long enough, people begin to talk about it in retrospect, and in retrospect it's really a curve that goes through some points and so it looks like a physical law and people talk about it that way. But actually if you're living it, which I am, then it doesn't feel like a physical law. It's really a thing about human activity, it's about vision, it's about what you're allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe what is possible.

Finally, in a another reference, Mead adds : "Permission to believe that [the Law] will keep going," is what keeps the Law going. Moore agrees in a 1996 article: "More than anything, once something like this gets established, it becomes more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Semiconductor Industry Association puts out a technology road map, which continues this [generational improvement] every three years. Everyone in the industry recognizes that if you don't stay on essentially that curve they will fall behind. So it sort of drives itself."

The " technology road map" produced by Semiconductor Industry Association in the 1990s was a major tool in cementing the role of Moore's law in chips and society. According to David Brock, author of Understanding Moore's Law, the SIA road map "transformed Moore's law from a prediction to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It spelled out what needed to be accomplished, and when." A major factor in semiconductor manufacturing process are the photoresist masks which craft the thin etched conducting wires on a chip. The masks have to get smaller in order for the chip to get smaller. Elsa Reichmanis is the foremost photoresist technical guru in Silicon Valley. She says, "Advances in the [process] technology today are largely driven by the Semiconductor Industry Association." Raj Gupta, a materials scientist and CEO of Rohm and Haas, declares "They" -- the SIA road map -- "say what performance they need [for new electronic materials], and by which date." Andrew Odlyzko from AT&T Bell Laboratories concurs: "Management is *not* telling a researcher, 'You are the best we could find, here are the tools, please go off and find something that will let us leapfrog the competition.' Instead, the attitude is, 'Either you and your 999 colleagues double the performance of our microprocessors in the next 18 months, to keep up with the competition, or you are fired.'" Gordon Moore reiterated the importance of SIA in a 2005 interview with Charlie Rose: "the Semiconductor Industry Association put out a roadmap for the technology for the industry that took into account these exponential growths to see what research had to be done to make sure we could stay on that curve. So it's kind of become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Clearly, expectations of future progress guide current investments. The inexorable curve of Moore's Law helps focus money and intelligence on very specific goals -- keeping up with the Law. The only problem with accepting these self-constructed goals as the source of such regular progress is that other technologies which might benefit from the same belief do not show the same zooming curve. We witness steady, quantifiable progress in other solid state technologies such as solar photovoltaic panels -- which are also made of silicon. These have been sinking in performance price for two decades, but not exponentially. Likewise the power density of batteries has been increasing steadily for two decades, not again, no where near the rate of computer chips.

Why don't we see Moore's Law type of growth in the performance of solar cells if this is simply a matter of believing in a self-fulfilling prophecy? Surely, such an acceleration would be ideal for investors and consumers. Why doesn't everybody simply clap for Tinkerbelle to live, to *really* believe, and then the hoped for self-made fairy will kick in, and solar cells will double in efficiency and halve in cost every two years? That kind of consensual faith would generate billions of dollars. It would easy to find entrepreneurs eager to genuinely believe in the prophecy. The usual argument applied against this challenge is that solar chips and batteries are governed primarily by chemical processes, which chips are not. As one expert put the failure of exponential growth in batteries: "This is because battery technology is a prisoner of physics, the periodic table, manufacturing technology and economics." That's plain wrong. Manufacturing silicon integrated chips is an intensely chemical achievement, as much a prisoner of physics, the periodic table and manufacturing as batteries. Mead admits this: "It's a chemical process that makes integrated circuits, through and through." In fact the main technical innovation of Silicon Valley chip fabrication was to employ the chemical industry to make electronics instead of chemicals. Solar and batteries share the same chemical science as chips.

So what is the curve of Moore's law telling us that expert insiders don't see? That this steady acceleration is more than an agreement. It originates within the technology. There are other technologies, also solid state material science, that exhibit a steady curve of progress, and just like Moore's Law, their progress *is* exponential. They too seem to obey a rough law of remarkably steady exponential improvement.

Consider the recent history (for the last 10-15 years) of the cost per performance of communication bandwidth, and digital storage.

The picture of their exponential growth parallels the integrated circuit in every way except their slope -- the rate at which they are speeding up. Why is the doubling period in one technology eight years versus two? Isn't the same finance system and expectations underpinning them?

Except for the slope, these graphs are so similar, in fact, that it is fair to ask whether these curves are just reflections of Moore's Law. Telephones are heavily computerized and storage discs are organs of computers. Since progress in speed and cheapness of bandwidth, and storage capacity, relies directly and indirectly on accelerating computing power, it may be impossible to untangle the destiny of bandwidth and storage from computer chips. Perhaps the curves of bandwidth and storage are simply derivatives of the one uber Law? Without Moore's Law ticking beneath them, would they even remain solvent?

Consider another encapsulation of accelerating progress. For a decade or so biophysicist Rob Carlson has been tabulating progress in DNA sequencing and synthesis. Graphed similarly to Moore's Law (above), in cost performance per base pair, this technology too displays a steady drop when plotted on a log axis. I asked Carlson how much of this gain is due to Moore's Law. If computers did not get better, faster, cheaper each year, would DNA sequencing and synthesis continue to accelerate? Carlson replied:

Most of the fall in costs of sequencing and synthesis have to do with parallelization, new methods, and falling costs for reagents. Moore's law must have had some effect through cheap hardware that enables desktop CAD, but that is fairly tangential. If Moore's Law stopped, I don't think it would have much effect. The one area it might affect is processing the raw sequence information into something comprehensible by humans. Crunching the data of DNA is at least as expensive as getting the sequence of the physical DNA.

Larry Roberts, the principal architect of the ARPANET, the early internet, keeps detailed stats on communication improvements. He has noticed that communication technology in general also exhibits a Moore's Law-like rise in quality. Might progress in wires also be correlated to progress in chips? Roberts says that the performance of communication technology "is strongly influenced by and very similar to Moore's Law but not identical as might be expected."

In the inner-circle of the tech industry the fast-paced drop in prices for magnetic storage is called Kryder's Law. It's the Moore's Law for computer storage and is named after Mark Kryder the chief technical officer of Seagate, a major manufacturer of hard disks. Kryder's Law says that the cost/performance of hard disks is increasing exponentially at a steady rate of 40% per year. I asked Kryder the same question: is Kryders' Law dependent upon Moore's Law. If computers did not get better, cheaper every year, would storage continue to do so? Kryder responded: "This is no direct relationship between Moore's law and Kryder's law. The physics and fabrication processes are different for the semiconductor devices and magnetic storage. Hence, it is quite possible that semiconductor scaling could stop while scaling of disk drives continues. In fact, I believe that Flash [silicon chip-based storage such as memory cards and thumb drives] will hit a barrier well before hard drives do." Of course, if computers were to cease getting more powerful, the need for extra storage or faster communications would also slow down. So indirect market forces entwine the Laws, but only to a secondary degree. Andrew Odlyzko, who now studies the growth of internet at the University of Minnesota, says, "I would say Moore's laws in their various disciplines are highly correlated and synergistic, drawing on the same pool of basic science and technology. It is hard (but not impossible) to imagine that if improvements in transistor density ceased, then photonics or wireless could progress for long."

While expectations can certainly guide technological progress, consistent law-like improvement must be more than self-fulfilling prophesy. For one thing, this obedience to a curve often begins long before anyone notices there is a law, and way before anyone would be able to influence it. The exponential growth of magnetic storage began in 1956, almost a whole decade before Moore formulated his law for semiconductors and 50 years before Kryder formulized its existence. Rob Carlson says, "When I first published the DNA exponential curves, I got reviewers claiming that they were unaware of any evidence that sequencing costs were falling exponentially. In this way the trends were operative even when people disbelieved it." Ray Kurzweil dug into the archives to show that something like Moore's Law had it origins as far back as 1900, long before electronic computers existed, and of course long before the path could have been constructed by self-fulfillment. Kurzweil estimated the number of "calculations per second per $1,000" performed by turn-of-the-century analog machines, by mechanical calculators, and later by the first vacuum tube computers and extended the same calculation to modern semiconductor chips. He established that this ratio increased exponentially for the past 109 years. More importantly, the curve (let's call it Kurzweil's Law) transects five different technological species of computation: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, transistors and integrated circuits. An unobserved constant operating in five distinct paradigms of technology for over a century must be more than an industry road map. It suggest that the nature of these ratios are baked deep into the fabric of the technium.

But in every contemporary case -- DNA sequencing, magnetic storage, semiconductors, bandwidth, pixel density -- once a fixed curve is revealed, scientists, investors, marketing, and journalists all grab hold of it and use it to guide experiments, investments, schedules and publicity. The map becomes the territory. There is no doubt curves are used as tools, and that they can sway the rate of progress. Moore tells one story: "When the industry fully recognized that we were truly on a pace of a new-process-technology-generation-every-three-years, we started to shift to a new-generation-every-two-years to get a bit ahead of the competition. We changed the slope." For three and a half decades, from 1956 to 1991, IBM set the pace on improvements in the density of hard disk drives to about 25% per year. That's just below the rate of semiconductor progress. IBM owned the patents and this rate allowed them to comfortably maintain high profit margins. But in the early 1980s, many competitors sprang up making smaller disks which had lower densities. But their densities were improving must faster than IBM's schedule. So in 1990, IBM changed the slope. They mandated that henceforth their improvement would be 60% a year. This spurred an escalation of R&D investment, faster growth by the competitors, and more R&D by IBM so that by the late 1990s onward, the slope of growth increased to more than 100% per year. The slope of progress can be changed by pouring money down it. Mark Kryder says, "My guess is that you could double the density growth rate with something less than the double the R&D dollars." The slope can also be changed by regulations. Larry Roberts offers this evidence for the effects of the US Telecommunications Act of 1993. "From before 1960 until de-regulation about 1993, the cost per terabit of communications [red line in the graph below; the blue is Moore's Law] dropped very slowly, halving every 79 months. Then, once fiber was in place, DWDM and free enterprise took the market price down fast, halving every 12 months."

Since the rate of these explosions of innovation can be varied to some degree by applying money or laws, their trend lines cannot be fully inherent in the material itself. At the same time, since these curves begin and advance independent of our awareness, and do not waver from a straight line under enormous competition and investment pressures, their course must in some way be bound to the materials.

If you scour the technium for examples of enduring exponential progress, you'll find most candidates within fields related to material science. For instance the maximum rotational speed of an electric motor is not following an exponential curve. Nor is the maximum miles-per-gallon performance of an automobile engine. In fact most technical progress is not exponential, nor steady. Even most progress in material science is not exponential. We are not exponentially increasing the hardness of steel. Nor are we exponentially increasing the percentage yield of say, sulfuric acid, or petroleum distillates, from their precursors.

I gathered as many examples of current exponential progress as I could find. I was not seeking examples where the total quantity produced (watts, kilometers, bits, basepairs, traffic, etc) were rising exponentially since these quantities are skewed by our rising populations. More people use more stuff, even if it is not improving. Rather I looked for examples that showed performance ratios (such as pounds per inch, illumination per dollar) steadily increasing if not accelerating. Here is a set of quickly found examples, and the rate at which their performance is doubling. (This will display as halving the time.)

Doubling Times of Various Technological Performance in Months

The first thing to notice is that all these examples demonstrate the effects of scaling down, or working with the small. In this microcosmic realm energy is not very important. We don't see exponential improvement in efforts to scale up, to keep getting bigger, skyscrapers and space stations. Airplanes aren't getting bigger, flying faster, and more fuel efficient at an exponential rate. Gordon Moore jokes that if the technology of air travel experienced the same kind of progress as Intel chips, a modern day commercial aircraft would cost $500, circle the earth in 20 minutes, and only use five gallons of fuel for the trip. However, the plane would only be the size of a shoebox! We don't see a Moore's Law-type of progress at work while scaling up because energy needs scale up just as fast, and energy is a major limited constraint, unlike information. So our entire new economy is built around technologies that scale down well -- photons, electrons, bits, pixels, frequencies, and genes. As these inventions miniaturize, they reach closer to bare atoms, raw bits, and the essence of matter and information. And so the fixed and inevitable path of their progress derives from this elemental essence.

The second thing to notice about this set of examples is the narrow range of slopes, or doubling time (in months). The particular power being optimized in these technologies is doubling between 8 and 30 months. Everyone of them is getting twice as better every year or two no matter the technology. What's up with that? Engineer Mark Kryder's explanation is that this "twice as better every two years" is an artifact of corporate structure where most of these inventions happen. It just takes 1-2 years of calendar time to conceive, design, prototype, test, manufacture and market a new improvement, and while a 5- or 10-fold increase is very difficult to achieve, almost any engineer can deliver a factor of two. Voila! Twice as better every two years. Engineers unleashed equals Moore's Law.

But, as mentioned earlier, we see engineers unleashed in other departments of the technium without the appearance of exponential growth. And in fact not every aspect of semiconductor extrapolation resolves into a handy "law." Moore recalls that in a 1975 speech he forecasted the expected growth of other attributes of silicon chips "just to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to extrapolate exponentials." Extrapolating the maximum size of the wafer of silicon used to grow the chips (which was increasing as fast of the number of components) he calculated would yield a nearly 2-meter (6-foot) diameter crystal by 2000, which just seemed unlikely. That did not happen; they reached 300 mm (1 foot).

And as small as those differences in slopes are, say, between the 21-month doubling increase in power of a CPU processor, and the 16-month doubling increase in density of RAM storage, that gap is significant. Curiously, the difference between two exponential curves is itself an exponential growth. That means that over time, the performance of two technologies under that same financial regime, the same engineering society, the same technium, are diverging at an exponential rate. Clearly, this ever widening gap is due to an intrinsic quality of the technologies.

Should we ever arrive on other inhabited worlds in our galaxy, we should expect some of them to have reached the stage of microelectronics in their own technium. Once they discover the application of binary logic to microcircuits, they too will experience a version of Moore's Law. The lessons of the microcosm will play out its inevitable course: as circuits get smaller, they get faster, more accurate, and cheaper. Their alien computers will quickly get better and more affordable at once, which in turn will propel innumerable other technological explosions to their great delight. Whenever it begins the steady acceleration of progress in solid-state computation should last for at least 25 doublings (what we've experienced so far), or a 33 million-fold increase in value. But while Moore's Law is inevitable in its progression, its slope is not.

The slant of increase in a particular world may indeed be a matter of macro-economics. Here Moore and Mead may be correct: the slope of the Law rests on economics. Whether computing power doubles every month or every decade will depend on many factors of that particular society: population size, volume of the economy, velocity of money, evolution of financial instruments. The constant speed of discovery might hinge in part on the total available pool of engineers, whether it is 10 thousand versus 10 million. A faster planetary velocity of money may permit a faster doubling period. All these economic factors combine to produce a fixed constant for that world at that phase. If Moore's Law turned out to be a universal fixture in the computational phase of civilization, this fixed constant might even be used as a classification marker. Hypothetical civilizations are currently classified by their energy use. The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev specified that a class I civilization would leverage its home planet's energy, a class II its star's, and class III civilization its galaxy's energy. In a Moore's Slope scheme, a class I civilization would exhibit a chip-power doubling rate measured in "days," while a class II civilization would show doublings measured in days squared, and class III in days cubed, and so on.

In any case, at some point on our planet, or any planet, the curve will plateau out. Moore's law will not continue forever. Any specific exponential growth will inevitably smooth out into a typical S-shaped curve. This is the archetypical pattern of growth: after a slow ramp up, gains takeoff straight up like a rocket, and then after a long run level out slowly. Back in 1830 only 37 kilometers of railroad track had been laid in the US. That count doubled in the next ten years, and then doubled in the decade after that, and kept doubling every decade for 60 years. In 1890 any reasonable railroad buff would have predicted that the US would have hundreds of millions of kilometers of railroad by a hundred years later. There would be railroad to everyone's house. Instead there were fewer than 400,000 kilometers. However, Americans did not cease to be mobile. We merely shifted our mobility and transportation to other species of invention. We built automobile highways, and airports. The miles we travel keep expanding, but the exponential growth of that particular technology peaked and plateau.

Much of the churn in the technium is due to our tendency to shift what we care about. Mastering one technology engenders new technological desires. A recent example: The first digital cameras had very rough picture resolution. Then scientists began cramming more and more pixels onto one sensor to increase photo quality. Before they knew it, the number of pixels possible per array was on an exponential curve, heading into megapixel territory and beyond. But after a decade of acceleration, consumers shrugged off the increasing number of pixels; the current resolution was sufficient. Their concern shifted to the speed of the pixel sensors, or the response in low light -- things no one cared about before. So a new metric is born, and a new curve started, and the exponential curve of ever-more pixels per array will gradually abate.
Moore's Law is headed to a similar fate. When, no one knows. "Moore's Law, which has held as the benchmark for IC scaling for more than 40 years, will cease to drive semiconductor manufacturing after 2014," Len Jelinek, the director of a major semiconductor manufacturer, claimed in 2009. Carl Anderson, an IBM Fellow, announced at an industry conference in April, 2009 that the end of Moore's Law was at hand: "There was exponential growth in the railroad industry in the 1800s; there was exponential growth in the automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s; and there was exponential growth in the performance of aircraft until they reached the speed of sound. But eventually exponential growth always comes to an end." But IBM has been wrong several times before. In 1978, IBM scientists predicted Moore's Law had only 10 years left. Whoops. In 1988, they again said it would end in 10 years. Ooops, again. Gordon Moore himself predicted his law would end when it reach 250 nanometer manufacturing, which it passed in 1997. Today the industry is aiming for 20 nanometers. In 2009, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said "We can scale it down another 10 to 15 years. Nothing touches the economics of it."

Whether Moore's Law -- as the count of transistor density -- has one, two, or three decades left to zoom and drive our economy, we can be sure it will peter out as other past trends have by being sublimated into another rising trend. When we reach the limits of miniaturization, and can no longer cram more circuits on one chip, we can just make the chip bigger (that's Moore's suggestion!). Carl Anderson of IBM cites three next-generation technologies that are candidates for the next round of exponential growth: piling transistors on top of each other (known as 3-D chips), optical computers, or making existing circuits work faster (accelerators). And then there is parallel processing using many core processors at once, lots of chips connected in parallel. In other words, maybe we don't need more and more transistors on one chip. Maybe we need re-arrangements of the bits we have. We may consider ourselves to be a million times cleverer than a monkey, but we don't have a million times as many genes, or a million times as many neurons. Our gene and neuron count is almost identical with all apes. The evolutionary growth in those trends stopped with Sapiens (us), and switched to increasing other factors. As Moore's Law abates, we'll find alternative solutions to making a million times more transistors. In fact, we may already have enough transistors per chip to do what we want, if only we knew how.

Moore began by measuring the number of "components" per square inch, then switched to transistors, and now we measure transistors per dollar. As one exponential trend (say, the density of transistors) decelerates, we begin caring about a new parameter (say, speed of operations, or number of connections) and so we begin measuring a new metric, and plotting a new graph. Suddenly, another "law" is revealed. As the character of this new technique is studied, exploited and optimized, its natural pace is revealed, and when this trajectory is extrapolated, it becomes the creators' goal. In the case of computing, this newly realized attribute of microprocessors will become, over time, the new Moore's Law.

Like the Air Force's 1953 graph of top-speed, the curve is one way the technium speaks to us. Carver Mead, who barnstormed the country waving plots of Moore's Law, believes we need to "listen to the technology." As one curve inevitably flattens out, its momentum is taken up by anther S-curve. If we inspect any enduring curve closely we can see how definitions and metrics shift over time to accommodate new substitute technologies.

For instance, a close scrutiny of Kryder's Law in hard disk densities shows that it is composed of a sequence of overlapping smaller trendlines. These may have slightly different slopes, but in aggregate, calibrated with an appropriate common metric, they yield the unwavering trajectory.

This cartoon graph dissects what is happening. A stack of s-curves, each one containing their own limited run of exponential growth, overlap to produce a long-run emergent exponential growth line. The trend bridges more than one technology, giving it a transcendent power. As one exponential boom is subsumed into the next boom, an established technology relays its momentum to the next paradigm, and carries forward an unrelenting growth. The performance is measure at a higher emergent level, not seen at first in the specific technologies. It reveals itself as a long-term trans-technium benefit, a macro trend that continues indefinitely. In this way Moore's Law -- redefined -- will never end.

But while the slow demise of the transistor trend is inevitable, if the larger meta version of all the related Moore's Laws -- increasing, cheaper computer/internet power -- were to suddenly cease on Earth in the next few years, it would be disastrous. These performance ratios roughly double (or half) 50% annually. That means things we care about get better by half as much every year. Imagine if you got half-again smarter every year, or remember half as much more this year as last. Embedded deep in the technium (as we no know it) is the remarkable capacity of half-again annual improvement. The optimism of our age rests on the reliable advance of Moore's promise: that stuff will get significantly, seriously, desirably better and cheaper tomorrow. If the things we make will get better the next time, that means that the Golden Age is ahead of us, and not in the past. With the meta Moore's Law out of action, half or more of the optimism of our time would vanish.

But even if it we wanted to, what on earth could derail Moore's law? Suppose we were part of a vast conspiracy to halt Moore's Law. Maybe we believed it artificially elevates undue optimism and encourages misguided expectations of a Singularity. What could we do? How would you stop it? Those who believe its powers rests primarily in its self-reinforced expectations would say: simply announce it will end. If enough smart believers circulate declaring Moore's Law is over, then it will be over. The loop of self-fulfilling prophecy would be broken. But all it takes in one maverick to push ahead and make further progress, and the spell would be broken. The race would resume until the physics of scaling down gave out.

More clever folk might reason that since the economic regime as a whole determines the slope of Moore's Law, you could keep decreasing the quality of the economy until it stopped. Perhaps through armed revolution, you installed an authoritative command-style policy (like the old state-communisms), whose lackadaisical economic growth killed the infrastructure for exponential increases in computing power. I find that possibility intriguing, but I have my doubts. If, in a counterfactual history, communism had won the cold war, and microelectronics were invented in a global Soviet style society, my guess is that even that alternative policy could not stifle Moore's Law. Progress might roll out slower, but I don't doubt Stalinist scientists would tap into the law of the microcosm, and soon marvel at the same technical wonder we do: chips improving exponentially as constant linear effort is applied.

I suspect Moore's Law is something we don't have much sway over, other than its doubling period. Moore's Law is the Moira of our age. In Greek mythology the Moira were the three Fates. Usually depicted as dour spinsters, one Moira spun the thread of a newborn's life. The other Moira counted out the thread's length. And the third Moira cut the thread at death. A person's beginning and end were predetermined. But what happened in between was not inevitable. Humans and gods could work within the confines of one's ultimate destiny. According to legend, Dionysos, the god of wine and parties, was unable to cry. But he loved a woodspirit, a half-satyr named Ampelos, who was killed by a wild bull. Dionysos was so stricken by Ampelos' death that he finally wept. So to appease Dionysos' unexpected grief, the Moira transformed Ampelos into the first grapevine. Then according to the bards, "the inflexible threads of Moira were unloosened and turned back." Ampelos' blood became the wine that Dionysos loved. Fate was obeyed, yet Dionysos get what he choose. Within the inexorable flow of larger trends our freewill flits, moving us in tandem with destiny.

The unbending trajectories uncovered by Moore, Kryder, Gilder, and Kurzweil spin through the technium forming a long thread. The thrust of the thread is inevitable, its course destined by the nature of matter and discovery. Once untied, the thread of Moore's Law will unravel steadily, inexorably towards its anchor at the bottom of physics. Along the way it unleashes other threads of technology we might wish to pull. Each of those threads, of Communication, Bandwidth, Storage, will unravel in its predetermined manner as well. We choose how fast to unzip them, and which ones to unloosen next. Collectively we push and pull with exceeding energy to wrench the threads from their place, but our efforts only serve to unravel it as it would anyway. The technium holds our Moira, and the Moira play out our inflexible threads. Like Dionysos we can unloosen, but not remove them.

Listen to the technology, Carver Mead says. What do the curves say? Imagine it is 1965. You've seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. What if you believed the story they were trying to tell us: that each year, as sure as winter follows summer, and day follows night, computers would get half again better, and half again smaller, and half again cheaper, year after year, and that in 5 decades they would be 30 million times more powerful than they were then, and cheap. If you were sure of that back then, or even mostly persuaded, and if a lot of others were as well, what good fortune you could have harvested. You would have needed no other prophecies, no other predictions, no other details. Just knowing that single trajectory of Moore's, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.

Moore's Law is one of the few Moira threads we've teased out in our short history in the technium. There must be others. Most of the technium's predetermined developments remain hidden, not yet uncovered, by tools not yet invented. But we've learned to look for them. Searching, we can see similar laws peeking out now. These "laws" are reflexes of the technium that kick in regardless of the social climate. They too will spawn progress, and inspire new powers and new desires as they unroll in ordered sequence. Perhaps these self-governing dynamics will appear in genetics, or in pharmaceuticals, or in cognition. Once a dynamic like Moore's Law is launched and made visible, the fuels of finance, competition, and markets will push the law to its limits and keep it riding along that curve until it has consumed its physical potential.

Our choice, and it is significant, is to prepare for the gift -- and the problems it will also bring. We can choose to get better at anticipating these inevitable surges. We can choose to educate ourselves and children to become smartly literate and wise in their use. And we can choose to modify our legal/political/economic assumptions to meet the ordained evolution ahead. But we cannot escape from them.

When we spy our technological fate in the distance we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather we should lurch forward in preparation.

Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:04:09 -0800

In 1964 I visited the New York World's Fair as a wide-eye, slack-jawed kid. The inevitable future was on display and I swallowed it up in great gulps. At the AT&T pavilion they had a working picture phone. The idea of a video-phone had been circulating in science fiction for a hundred years earlier in a clear case of prophetic foreshadowing. Now here was one that actually worked. Although I could see it, I didn't get to use it then, but photos of how it would infuse our suburban lives ran in the pages of Popular Science and other magazines. We all expected it to appear in our lives any day. Well, the other day, 45 years later, I was using a picture phone just like the one predicted way back in 1964. As my wife and I gathered in our California den to lean toward a curved white screen displaying the moving image of our daughter in Shanghai we mirrored the old magazine's illustration of a family crowded around a picture phone. While our daughter watched us on her screen in China, we chatted leisurely about unimportant family matters. Our picture phone was exactly what everyone imagined it to be, except in three significant ways: the device was not exactly a phone, it was our iMac and her laptop; the call was free (via Skype, not AT&T); and despite being perfectly useable, and free, picture-phoning has not become common — even for us. So unlike the earlier futuristic vision, the inevitable picture phone has not become the standard modern way of communicating.

So was the picture phone inevitable? There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented.

The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

The picture phone was imagined in sufficient detail a number of times, in different eras and different economic regimes. It really wanted to happen. One artist sketched out a fantasy of it in 1878, only two years after the telephone was patented. A series of working prototypes were demoed by the German post office in 1938. Commercial versions were installed in phone booths in New York City after the 1964 World's Fair, but AT&T canceled the product ten years later due to lack of interest. At its peak the Picturephone had only 500 or so paid subscribers, even though nearly everyone in New York recognized the vision. One could argue that rather than being inevitable progress, this was an invention battling its own inevitable bypass.

Yet today, it is back. Perhaps it is more inevitable over a 50-year span. Maybe it was too early back then, and the necessary supporting technology absent and social dynamics not ripe. In this respect the repeated earlier tries can be taken as evidence of its inevitability, its relentless urge to be born. And perhaps it is still being born. There may be other innovations yet to be invented that could make the videophone more common. Such needed innovations as: ways to direct the gaze of the speaker into your eyes instead of towards the off-center camera, or have the screen switch gazes among multiple parties in the conversation.

We can see both arguments for the picture phone: a) that it had to happen, or b) that it did not have to happen, and it still may not really happen beyond the minor, occasional use on Skype. So does any technology lurch forward on its own inertia as "a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow", in the words of technology critic Langdon Winner, or do we have clear free-will choice in the sequence of technological change, a stance that makes us (individually or corporately) responsible for each step?

I'd like to suggest an analogy:

Who you are is determined in part by your genes. Every single day scientists identify new genes that code for a particular trait in humans, revealing the ways in which inherited "software" drives your body and brain. We now know that behaviors such as addictions, ambition, risk-taking, shyness and many others have strong genetic components. At the same time, "who you are" is clearly determined by your environment and upbringing. Every day science uncovers more evidence of the ways in which our family, peers, and cultural background shape our being. The strength of what others believe about us is enormous. And more recently we have increasing proof that environmental factors can influence genes, so that these two factors are co-factors in the strongest sense of the word — they determine each other. Your environment (like what you eat) can affect your genetic code, and your code will steer you into certain environments — making untangling the two influences a conundrum.

Lastly, who you are in the richest sense of the word — your character, your spirit, what you do with your life — is determined by what you choose. An awful lot of the shape of your life is given to you and is beyond your control, but your freedom to choose within those givens is huge and significant. The course of your life within the constraints of your genes and environment is up to you. You decide whether to speak the truth at any trial, even if you have a genetic or familial propensity to lie. You decide whether or not to risk befriending a stranger, no matter your genetic or cultural bias. You decide beyond your inherent tendencies or conditioning. Your freedom is far from total. It is not your choice alone whether to be the fastest runner in the world (your genetics and upbringing play a large role) but you can choose to be faster than you have been. Your inheritance and education at home and school set the outer boundaries of how smart, or generous, or sneaky you can be, but you choose whether you will smarter, more generous and sneakier today than yesterday. You may inhabit a body and brain that wants to be lazy, or sloppy, or imaginative, but you choose to what degree those qualities progress (even if you aren't inherently decisive).

Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.

It is the same with technology. The technium is in some part preordained by the inherent nature of technology itself. Just as our genes drive the inevitable unfolding of human development, starting from a fertilized egg, proceeding to an embryo, then fetus, to an infant, a toddler, kid, and teenager, so too the largest trends of technology unroll in developmental stages.

In our lives we have no choice about becoming teenagers. The strange hormones will flow, and our bodies and minds must morph. Civilizations follow a similar developmental pathway as well, although its outlines are less certain because we have witnessed a sample of one. But we can discern a necessary ordering: a society must control fire first, then metalworking before electricity, and electricity before global communications. We might disagree on what exactly is sequenced, but a sequence there is.

At the same time, history matters. Technological systems gain their own momentum, and become so complex and self-aggregating that they form an environment for other technologies. The infrastructure built to support the gasoline automobile is so extensive that over a century of expansion it now affects technologies outside of transportation. For instance, the invention of air-conditioning plus the highway system encouraged sub-tropical suburbs. The invention of cheap refrigerated air altered the landscape of the American south and southwest. If air-conditioning had been implemented in a non-auto society, its pattern of consequences would be different even though air cooling systems contain their own technological momentum and inherencies. So every new development in the technium is contingent upon the historical antecedents of previous technologies. In biology this effect is called co-evolution, and it means that the "environment" for one species is the ecosystem of all the other species it interacts with, all of them in flux. For example prey and predator evolve each other in a never-ending arms race, host and parasite become one duet as they try to outbest each other, and an ecosystem will adapt to the moving target of a new species adapting to it.

Within the borders laid out by inevitable forces, our choices unleash consequences that gain momentum over time until these contingencies harden into technological necessities and become nearly unchangeable in future generations. There's an old story that is basically true: Ordinary Roman carts were constructed to match the width of Imperial Roman war chariots because it was easier to follow the ruts in the road left by the war chariots. The chariots were sized to accommodate the width of two large war horses, which translates into our English measurement as a width of 4' 8.5". Roads throughout the vast Roman empire were built to this spec. When the legions of Rome marched into Britain, they constructed long distance imperial roads 4' 8.5" wide. When the English started building tramways, they used the same width so the same horse carriages could be used. And when they started building railways with horseless carriages, naturally the rails were 4' 8.5" wide. Imported laborers from the British Isles built the first railways in the Americas using the same tools and jigs they were used to. Fast forward to the US Space shuttle, which is built in parts around the country and assembled in Florida. Because the two large solid fuel rocket engines on the side of the launch Shuttle were sent by railroad from Utah, and that line transversed a tunnel not much wider than the standard track, the rockets themselves could not be much wider than 4' 8.5." As one wag concluded: "So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse." More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.

The past 10,000 years of human technology will sway the preordained march of technology in each new era. The initial conditions of an electrical system, for example, can guide it in several ways. The technical specifications could default to either AC or DC, favoring centralization (AC) or decentralization (DC). Or it could be installed in 12 volts (by amateurs) or 250 volts (by professionals). The legal regime could favor patent protection or not, and the business models could be built around profits or nonprofit. All these variables would bend the unrolling system in different cultural directions. Yet electrification in some form was a necessary, unavoidable phase for the technium. These initial specifications later affected how the internet developed on top of the electric network. The internet, too, was inevitable, but the character of its incarnation is contingent on the tenor of the technologies that preceded it. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone isn't. We accept the biological analog: human adolescence is inevitable, but pimples are not. The exact pattern that the inevitable teenagehood manifests in any individual will depend in part on his/her biology, which depends in part of their past health and environment.

As in personality, technology is shaped by a triad. In addition to the primary drive of preordained development (force #1), and in addition to the escapable influences of technological history (force #2), there is society's collective free will in shaping the technium (force #3). Under the first force of inevitability, the path of technological evolution is steered by both the laws of physics, and by self-organizing biases within its large complex adaptive system. The technium will tend toward certain macro forms, even if you rerun the tape of time. The path of the technium is further constrained by the second force created by the momentum of past decisions, or technological history. At any moment of technological conception what happens next is contingent of what has already happened, and so history constrains our choices forward. These two forces channel the technium along a limited path, and severely restrict our choices. We like to think that "anything is possible next" but in fact anything is not possible in technology.

In contrast to these two, the third force is our free will to make individual choices of use, and collective policy decisions. Compared to all possibilities that we can imagine we have a very narrow range of choices. But compared to 10,000 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, or even last year, our possibilities are expanding. Although restricted in the cosmic sense, we have more choice than we know what to do with. And via the engine of the technium, these real choices will keep expanding (even though the larger path is preordained).

This paradox is experienced not just by historians of technology but ordinary historians as well. In their view "human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen." And so as historian David Apter writes, "to be modern means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices" in "a process of increasing complexity in human affairs within which the polity must act," that is within a course that is determined. Historian of technology Langdon Winner sums up this convergence of free will and the ordained, which the historian of technology Jacques Ellul also held, in these terms: "technology moves steadily onward as if by cause and effect. This does not deny human creativity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, chance, or the willful desire to head in one direction rather than another. All of these are absorbed into the process and become moments in the progressions."

The triadic nature of the technium is reflected by the triadic nature of biological evolution — which makes sense since the technium is the acceleration of evolution. (This representation is roughly based on Steven Jay Gould's analysis, as described in my Ordained Becoming.) The basic laws of physics and emergent self-organization drive evolution towards certain forms of life. Specific species are unpredictable in their micro details, but the macro patterns of bilateral symmetry, or streamlined bodies underwater, or eyeballs are ordained by the physics of matter and self-organization. This inescapable force can be thought of as the structural inevitability of evolution.

The second aspect of evolution's triad is the historical aspect of biological change. Earlier accidental mutations and circumstantial opportunities bend the course of evolution this way and that — contingency within the bounds of inevitable. Lastly, the third force working within evolution can be thought of as the adaptive function — the relentless engine of optimization and creative innovation that continually solve the problems of survival. All three work together to propel evolution through a channel of a finite number of basic forms, but with unexpected and novel variation.

The triad nature of technology is very similar. But instead of an unconscious adaptive function, the technium possess a conscious adaptive function of human ingenuity and free will. In biological evolution there is no designer, but in the technium there is an intelligent designer — Sapiens. The other two legs of technological evolution are identical. The basic laws of physics and emergent self-organization drive technological evolution through an inevitable series of structural forms — wheels, steam engines, binary software, etc. At the same time, the historical contingency of past inventions forms an inertia which bends evolution this way or that — with the bounds of the inevitable developments. Lastly, the collective choice of free-willed individuals select the character of the technium. And just as our free-will choices in our individual lives create the kind of person we are (our ineffable "person"), so too in the technium.

Winner gives an example of how this conundrum of choice within the ordained can be visualized. He says, the "Lapps of the Sevettijarvi region deliberately chose to use snowmobiles as a replacement for dogsleds and skis in the basis of their economy--reindeer herding. But they neither chose nor intended the effect this change would have in totally reshaping the ecological and social relationships upon which their traditional culture depended." Those larger consequences are driven by the larger trajectory of the technium.

We may not be able to choose the macro scale outlines of an industrial automation system — say assembly line factories, fossil fuel power, mass education, allegiance to the clock — but we can choose the character of those parts. We have latitude in selecting the defaults of our mass education, so that we can nudge the system to maximize equality, or to favor excellence, or to foster innovation. We can bias the assembly line either towards productivity of output or productivity of worker skills. Every technological system can be set with alternative defaults that will change the character and personality of that technology.

So the natural question is, if certain aspects of the technium are preordained by the laws of physics and natural self-organization, and certain aspects contingent upon our choices now and in the past, how do we know which is which? Systems theorist John Smart, who also describes the technium in terms of a triad (though different than the one presented here) suggests that we need a technological version of the Serenity Prayer. Popular among participants in twelve-step addiction recovery programs, the Prayer, originally written in the 1930s by the theologian Rheinhold Niebuhr, goes:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Where is the source for the wisdom to discern the difference between the inevitable stages of technological development and the volitional forms that are up to us? What we would really like is a technique which makes the inevitable obvious.

I think that tool is our awareness of the technium's long-term cosmic trajectory. By placing technology in the context of a natural extension of biological evolution rising from the big bang, we can perceive how those macro imperatives play out in our present time. In other words, technology's inevitable forms derive from the dynamics that characterize all extropic systems — the dozen or so attributes I describe as "what technology wants." These are: an increase in complexity, diversity, specialization, efficiency, consilience, socialization, structure, ubiquity, opportunity, beauty, sentience, and evolvability. All these values are increasing on average in sustainable systems like life, evolution, and the technium.

My hypothesis claims that as more of these long-term trends operate in a particular current technology, the more that technology will be characterized by "inevitable" forces. Indeed, it is these long term constraints which give an opening to the inevitable. I propose that whether a technology in question exhibits a tendency towards increased socialization, say, or moves toward consilience, or whether it increases or decreases volition and freewill, or diminishes or raises opportunities as it propagates, will, in aggregate signal its inevitability. An alignment with these extropic forces becomes the Serenity Prayer Filter. The more an idea moves along the frontier of those dozen qualities, the more inevitable that technology is for that time period.

Let me just give one small example of many. At this particular phase in the technium (at the turn of the 21st century), we are building many intricate, complex systems of communications. This wiring up of the planet can happen in a number of ways, but my modest prediction is that the technological arrangements that will be most sustainable in the long run — which I take as a by product of inevitability since the alternative arrangements drop away — will be those technologies that tend toward the greatest increases in diversity, consilience, opportunity, sociability, sentience, etc. We can compare two competing technologies to see which one favors more of these extropic qualities. Does it open up diversity or close it down? Does it bank on increasing opportunities or assume they wither? Is it moving towards embedded sentience, or ignoring it? Does it blossom in ubiquity, or collapse under it?

For example is large-scale petro-fuel-fed agriculture inevitable? This highly mechanical system of tractors, fertilizers, breeders, seed producers, and food processors provides the abundant cheap food which is the foundation of our leisure to invent other things, our longevity to keep inventing, and ultimately the increase in population that generates increasing numbers of new ideas. Compared to the food production schemes that preceded it -- both subsistence farming, and animal-powered mixed farming at its peak -- mechanicized farming was inevitable in that it increased energy efficiency, complexity, opportunities, structure, sentience and specialization.

However, because technological phases are developmental, they are eventually outgrown in the same way our infancy is outgrown. As in most growth, the earlier form is not discarded but subsumed. Our infant organs are not eliminated but are matured. In evolution, earlier structures are rarely extinguished. Usually they are built around by the new. Our own brains are the best evidence of this. We still retain an inner "reptilian" core that generates all the essential instincts that benefited our crawling primitive ancestors. When we are frightened the ancient "fight or flight" circuits are ignited. They have not disappeared. As our brains developed we added layers of cognition OVER the earlier still operating brain. That's one reason our behavior is so complex. Later on in our evolutionary journey, we acquired mental patterns for social interactions that we share with other social primates, which govern much of our behavior and thinking. Our human consciousness is a very thin layer on top.

Our layers of technological acquisition reflects a similar subsumption pattern. The current "new economy" of information and communication is a thin layer that resides upon a very hearty industrial economy that is not going away. Just as subsistence farming is still the norm for most of the living farmers alive today (most of them living in the developing world), industrial farming will remain the largest producer of food for many decades, just as industrial processes continue to undergird the digital economy.

But just as a more intangible, more diverse, more sentient technology economy has appeared as a thin alternative layer upon the industrial world, so too, can we see hints of an alternative method of food production that is more in line with extropic principles. According to many food experts, the problems with the current food production system is that it is heavily dependent on monocultures (not diverse) of too few staple crops (five worldwide), which in turn require pathological degrees of interventions with drugs, pesticides, herbicides, soil disturbances and (reduced opportunities), and over reliance on cheap petro fuels for both energy and nutrients (misplaced energy efficiency). Alternative scenarios that can scale up to the global level are hard to imagine, but there are hints that a decentralized agriculture, with less reliance on politically motivated government subsidies, or petroleum, or on monocultures, would work. This evolved system of hyperlocal, hybrid farms might be manned by either a truly globally mobile migrant labor force (until pay differentials evened out), or with smart, nimble worker robots. In other words instead of highly technological mass production farms, highly technological personal or local farms. Compared then to the industrial factory farm as found in say the corn belt of Iowa, this type of advanced gardening would lean towards more diversity, more opportunities, more complexity, more structure, more specialization, more sentience, and would therefore more likely to be inevitable, after, or on top of the dominant industrial form of farming now.

We can ask the same questions for other technologies on the horizon. In this same field, are genetically modified foods inevitable? In the near future will they become the dominate type of crop planted and eaten world wide? My answer would be: probably. While many people will chose not to patronize genetically modified foodstuffs (just as they choose not to watch TV, or get vaccinated) the push of extropy will move food production in this direction because it further increases diversity, complexity, structure, sentience, etc in the technium. In fact the only trends working against genetically modified food are nostalgia and misunderstanding. There is a misguided idea that GM food is more engineered, when of course ordinary crops are highly technological, having been deliberately "engineered" through breeding for millennia. But breeding is an inferior type of technology because it relies on randomness (less structure) — take two parents and see what random offspring you get. In fact, in an alternative world where scientific GM food had been invented first, the newer invention of "natural" random breeding would be rejected as insanely crazy and dangerous. It is, as Danny Hillis calls it, "genetic gambling." Why would you trust your food to chance?

We might apply these same heuristics to this sample list of controversial near-term or already prototyped inventions. Can we determine which, if any of these, is inevitable in the next 50 years?

Assisted-suicide devices
Human cloning
Memory pills
Underground CO2 sequestering
Brain-wave phone controllers
Public location trackers
Transcontinental maglev trains
Male contraception
Iris/face ID detectors
Free full genome sequence
Robot-driven cars

I don't think we can in useful detail. The above innovations are too specific to forecast with any believability. But I do think we can discern the wider currents of change that carry them. We can describe the predetermined, long-term, macro elements of progress that flow through the technium and channel unpredictable details. That larger predictable framework can guide our policy and personal decisions. As an illustration I've taken the above list and suggested the trajectories I see in them:

Assisted-suicide devices — The technology is already here; we could make some amazingly clever contraptions if we wanted to, but the deployment of advanced killing devices is a choice, and not at all inevitable. However what is inevitable is the expansion of personal choice, the increase in specialized tools, the increase in smarter, more responsive machines that can tailor its actions to the most subtle signals of pain and consciousness, so technology will continue to move in the direction of making assisted suicide more attractive.

Human cloning — We have human clones now. They're called twins. Whether we will intentionally create them on demand, and whether we'll time shift their arrival so that they resemble serial twins, is a choice. While we choose, the drift of the technium will encourage all the technologies which make it easy to clone a human, in particular robust technologies that can clone all other animals. The power to clone a human will inevitably increase, but we may chose not to deploy it any more than suicide.

Memory pills — Pills are inevitable, and so are pills that enhance cognition. But the particulars of what we are able to enhance, or what to enhance, or choose to enhance, and under which conditions, seem open. Memory pills may not work, or the side effects may be debilitating. However, the extropic drive of the technium pushes toward maximizing mindedness, optimizing options, increasing specialization and socialization, accelerating our own evolution and all those trends lean towards more kinds of biochemical agents for our minds. There will be more smart pills, but we'll have a strong choice in what kind.

Underground CO2 sequestering — The technium is inevitably moving towards global interaction, global awareness, and global action, and the global problem of greenhouse gases will need a global solution. Some kind of geo-engineering is inevitable, but the particular technique is not.

Brain-wave phone controllers — After keyboards, after voice command, there is thought command. Think of who you want to speak to and bingo you are connected. Or think of where you want to go, and your automobile takes you there. The usual biases propelling disembodiment, more complex structure, heightened sentience, and new sensory dimensions all make thought control inevitable, but whether we choose to use it everyday on phones is not. The technology will thrive in some domain; we have a choice in how and where we apply it.

Public location trackers — Location tracking technology will be built into every electronic gadget and article. Literally anything can be tracked anytime anywhere. It is up to us how. There are many ways this inevitable superpower can be dispensed.

Transcontinental maglev trains — There is nothing inevitable about long-distance maglev trains. Or any kind of specific long-distance transportation. Other than that we'll have lots of it. And more of it, used more often. The inevitable trend is more miles traveled per person, even with, or despite the increase in communication bandwidth and fidelity. Increasing choice and freedom demand ever more mobility.

Male contraception — It will inevitably be an option, but it is totally evitable whether it becomes common.

Iris/face ID detectors — The irreversible slide towards greater socialization, more shared sentience, greater social structure, and integrated globalism means that some kind of biometric identification is inevitable. But we have a great degree of freedom in setting up the defaults and assumptions of this technology, and directing the shape of a society relying on this inevitable system.

Free, full genome sequences — Both the price and the data will be inevitable, but not who funds it, or whether it becomes mandatory, or public, or actionable.

Robot-driven cars — Inevitable, and sooner than you think. In a neat reversal many highways will be quick to ban human drivers because their driving will be proven to be less safe. Other regions will pride themselves on robot-free lanes. The arrangements of smart-machine/human will play out in a thousand different styles, all chosen.

Unless I am uncommonly lucky more than one of these speculations will be dead wrong. I don't intend these tweets as predictions. They are meant to illustrate the triad nature of the technium, how the "self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow" of technological forces pushes us along, swayed by the character of past inventions, but providing us plenty of room to choose the specific manner by which these forces are rendered. We choose whether to use our eyeballs as ID, or whether we share lanes with robot cars. But we don't have a choice in whether cars become more robotic in general, or whether biometric IDs become more common, or whether we'll have a global internet.

"Inevitable" is a fighting word. It raises hackles among many who doubt it exists in history. It also is seen by others as an excuse. The French philosopher of technology Jacques Ellul says "the process of technological advance surges along an ineluctable path largely because human agents have abdicated their essential role." In other words, technologies are only inevitable if we let them be.

Inevitability is impossible to prove, particularly when we cannot rewind the tape of time, and particularly when we have a sample size of one. But we should not take inevitability as a loss or defeat. Inevitability makes prediction easier. The better we can forecast, the better prepared we can be for what comes. If we can discern the large outlines of persistent forces, we can better education our children in the appropriate skills and literacies need for thriving in that world. We can shift the defaults in our laws and public institutions to reflect that coming reality. If, for instance, everyone's full DNA will be sequenced, then instructing everyone in genetic literacy becomes essential. Each must know the limits to what can, and cannot, be gleaned from this code, how it varies or not among related individuals, what might impact its integrity, what info about it can be shared, what concepts such as "race" and "ethnicity" mean in context, and how to use this knowledge to get therapeutics tailored to it. There's a whole world to open up, and it will take time, but we can begin to sort these choices out now because its arrival, in alignment with the extropic principles, is pretty inevitable.

As the technium progresses, better tools for forecasting and prediction serve as our Serenity Prayer, helping us spot the inevitable outside the expanding universe of free choices that new innovations bring. To return to the adolescence analogy, because we can anticipate the inevitable onset of human adolescence, we are better able to thrive in it. Teenagers are biologically compelled to take risks as a means of establishing their independence. Evolution "wants" risky teenagers. Because risky behavior is expected in adolescence, this knowledge is both reassuring to teenagers (you are normal, not a freak) and to society, and an invitation employ that "normal" riskiness for improvement and gain. If we ascertain that a global web of continuous connection is an inevitable phase in a growing civilization, than we can be both reassured by this inevitability and take it as an invitation to make the best possible global web we can.

As technology advances we gain both more possibilities and, if we are smart and wise, better ways to anticipate choice-less trends. Our real choices in technology matter. Although constrained by inevitable forms of development, the particular specifics of a technological phase matter to us greatly. The chosen materialization of each technology supplies the character to our society. Electromagnetic radiation as a communication matrix was inevitable. But the particular social forms we used to invent radio make a huge difference to us. A simple choice such as whether the radio spectrum is shared or hoarded will shape the contours of its preordained appearance.

The lessons of the technium's triad are this: 1) Anticipate the technium's inevitable macro developments, and build better tools to predict them; 2) Make choices in technology that further the extropic principles of increasing opportunities, socialization, consilience, sentience, and so on. 3) Choose details and defaults with the awareness that our choices today form the constraints of tomorrow.

Easier said then done.

The Choice of Cities

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:22:21 -0800

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about one or two percent for most of recorded history. (The chart's Y axis is a logarithmic scale of percentage.) Yet almost everything that we think of when we say "culture" arose within cities. After all, the terms "city" and "civilization" share the same root. But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.

Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it's a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn't matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that "were putrid, sodden and sagging." Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that "slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape" of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a "fixed abode" — that is they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: "Several families inhabit one house. A weaver's family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace." That refrain is repeated throughout history. Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak. In the New York slums "nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family."

San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that "95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land." Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, "Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties." Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called "squatlers." As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first 21st century cities.

That's how it works. Over time slums gain permanency. Ad hoc shelters are upgraded, infrastructure extended, and makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow.

Slums of the past and slums today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity. Every slum boasts eateries, and bars. And most have rooming houses, or places you can rent a bed. They have animals, fresh milk, grocery stores, barber shops, healers, herb stores, repair stands, and strong armed men offering "protection." A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.

The improvisation and creative energies unleashed by a squatter city are so attractive that we build them just for the pleasure of their raucousness. Take Burning Man, the arts festival arising every year in the Nevada desert. It is a bona fide squatter city built and run semi-legally by its inhabitants. It is, in essence, a slum with porta potties. It draws 40,000 residents who bang together huts, shanties, tents, and make-shift shelters, and then, like any other slum, trade, barter, and share their few skills and belongings. The owner-built architecture of Burning Man is thrilling, and the gift economy bracing. Because this futuristic slum is so dense and temporary, it has one of the highest concentrations of creativity I've seen anywhere.
Like any city, a slum is highly efficient. Maybe even more than the official sections because nothing goes to waste. The rag pickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter, and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but a city also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions.

The squatter city at Black Rock, Nevada

As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, "Cities are wealth creators; they have always been." He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world's population, "produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations." A Canadian demographer figured that "80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities." The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens. As Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums, "The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years…" Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it's close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.

There is a price to pay for that growth. As vibrant and dynamic as cities are, their edges can be unpleasant. To enter a slum you need to walk down shit lane. There is human excrement rotting on the sidewalk, urine flowing in the gutter and garbage piled up in heaps. I've done it many times in the sprawling shantytowns of the developing world and it is no fun — especially for the residents. To compensate for this outer contamination and ugliness, the insides of squatter housing is often surprisingly soothing. Recycled material covers the walls, color abounds, knick-knacks accumulate to create a comfy zone. Sure, one room will house far more people than seems possible, but for many, a slum dwelling offers more comfort than a village hut. While the pirated electricity may be unreliable, at least there is electricity. The single water spigot may have a long line, but it might be closer than the well at home. Medicines are expensive, but available. And there are schools with teachers that show up.

It is not utopia. When it rains, slums turn to mud cities. The ceaseless call for bribes for everything is dispiriting. And there is the embarrassment that squatters feel about the obvious low-status of their homes. As Suketa Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai, and quoted by Brand) says, "Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?" Then he answers: "So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment…"

Then Mehta continues: "For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn't just about money. It's also about freedom." Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children." The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on earth, roaming the Great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one's boss. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and hustling into drab concrete block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos. As reported by Donovan Webster for National Geographic, they stable their camels and goats in their ancestral village, since the bounty and attraction of the herder's life still remain for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: "We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children." An 80-year old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: "The children will have more options for their future."

The migrants don't have to come. Yet, they come by the millions from the villages, or the deserts and scrublands. If you ask them why they come, it's almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities. They could stay where they are. The seasonal droughts and floods are eternal. The hardship in planting and harvesting in the hills are ancient. And so is the incredible beauty of the land and the intensity of family and community support. If everything were equal who would want to leave a Greek island, or a Himalayan village, or the lush gardens of southern China? The young men and women could stay in the villages and adopt the satisfying rhythms of agriculture and small town craft that their parents followed. The same tools work. The same traditions would deliver the same good things. Very little in the country side has changed. It is all as it has always been — except the outside around it is new. Now the young have TV and radio and trips into town to see movies and they know what is possible. They could stay. But while their options in the village have not decreased, the options outside the village in the city have enlarged to such a degree that it makes the village seem a prison. They could stay, like the Amish choose to do. Or Wendell Berry. They could keep the minimalist ways going as their ancestors have for millennia. They could stay and not increase their technology. But they choose — very willingly, very eagerly — to run to the city.

Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desires to migrate to the city because their villages lacked the options of education, jobs and opportunity. It is true there's an imbalance of options — that's the point. But there is work in the villages; it is just that this work does not pay cash (by which to buy cell phones and movie tickets), and it is boring for many, although it can be very satisfying if one is patient. That livelihood of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, strong conformity, rewarding physical labor — all this treasure is unquestionably available to them. They could stay. But they do not choose it. They choose possibilities and opportunities.

They stream into the open-ended city aware of what they left behind. I once spotted the classic Manhattan subway map on the mud walls of a Sherpa hut in the Himalaya. It was some trekker's small joke, a nod to technological incongruity. But in many parts of Africa and Asia it is not incongruous to hear country-western music wailing from a radio in a quiet alley. Country music has an unexpected international appeal. Country star Kenny Rogers is the number one musician in Kenya, where there are more than one all-country-music radio stations. Dolly Parton sells out in South Africa. Modified versions of Johnny Cash cover songs can he heard in Afghanistan. Country music has fans wherever people are departing rural areas. In other words, worldwide. Turns out that the weeping tunes about better days can be understood even without understanding the lyrics. That crying slide guitar is the perfect accompaniment for the universal nostalgia that millions of migrants experience in their new urban homes. They miss the countryside they recently left, and they can hear their own yearning for it in Kenny Rogers's deep longing. Country music began in America during the very period when vigorous farm towns dissolved into suburbia. It is played along highways, among factory workers, and in the low-rent fringes of urbanity as a comforting reminder of what has been lost. Perhaps the songs serve as a charm to ward off further demise. The benefits of the city and technology are not free; they are paid with a sigh.

There are times and places when that pull of options is replaced by a involuntary push. I think there is nothing as disturbing as the sight of indigenous tribesmen, say in the Amazon basin or in the jungles of Borneo or Papua New Guinea, wielding chain saws felling their own forests. When your forest home is toppled, you are pushed into camps, then towns, and then to cities. That migration is not voluntary. Once in a camp, cut off from your hunter-gatherer skills, it makes a weird sense to take the only paid job around, which is cutting down your neighbors forest. Even though this job is a choice of sorts, the narrow options that constrain it are very clear. The despicable treatment of indigenous tribes by American white settlers really did force them into settlements and the adoption of new technologies they were in no hurry to use. But since not every colonial nation forced their indigenous subjects into urbanity, this forced migration is not inherent in urbanity. It is a policy that is freely chosen by a people, and not mandated by technology itself. Gratefully, forced migration happens less and less. Habitat for aboriginal tribes, however, is still being cut down, putting intense pressure on them to abandon their ancient lifestyles. A certain small percentage of the river of people streaming into the cities today are being pushed by the expansion of the technium. It is a horribly stupid policy to destroy natural habitat this way, and a horribly stupid policy to displace tribes. It does not have to be that way. Wiser people would not allow it.

But today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities — the hundreds of millions per decade — is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head towards possibilities and increased freedoms.

Why Technology Can't Fulfill

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:22:43 -0800

At the beginning of this summer an Amish guy I met online rode his bicycle out to our home along the foggy Pacifica coast. Online, is of course, the last place you'd ever expect to meet an Amishman. But he contacted me via my blog, and then a few months later he appeared at our door hot, sweaty and out of breath from the long uphill climb to our house under the redwoods. Parked a few feet away was his ingenious Dohan foldup bike, which he rode from the train station. Like most Amish he did not fly, so he had stored his bike on the 3-day cross-country train ride from Pennsylvania. This was not his first trip to this neck of the woods. He had previously ridden his bike along the entire coast of California, and had in fact seen a lot of the world on train and boats.

For the next week, our Amish visitor couch-surfed in our spare bedroom, and at dinner he regaled us with tales of his life growing up in an horse-and-buggy Old Order Plain Folk community. I'll call our friend Leon Hoffman, although that is not his real name, because the Amish are averse to bringing attention to themselves (thus their reluctance to being photographed). But Leon is an unusual Amish. While he never went to high school (Amish formal education ceases after 8th grade) he is among the few Plain Folk to go to college, where he is currently an older student in his 30s. He hopes to study medicine, and perhaps become the first Amish doctor. Many former Amish have gone to college, or become doctors, but none that remain in the Old Order church. Leon is unusual in that he has remained in the church, yet relishes his ability to live in the "outside" world as well.

The Amish practice a remarkable tradition called "rumspringer" wherein their teenagers are allowed to ditch their home-made uniforms -- suspenders and hats for boys, long dresses and bonnets for girls -- and don baggy pants and short skits to buy a car, listen to music, and party for a few years before they decide to forever give up these modern amenities and join the Old Order church. This intimate, real exposure to the technological universe means that they are fully cognizant of what that world has to offer, and what exactly they are denying themselves. Leon is on a sort of permanent "rumspringer" although he doesn't party, but works very hard. His father runs a machine shop (a common Amish occupation; not all are farmers), and so Leon is genius with tools. I was in the middle of a bathroom plumbing job on the afternoon when Leon first showed up and he quickly took over the job. I was impressed by his complete mastery of hardware store parts. I've heard of Amish auto mechanics who don't drive cars but can fix any model you give them.

As Leon spoke of what his boyhood was like with only a horse and buggy for transportation, and what he learned in his multi-grade, one room school house, a fervent wistfulness played over his face. He missed the comfort of Old Order life now that he was away from it. We outsiders think of life without electricity, central heat, or cars as hard punishment. But curiously Amish life offers more leisure than contemporary urbanity does. In Leon's account, they always had time for a game of baseball, reading, visiting neighbors and hobbies. This was a complete surprise to Eric Brende, an MIT student who gave up an engineering degree and instead dropped out to live alongside an Old Order Amish/Mennonite community. Brende, who is not Amish, eliminated as much gear as he could from his home with his wife and tried to live as Plain as possible, a tale he recounts in his book, Better Off. For over two years Brende gradually adopted what he calls a minimite lifestyle. A minimite uses "the least amount of technology needed to accomplish something." Like his Old Order Amish/Mennonite neighbors, he employed a minimum of technology: no power tools, or electric appliances. Brende found that the absence of electronic entertainment, the absence of long auto commutes or frequent shopping trips, and the absence of chores simply maintaining existing complex technology, was replaced by more real leisure time. In fact the constraints of cutting wood by hand, hauling manure with horses, doing dishes by lamp light liberated the first genuine leisure time he had ever had.

Who is not seduced by the allure of this lifestyle?

At the same time, the hard, strenuous manual work was satisfying and rewarding. He not only found more leisure but more fulfillment as well. Wendell Berry is a thinker and farmer who works his farm in an old fashioned way using horses instead of tractors, very similar to the Amish. Like Brende, Berry finds tremendous satisfaction in the visible arrangement of bodily labor and agricultural results. Berry is a master wordsmith as well, and no one has been able to convey the "gift" which minimalism can deliver as well as he. One particular story from his collection The Gift of Good Land captures the almost ecstatic sense of fulfillment won with minimal technology.

Last summer we put up our second cutting of alfalfa on an extremely hot, humid afternoon. Our neighbors came in to help, and together we settled into what could pretty fairly be described as suffering. The hayfield lies in a narrow river bottom, a hill on one side and tall trees along the river on the other. There was no breeze at all. The hot, bright, moist air seemed to wrap around us and stick to us while we loaded the wagons.

It was worse in the barn, where the tin roof raised the temperature and held the air even closer and stiller. We worked more quietly than we usually do, not having breath for talk. It was miserable, no doubt about it. And there was not a push button anywhere in reach.

But we stayed there and did the work, were even glad to do it, and experienced no futurological fits. When we were done we told stories and laughed and talked a long time, sitting on a post pile in the shade of a big elm. It was a pleasing day.

Why was it pleasing? Nobody will ever figure that out by a "logical projection." The matter is too complex and too profound for logic. It was pleasing, for one thing, because we got done. That does not make logic, but it makes sense. For another thing, it was good hay, and we got it up in good shape. For another, we like each other and we work together because we want to.

And so, six months after we shed all that sweat, there comes a bitter cold January evening when I go up to the horse barn to feed. It is nearly nightfall, and snowing hard. The north wind is driving the snow through the cracks in the barn wall. I bed the stalls, put corn in the troughs, climb into the loft and drop the rations of fragrant hay into the mangers. I go to the back door and open it; the horses come in and file along the driveway to their stalls, the snow piled white on their backs. The barn fills with the sounds of their eating. It is time to go home. I have my comfort ahead of me: talk, supper, fire in the stove, something to read. But I know too that all my animals are well fed and comfortable, and my comfort is enlarged in theirs. On such a night you do not feed out of necessity or duty. You never think of the money value of the animals. You feed and care for them out of fellow feeling, because you want to. And when I go out and shut the door, I am satisfied.

Leon spoke of the same equation: fewer distractions, more satisfaction. The ever-ready embrace of his community was palpable. Imagine it: neighbors would pay your medical bill if needed, or build your house in a few weeks without pay, and more importantly allow you to do the same for them. Minimal technology, unburdened by the cultural innovations such as insurance or credit cards, forces a daily reliance on neighbors and friends. Hospital stays are paid by church members, who also visit the sick regularly. Barns destroyed by fire or storm are rebuilt in a barn-raising. Financial, marital, behavioral counseling are done by peers. The community is as self-reliant as it can make itself, and only as self-reliant as it is because it is a community. I began to understand the strong attraction the Amish exerts on its young adults and why, even today, only a very few leave after their rumspringer. Leon observed that of the 300 or so friends his age in his church, only 2 or 3 have abandoned this very technologically constrained life, and the ones who did, joined a lifestyle that is still constrained compared to the average American.

But the cost for this closeness and dependency is limited choice. No education beyond 8th grade. Few career options for guys, none besides homemakers for girls. I asked Leon whether he could imagine all the goodness of the Amish life -- all that comforting mutual aid, satisfying hands-on work, reliable community infrastructure --whether it could still issue forth if, say, all kids attended school up to 10th grade? Just for starters. Well, you know, he said, "hormones kick in around the 9th grade and boys, and even some girls, just don't want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age."

Fair enough. I can really identify with that, since I wish I had been "doing real stuff" instead of being holed up in a stuffy high school classroom. On the other hand, reading books in high school opened up my mind to possibilities I had never imagined in grade school, and my world began expanding in those years and has never stopped. The technium amplifies possibilities, and a technological oriented education (which is what contemporary education is) optimizes choices. Amish minimalism, on the other hand, is deliberately aimed to optimize satisfaction, fulfillment and the comforting bonds of family and community. It does that well.

In the late 1960s some million self-described hippies stampeded to small farms and make-shift communes to live simply, not too different from the Amish. I was part of that movement. Wendell Berry was one of the clear-thinking gurus we listened to. In tens of thousands of experiments in rural America, we jettisoned the technology of the modern world (because it seemed to crush individualism) and tried to rebuild a new world while digging wells by hand, grinding our own flour, keeping bees, erecting homes from sun-dried clay, and even getting windmills and water generators to occasionally work. Some found religion, too. Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew -- that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn't no-technology but some technology, and what we then called appropriate technology. This day-glo, deliberate, conscious engagement with appropriate technology was deeply satisfying for a while.

But only for a while. The Whole Earth Catalog, which I edited at one point, published the field manual for those millions of simple technology experiments. We ran pages and pages of how to build chicken coops, grow your own veggies, curdle your own cheese, school your children and start a home business in house made from bales of straw. I got to witness close up how the early enthusiasm for restricted technology would inevitably give way to unease and restlessness. Slowly those millions of hippies drifted away from their deliberate low tech world. One-by-one they left their domes for suburban garages and lofts, and much to our collective astonishment, transformed their small-is-beautiful skills into small-is-startup entrepreneurs. The origins of the Wired generation and the laid-back, long-hair computer culture (think open source) lay in the hippies of the 70s. As Stewart Brand, hippy founder of the Whole Earth Catalog remembers, " 'Do your own thing' easily translated into 'Start your own business'." I've lost count of the hundreds of individuals I personally know who left communes to eventually start hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It's almost a cliche by now -- barefoot to billionaire, a la Steve Jobs.

The hippies of the previous generation did not remain in their Amish-like mode because as satisfying and attractive as the work in those communities were, the siren of choices was more attractive. The hippies left the farm for the same reason the young have always left: the possibilities leveraged by technology beckon all night and day. In retrospect we might say the hippies left for the same reason Thoreau left his Walden; they came and then left to experience life to its fullest. Volunteer simplicity is a possibility, an option, a choice that one should experience for a least part of one's life, not the least to help you sort out your technology priorities. But in my observation simplicity's fullest potential requires that one consider it one phase of many (even if a recurring phase as is meditation or the Sabbath). In the past decade a new generation of minimites has arisen, and they are now urban homesteading -- living lightly in cities, supported by adhoc communities of like-minded homesteaders. They are trying to have both, the Amish satisfaction of intense mutual aid and hand labor, and the ever cascading choices of a city.

It is a fine experiment. I too left a place where I built a house from scratch, and kept bees, and lived on a commune, and I left because choices were limited. Instead I came to a place where opportunities increased every day: a megalopolis sprawl. Yet I carry an old habit of minimites: I am constantly seeking the least amount of technology needed to do the most good. I have hope that some version of minimitism is possible in urbanity.

Because of my own personal journey from low-tech to high choice, I remain fascinated and deeply impressed by Leon and Berry, and Brende and the Old Order Plain Folk communities. I am impressed that their tightly bound mutual support can reliably resist the perennial lure of modernity. That's an amazing testimony because so few other cultures can boast that.

But there is one aspect of the Amish, and the minimites, and the small-is-beautiful hippies at their heyday, that is selfish. The "good" they wish their minimal technology to achieve is primarily the fulfillment of a fixed nature. The human that is satisfied by this agricultural goodness is an unchanging human. For the Amish, one's fulfillment must swell inside the traditional confine of a farmer, tradesman, or housewife. For minimites and hippies, fulfillment must rise within the confine of the natural unhampered by artificial aids. For example, Wendell Berry will agree that a solid cast iron hand pump is much superior to hauling water in buckets on a yoke. And that domesticated horses (an invention equal to iron) are vastly better than pulling a plow yourself, as many an ancient farmer has done. But for Berry, who uses horses to drive his farm gear, anything beyond the innovation of horse power works against the satisfaction of human nature and natural systems. When tractors were introduced in the 1940s, "the speed of work could be increased, but not the quality." He writes: "Consider, for example, the International High Gear No. 9 mowing machine. This is a horse-drawn mower that certainly improved on everything that came before it, from the scythe to previous machines in the International line... I own one of these mowers. I have used it in my hayfield at the same time that a neighbor mowed there with a tractor mower; I have gone from my own freshly cut hayfield into others just mowed by tractors; and I can say unhesitatingly that, though the tractors do faster work, they do not do it better. The same is substantially true, I think, of other tools: plows, cultivators, harrows, grain drills, seeders, spreaders, etc... The coming of the tractor made it possible for a farmer to do more work, but not better."

For Berry technology peaked in 1940, about the moment when all these farm implements were as good as they got. In his eyes, and the Amish too, the elaborate circular solution of a small mixed family farm, where the farmer produces plant feed for the animals who produced manure, power and food to grow more plants, is the perfect pattern for the health and satisfaction of a human being, human society and environment. Yet, it is pure foolishness, if not the height of conceit and hubris, to believe that in the long course of human history, and by that I mean the next ten thousand years in addition to the past ten thousand years, the peak of human invention and satisfaction should be 1940. It is no coincidence that this date also happens to be the time when Wendell Berry was a young boy growing up on a farm with horses. 1940 cannot be the end of technological perfection for human fulfillment simply because human nature is not at its end.

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago, and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration, and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago. The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature -- of an ancient agrarian epoch. I call this devotion to a traditional being "selfish" because it ignores the way in which our nature -- our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations -- are being recast by ourselves, by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures.

There are many traditionalists who deny this shift, and who hold our nature is unchanging; from the perspective of an individual, or even a generation, it looks that way. But for anyone raised by a modern culture crammed with ubiquitous writing, communication technology, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day, we are different beings than our ancestors. We think different. That should be no surprise because our personas are dictated beyond our genetics. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of our all those who've lived before us and live with us. At the same time our genes are racing. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, from medical interventions to gene therapy, and then racing our culture with computers and wires as well. In fact every trend of the technium -- especially its increasing evolvability -- point to more rapid change of human nature in the future. Curiously many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing, insist that we had better not.

Not everyone is born to be a farmer. Not every human is ideally matched to the rhythms of horse and corn and seasons, and the eternal close inspection of village conformity. Where in the Amish scheme of things is the support for a mathematical genius, or a native doctor, or a person who might spend all day composing new music? Mr. Berry himself supplements his farming satisfactions with those of essay writing (using paper and pencil). A large technological system of book printing, distribution, desk-bound editors, and bookshop sellers reward his efforts. He would have engaged that part of himself much less if no one outside his family was reading him.

What the Amish can't deliver are possibilities. Technology summons possibilities. The arc of change in the technium moves toward increasing choices, options, and possibilities. Chief among those expanding possibilities are new ways to be human. If we expand our memory with an always-on auxiliary Google-in-a-phone attachment from when we are young, then we have a new organ. But we don't know how to satisfy those new parts of us. The honest truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don't know what is being filled? And how do we know how large we are -- our innate potential -- until we try to overfill it?

We expand technology to find out who we are. The Amish find incredible contentment in their enactment of a fixed human nature. This deep human contentment is real, visceral, renewable, and so attractive that Amish numbers are doubling every generation. But I believe the Amish and minimites have not, and can not, really discover who they are. They trade discovery for contentment. In their deliberate constraint of technology they optimize an alluring combination of leisure, comfort, and certainty over the optimization of uncertain possibilities - which is what the technium optimizes.

The narrow minimite definition of humanity and the occupations one can attain, not only constrain themselves, but others. If you are a web designer today, it is only because many tens of thousands of other people have been expanding the realm of possibilities. They have gone beyond farms and home shops to invent a complex ecology of electronic devices that require new expertise and new ways of thinking. If you are an accountant, untold numbers of creative people in the past devised the logic and tools of accounting for you. If you do science, your instruments and field of study have been created by others. If you are a photographer, or an extreme sports athlete, or a baker, or an auto mechanic, or a nurse -- then your potential has been given an opportunity by the work of others. You are being expanded as others expand themselves.

I know the Amish, and Wendell Berry and Eric Brende, and the minimites well enough to know that they believe we don't need exploding technology to expand ourselves, at least in the proper directions. They are, after all, minimalists. They see most of the promises of freedoms from increased technology as illusionary. In their eyes, technology generates fake choices, meaningless options, or real choices that are really entrapments. This is an argument worth exploring because there is some truth in it. The technium is an autonomous system that tends to favor choices by humans that expand its own reach, which can feel like a type of entrapment. And many choices we make don't matter.

But the evidence that the technium expands real choices is voluminous. Throughout history there is a one-way march from the farm to the bustling choices of the city. That steady migration is going on today at a shocking rate; More than two million people per day decide they prefer the options that modern technology life offers, so they flee the constrained choices in a picturesque and comforting village somewhere. They can't all be bewitched. It would be a powerful spell to fool 50% of the people living on this planet.

Those million urban migrants per day have enrolled into the technium for the same reason you have (and you have if you are reading this): to increase your choices. To increase your chances of unleashing your full potential. Perhaps someday someone will invent a tool that is made just for your special combination of hidden talents. Or perhaps you will make your own tool. Most importantly, and unlike the Amish and minimites, you may invent a tool which will help unleash the fullest of someone else. Our call is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, but to expand the possibilities for others. We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world in order to increase the number of possibilities for the most people. Greater technology will selfishly unleash us, but it will also unselfishly unleash others, our children and all to come.

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don't manufacture the solar panels on their roofs. They don't grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They don't educate or train their own doctors. They also famously do not enroll in armed forces of any kind (but in compensation of that, they are world-class volunteers in the outside world. Few people volunteer more often, or with more expertise and passion than the Amish/Mennonites.) In short they depend up the outside world for they way they currently live. The increasing numbers of minimite urban homesteads are likewise indebted to the ongoing technium. If the Amish had to generate their all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, it would not be Amish at all. Their communities would hardly be civilized.

Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice -- but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it.

As I encourage new technologies I am working for the Amish, and Leon, and the minimite homesteaders. So is anyone who is inventing, discovering, and expanding possibilities. In our ceaseless collective generation of new technologies, we technology boosters can invent more appropriate tools for minimalism, even though they are not doing that for us. Nonetheless, the Amish and minimites have something important to teach us about selecting what we embrace. I don't want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be slow to embrace technology that I can back out of. I don't want stuff that closes off options to others (like weapons). And I do want the minimum because I've learned that I have limited time or attention.

I think I can put it this way: What we are seeking is the minimum amount of technology that will generate the maximum number of options for all.

Triumph of the Default

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:47:24 -0800

[Translations: Italian]

One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. "Default" is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. Default, for instance, as in: the default of this program assumes that dates are given in two digit years not four. Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental to the technium.

It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. In the early days of computers, when system crashes were frequent, and variables a lot of trouble to input, a default was the value the system would automatically assign itself if a program failed or when it first initiated. It was a smart trick. Unless a user, or programmer, took the trouble to alter it, the default ruled, ensuring that its host system would probably work. So electronic goods and software programs were shipped with all options set to defaults. The defaults were preset for the expected norms of the buyers (say the standard voltage of the US), or expected preferences (subtitles off for movies), or best practices (virus detector on). Most times presets work fine. We now have defaults installed in automobiles, insurance programs, networks, phones, health care plans, credit cards, and anything that is customizable.

Indeed, anything with the slightest bit of computational intelligence it in (that is any complex modern artifact) has defaults embedded into it. These presets are explicit biases programmed into the gadget, or system, or institution. But a default is more than the unspoken assumptions that have always been present in anything made. For instance most hand tools were "defaulted" to right hand use. In fact assuming the user was right handed was so normal, it was never mentioned. Likewise, the shape of hand tools assumed the user was male. Not just tools: early automobiles were designed assuming the driver was male. Anything manufactured must make a guess about its presumed buyer and their motivations; these assumptions are naturally designed into the technology. The larger the scale of the system, the more assumptions it has to make. A careful examination of a particular technological infrastructure will reveal the broad assumptions that are buried in its design. So American optimism, high regard for the individual, and penchant for change are all wrapped up in the specific designs of the American electrical system, railroads, highways, and education.

But while these embedded biases, common to all technology, share many attributes with the concept of a default, they are not a default proper. A default is an assumption that can be changed. The assumption of right-handedness in a hammer, or pliers, or scissors, could not be switched. The assumption of a driver's gender as manifested in the seat position in an automobile could not be altered easily in the old days. But in much of modern technology it can be. The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. Technologies can be tailored to your preferences, and optimized to fit your own talents.

However the downside to extremely flexible techniques is that all these nodes of exploding possibility become overwhelming. Too many mind-numbing alternatives, and not enough time (let alone will) to evaluate them all. The specter of 99 varieties of mustard on the supermarket shelf, or 2,356 options in your health plan, or 56,000 possible hairdos for your avatar in a virtual world produces massive indecision and paralysis. The amazing solution to this problem of debilitating over-abundant choice are defaults. Defaults allow us to choose when to choose. For example, your avatar is given a standard default look (kid in jeans) to start out. You can alter every default description later. Think of it as managed choice. Those thousands of variables — real choice — can be managed by adopting smart defaults, which "make" a choice for us, yet reserve our full freedom to choose in the future when we want to. My freedoms are not restricted but staggered. As I become more educated I go back to my preferences and opt in, or opt out, or tweak a parameter up or down, or ditch one thing for another. But until I do, the choices remain veiled, out of sight, and house-trained, obediently waiting. In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice.
Contrast that expansion to the classic hammer, or automobile, or 1950s phone system. Users simply had few choices in how the tool was used. World-class engineers spent years honing a fixed universal design to work best for the most people, and there's still an enduring beauty in those designs. The relative inertness of industrial artifacts and infrastructure was compensated with elegant and brilliant access for the average everyman. Today you may not actually make a lot more choices about your phone than 50 years ago, but you could. And you'll have more choice in where to make those few choices. These unfolding potential choices are nested within the adaptive nature of mobiles and networks. Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs.

Defaults first arrived in the complex realms of computation and communication networks, but they aren't excluded from hammers, or cars, or shoes, or door knobs, for that matter. As we inject adaptability into these artifacts by manufacturing them with traces of computer chips and smart materials, we open them up for defaults as well. Imagine a hammer handle made of some kind of adaptive material that would reform itself to your left hand, or to a woman's hand. You might very well have the option to designate your gender, or age, or proficiency, or work environment, directly into the small neurons of the hammer. And if so, then the tool would be shipped with defaults.

But defaults are "sticky." Many psychological studies have shown that the tiny bit of extra effort needed to alter a default is enough to dissuade most people from bothering, so they stick to the default, despite their untapped freedom. Their camera's clock blinks at the default of 12:00, or their password remains whatever temporary one was issued them. The hard truth, as any engineer will tell you, is that most defaults are never altered. Pick up any device, and 98 out of 100 options will be the ones preset at the factory. I know from my own experience that I have altered very few of the preferences available to me; I've stuck to the defaults. I've been using a Macintosh from the day it was introduced 25 years ago and I am still discovering basic defaults and preferences I had never heard of. From an engineering perspective this default inertia is a measure of success, because it means the defaults work. Without much change, products are used, and their systems happily hum on.

Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers — those who set the presets — to steer the system. The architecture of these choices can profoundly shape the culture of that system's use. Even the sequences of defaults and choices make a difference too. Retail merchandisers know this well. They stage stores and websites to channel decisions in a particular order to maximize sales. If you let hungry students make their desert choice first rather than last, this default order has an impact on their nutrition.

Every element of a complex technology, from its programming language, to the user interface design, to the selection of its peripherals, harbors a multitude of defaults: Does the system assume anonymity? Does it assume most people are basically good or basically up to no good? Are its defaults set to maximize sharing or maximize secrecy? Should its rules expire after a set period by default or renew automatically by default? How easy is to undo a choice? Should the process of control be an opt in or opt out process? Recombining four or five different default parameters will spawn systems with hundreds of different characteristics.

Identical technological arrangements — say two computer networks constructed of the same hardware and software — can yield very different cultural consequences simply by altering the defaults embedded in the system. The influence of a default is so powerful that one single default can act as a very tiny nudge that can sway extremely large and complex networks. As an example, most pension investment programs, such as corporate 401k plans, have very low participation rates in part because the plans have an overwhelming number of sub-options to choose from. The behavioral economist Richard Thaler relates experiments whereby making enrollment automatic with a default choice ("mandated choice") dramatically increased savings rates for employees. Anyone could opt out the program at any time, with full freedom to change the specifics of their plan, but simply shifting the default from "having to sign up" to "automatic enrollment" changed the entire tenor of the system. A similar shift happens if you make the donation of organs upon death automatically an "opt out" choice (it happens unless you refuse beforehand) versus "opt in" (it does not happen unless you sign up). A opt out donor system greatly increases the number of organs donated.

The tiny default is one of the ways that we can bend the inevitable unrolling of a technological innovation. For instance, an elaborate continent-wide technical system, such as 110-volt AC electricity, may gather its it own momentum as it acquires self-reinforcing support from other technical systems (like diesel generators, or factory assembly lines), and that accelerating momentum may steamroll over prior systems, but at every node in the electrical body, a default resides, and with the proper alignment and deft choices, those slim defaults can be used to nudge the gigantic system toward certain states. The system can be bent towards making it easy to add new but less secure innovations , or making it difficult to change, but more secure. The tiny nudges of defaults can shape how easy the network expands, or not. Or how well it incorporates unusual sources of power. Or whether it tends to centralize or decentralize. The shape of a technological system is set by the technology itself, but the character of the system can be set by us.

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that "no choice" is a choice itself. There's is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don't choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

Future Fossil of the Technium

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:54:09 -0800

Last year I posted an ode to the Anthropocene -- the period in Earth's long history when humans are the dominant geological force. That would be the last 20,000 years or so. One anthropocenic question brought up by Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from the University of Leicester, is, as he puts it, "What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?." He speculates that we'll leave fossil cities as the debris of our civilization is pressed into rock.

Reader Brett Lovgren was reminded on this on a walk along Wassenaar Beach in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. He tells me: "We were on a field trip with my son's 2nd grade class from the American School of the Hague. His science teacher had them identifying the shells, jellyfish and seaweed that wash up on the beach. The kids found this bit of barnacle encrusted plastic cup. It made me feel like an archaeologist from the future discovering a layer of the Technium."

The Fifth and Sixth Discontinuity

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:04:48 -0800

Philosopher Bruce Mazlish claims that the eyes of science have overthrown humanity's view of itself in a series of revelations. At each unveiling, we descend one notch. In the first removal, Copernicus dethroned our common-sense assumption that our world stood at the center of the universe. Astronomy eventually revealed, with a shock, that we were a minor tribe huddled on a small speck circling a nondescript star at the outer edge of an immense average galaxy floating among a trillion others in one small corner of the universe. The noble distinction between us and the rest of the universe was eliminated to reveal a continuous continuity of existence. Our perceived exceptionalism was demoted to the ordinary. Within the universe, we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

The second break from the exalted was launched by Darwin, who revealed that the exceptional discontinuity we perceived between ourselves and other animals or plants was equally illusionary. We are one continuous life, one evolution. Our position as humans is only one twig on a million-twigged tree, each terminal equally evolved. Within life we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of "I." Psychology and neurology discovered that the "I" is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many "i"s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

We are now in the middle of dispatching the fourth discontinuity. The venerable distinction between machines and living creatures is receding so fast that it is becoming increasingly clear to everyone that a grand continuity connects the world of the made and the world of born. Nature and machine are two faces of the same extropic force. I've previously written a long argument in support of this continuity, and I assume its validity here on this blog. The question today is not so much whether the technium shares its roots with biological evolution, but whether it will displace its parent, or cohabit with it. Either way within the technium we, the living, are not set apart but dwell in a continuum.

But as the arc of evolution continues beyond these four continuums, what future smoothings can we expect? I propose that the next exceptionalism to be broken by science, the fifth discontinuity so to speak, is the special status we give to the physical. We feel the universe to be a place full of physical material that pushes back and presses against us. Things have weight, size, and duration. That's what the universe is in everyday experience -- the real stuff that can be really measured, felt, and sensed. Our world of matter and energy follow a set of laws to such an exacting degree that we can manipulate it to make rockets and computers. Matter's consistent refusal to be bullied outside its own laws adds to the sense of it being "real." Real means physical.

Information, on the other hand, lacks physicality. Unlike energy, which we can at least measure with physical instruments, a digital bit is disembodied. It weighs nothing. It takes up no space. It flows as mysteriously as a gremlin. We don't have good measures for information. (If I make an exact copy of your song, am I increasing the amount of information in the world, or decreasing it because I am adding nothing new?) We are not yet sure if the total amount of information in the universe is conserved, nor if it is finite. Yet, we have come to see that life, even our own life, is a pattern of intangible information, rather than material form. Evolution – that great engine of creation -- is a pattern of information. And mind, especially the mind, is a type of information flow. So we know that the most powerful forces in the universe (that we are aware of) are constructed of the most intangible things we can detect: bits.

There stands the discontinuity: atoms vs bits. But lately, physicists have begun to suspect that atoms are composed of information in some way we don't understand. As legendary physicist John Wheeler puts it, "its are bits." The deeper we inspect the interior of sub atomic particles and their quirky behavior, the more they can be explained as information flows. Many physicists expect that when we get to the bottom of how matter works that we'll find primarily a structure of information and the absence of anything "material." Atoms will be understood as elaborate, dynamic arrangements of intangible signals. In an article published by the American Journal of Physics, entitled "What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us" solid-state-physicist David Mermin writes "matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. [There's] no duality between the existence of a thing and its properties: properties are all there is. Indeed: there are no things."

As this discontinuity between the realm of the physical and the realm of the immaterial is erased, scientists have began to re-envision the laws of physics as complex algorithms of code. Energy also, is being restated in terms of information. The pulsating stars and iron planets will gradually be seen by science as wisps of intangible nothings. Organisms and technologies, including mega structures such as skyscrapers, starships, and floating cites, will be defined as structures of computation, equivalent to software. Eventually the boundary between the tangible and intangible will be completely permeable, and the special status we assign to our physicality will be seen (again) as only one station on a long continuum. Within the realm of the real, we, the physical, are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

On the immense journey in front of us there will undoubtedly be many more smoothings ahead beyond the five we can already see. I don't know if it will be the sixth, seventh or nth discontinuity, but another boundary that is already being challenged is the unique place we give to the past, to causation, and to objectivity. Physical phenomenon are caused via a long chain of actions originating in the past, and we, the observers, remove ourselves from the chain of causes in order to study the phenomenon. For instance, scientists do controlled experiments and double-blind experiments so that they remain objective, removing their own observational biases from the causes they are studying. Science, which has brought us so far, clearly holds the "outside" unbiased observer to be an essential position. In fact by many definitions, science is the invention of the objective.

Further, science holds that causation must originate in the past. An event in the present is the last result of a chain of actions begun in the past. That seems logical and intuitive – as did the circling of the sun. But the weirdness of newly discovered quantum effects is rapidly breaking down the discontinuity between object and subject, past and future. With new instruments scientists can shoot quantum wave/particles through two tiny slits to measure the pattern of their arrival on a screen. Wheeler investigated exactly this experiment. True to its dual nature sometimes the wave/particle passes through the slits as a wave and sometimes it passes through them as a particle. But the particular form the wave/particle assumes as it passes through the two slits is decided upon measuring or observing the results. This is called the delayed-choice experiment because it means that the wave/particle chooses which form to pass through the slits after it has already passed through. Theoretically, if the slits were far enough away from the screen, the choice of whether the wave/particle was a wave or a particle could be delayed by billions of years after it had already happened. And this inversion of the ordinary arrow of causality is being driven by the observer.

Paul Davies suggests "the novel feature Wheeler introduced via his delayed-choice experiment was the possibility of observers today, and in the future, shaping the nature of physical reality in the past, including the far past when no observers existed." Minds today could, in theory, shape the very foundational laws of physics in a delayed-choice action, since Wheeler claimed, "so far as we can see today, the laws of physics cannot have existed from everlasting to everlasting. They must have come into being at the big bang." Since the laws of physics and information reside inside the cosmos, that gives mind a possible subjective role in shaping the cosmos via delayed choice. But since our minds and life are products of that cosmos, there is a necessary recursive loop. Davies writes: "Conventional science assumes a linear logical sequence: cosmos -> life -> mind. Wheeler suggested closing this chain into a loop: cosmos -> life -> mind -> cosmos." The universe was self-synthesizing. You can start anywhere along such a recursive loop. Wheeler observed: "Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics." Wheeler called this subjective self-creation, "the participatory universe."

When I asked the Piet Hut, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton, what innovations in the practice of science he expected to see in the future, he surprised me by suggesting "the return of the subjective." In order to get a more complete picture of reality, he said, we need to focus on the subjective. "We have painted ourselves in a corner, scientifically, by describing the whole world in objective terms, and finding less and less room for ourselves to stand on. We are now reaching the limits of a purely objective treatment. In various areas of science, from quantum mechanics to neuroscience and robotics, the pole of subjective experience can no longer be neglected." A more recognizable thinker echoes the thought: "The histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured," Stephen Hawking said recently, "contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history."

The notion that minds in the future might evolve to the point that they could subjectively influence the laws of their own physicality is of course, only the most extreme speculation. But the delay-choice experiment is not. It happens now every time our minds observe something. I delve into the details of this frontier chiefly to illustrate how technology continues to level distinctions we once thought crucial, and how technology continues to forge a kind of unity in knowledge.

Breaking the discontinuity between the objective and subjective won't be the last great unification either. As the technium advances, and mind expands, additional distinctions are primed to be blurred and unified. Looking ahead we can imagine that the keen distinction and superior status we assign to consciousness, versus the inert or non-unconsciousness (even if intelligent) of the rest of the material world could be unified into a continuum via technology. Likewise the discontinuity between reality and unreality (the imaginary) could likewise disappear with sufficient advanced technology.

It was not until we invented telescopes and mathematics that we could peer way past the Earth and see that it was not at the center of a revolving universe. It was not until we invented digital computation and could replicate life processes on intangible computer software that we realized that intelligence and life are not tangible. It was not until we devised sophisticated atom smashers that we began to perceive the true otherworldliness of our material world. Lasers, electron guns, charged coupler sensors, electronic chips – all these technologies made quantum mechanics visible. And once the quantum realm was visible, the paradoxes of the subjective mattered. Thus, through the medium of advanced tools, we saw a continuum where discontinuities had been seen before. In this way, as we expand the technium, upping our knowledge, we continually remove discontinuities in our perceptions.

The universe, as the sages in every religion teach us, is really one vast continuum. But to utilize knowledge of this universal continuum we need to expand our technology, which is really a way of expanding our collective mind. Technology's long term evolution moves science – that is the interconnected, accumulated body of knowledge of all human minds – towards unity, or consilience. Consilience is a term coined in the 1840 by philosopher William Whewell and resurrected recently by E.O. Wilson to indicate the unity of knowledge. Consilience would entail, among other things, a common set of axioms that can be used to adequately explain (and predict) the phenomenon we experience in the ecology of a tundra, the interior fusion of stars, the behavior of teenage social networks, the physics of quantum computing, and the mutation of viruses. Today science is far from consilience.

In addition to uniting the principles of different scientific fields, consilience will also need to bind unrelated bodies of knowledge together, some of it ancient knowledge. Advances in communication technology and the scientific method are doing that.

We casually talk about the "discovery of America" in 1492, or the "discovery of gorillas" in 1856, or the "discovery of vaccines" in 1796. Yet vaccines, gorillas and America were not unknown before their "discovery." Native peoples had been living in the Americas for 10,000 years before Columbus arrived and they had explore the continent far better than any European ever could. Certain West African tribes were intimately familiar the gorilla, and many more primate species yet to be "discovered." Dairy farmers had long been aware of the protective power of vaccines that related diseases offered, although they did not have a name for it. The same argument can be made about whole libraries worth of knowledge – herbal wisdom, traditional practices, spiritual insights – that are "discovered" by the educated but only after having been long known by native and folk peoples. These supposed "discoveries" seems imperialistic and condescending, and often are.

Engraving by Samuel Calvert of the new gorilla display at the National Museum published in The Illustrated Melbourne Post of 25 July 1865.

Yet there is one legitimate way in which we can claim that Columbus discovered America, and the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu discovered gorillas, and Edward Jenner discovered vaccines. They "discovered" previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating structured knowledge science. Until du Chaillu's adventures in Gabon any knowledge about gorillas was extremely parochial; the local tribes' vast natural knowledge about these primates was not integrated into all that science knew about all other animals. Information about "gorillas" remained outside of the structured known. In fact, until zoologists got their hands on Paul du Chaillu's specimens, gorillas were scientifically considered to be a mythical creature similar to Big Foot, seen only by uneducated, gullible natives. Du Chaillu's "discovery" was actually science's discovery. The meager anatomical information contained in the killed animals was fitted into the vetted system of zoology. Once their existence was "known," essential information about the gorilla's behavior and natural history could be annexed. In the same way, local farmers' knowledge about how cowpox could inoculate against small pox remained local knowledge and was not connected to the rest of what was known about medicine. The remedy therefore remained isolated. When Jenner "discovered" the effect, he took what was known locally, and linked its effect into to medical theory and all the little science knew of infection and germs. He did not so much "discover" vaccines as much as he "linked in" vaccines. Likewise America. Columbus's encounter put America on the map of the globe, linking it to the rest of the known world, integrating its own inherent body of knowledge into the slowly accumulating, unified body of verified knowledge. Columbus joined two large continents of knowledge into a growing global consilience.

The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many "facts" that don't fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. A new theory does not need to have every unexpected detail explained (and rarely does) but it must be woven to some satisfaction into the established order. Every strand of conjecture, assumption, observation is subject to scrutiny, testing, skepticism and verification. Piece by piece consilience is built.

In this way consilience is a type of technology, expanded by technology. Unified knowledge is constructed by the mechanics of duplication, printing, postal networks, libraries, indexing, catalogs, citations, tagging, cross-referencing, bibliographies, keyword search, annotation, peer-review, and hyperlinking. Each epistemic invention expands the web of verifiable facts and links one bit of knowledge to another. Knowledge is thus a network phenomenon, with each fact a node. We say knowledge increases not only when the number of facts increases, but more so when the number and strength of relationships between facts increases. It is the relatedness that gives knowledge its power. Our understanding of gorillas deepens and becomes more useful as their behavior is compared to, indexed with, aligned into, and related to the behavior of other primates. Our consilience is expanded as their anatomy is related to other animals, as their evolution is integrated into the tree of life, as their ecology is connected to the other animals co-evolving with them, as their existence is noted by many kinds of observers, until the facts of gorillahood are woven into the encyclopedia of knowledge in thousands of criss-crossing and self-checking directions. Each strand of enlightenment enhances not only the facts of gorillas, but also the strength of the whole cloth of human knowledge.

And as in any networked system, the larger the pool of nodes that are being linked up in the network, the more powerful it is. Doubling the number of nodes more than doubles its value. To a rough approximation, as the nodes of a network increase linearly, its value grows exponentially. This exponential growth in power means that one larger network is vastly more valuable than two smaller networks with the same total number of members. Let's say that community "A" has integrated 10 facts into its pool of knowledge. If each fact is related in some way to the others, then the collective knowledge swells exponentially by 10^2, or 100 assertions. At the same time on another part of the planet, community "B" has integrated a different set of 10 facts with a similar value. If a Columbus or encyclopedist were able to combine those two pools of knowledge, the 10 A nodes with the 10 B nodes, and then interrelate those 20 facts into a single integrated web of knowledge, the value of that unified pool is twice the value (400, or 20^2) compared to the sum of the two isolated pools (2 x 100). The mathematics favors a single seamless carpet of knowledge over separate disjoined knowledge. When a self-contained patch of information can be woven into a global consilience it increases the value of all parts.

Today there remain many unconnected pools of knowledge. The unique wealth of traditional wisdom won by indigenous tribes in their long intimate embrace of their natural environment is very difficult (if not impossible) to move out of their native context. Within their system, their sharp knowledge is tightly woven, but it is disconnected from the rest of what we collectively know. A lot of shamanic knowledge is similar. Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains "undiscovered." Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don't fit into the larger pattern of the known.

The perceived divisions between types of knowledge, between levels of knowing, and between distinctions in our own standing in the universe are all being steadily leveled by the advance of the technium. Bit by bit technology illuminates the continuum that connects everything. In the usual self-amplifying circle of upcreation, each advance in knowledge also facilitates new inventions, unleashing yet more revealing technology. While our system of science can increase ignorance faster than it can increase knowledge (see the Expansion of Ignorance), new instruments amplify our ways of seeing and powers of systemic thinking. New tools fatten our collective memory and deepen our understanding. Just as the technium is currently in the process of connecting all humans to each other (via the internet), and all devices to each other (ditto), it is also in the process of connecting each idea to all other ideas, so that there is a one unified body of knowledge.

Over the long haul, as the technium becomes more complex, accelerated and sentient, technology tends toward consilience.

Technophilia

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:02:35 -0800

An acquaintance of mine has a teenage daughter. Like most teens in this century she spends her day texting her friends, abbreviating her life into 140 character hints, flinging these haikus out to an invisible clan of mutual texters. It's an always-on job, this endless encapsulation of the moment. During dinner, while walking, on the toilet, lounging in bed, or in any state of wakefulness, to chat is to live. Like all teens, my friend's daughter tested the limits of her parents' restrictions. For some infraction or another, they grounded her. And to reinforce the seriousness of her misconduct, they took away her mobile phone. Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn't get out of bed. It was if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had. Our creations are now inseparable from us. Our identity with technology runs deep, to our core.

According to psychologist Erich Fromm (and famed biologist E.O. Wilson) humans are endowed with biophilia, an innate attraction to living things. This hard-wired, genetic affinity for life and life processes ensured our survival in the past by nurturing our familiarity with nature. In joy we learned the secrets of the wild. The eons which our ancestors spent walking to find coveted herbs in the woods or stalking a rare green frog were bliss; ask any hunter/gatherer about their time in the woods. In love we discovered the boons each creature could provide, and the great lessons of hurt and healing organic forms had to teach us. This love still simmers in our cells. It is why we keep pets, and potted plants in the city, why we garden when supermarket food is cheaper, and why we are drawn to sit in silence under towering trees.

But we are likewise embedded with technophilia, the love of technology. Our transformation from smart hominid into Sapiens was midwifed by our tools, and at our human core we harbor an innate affinity for made things. We are embarrassed to admit it, but we love technology. At least sometimes.

Craftsmen have always loved their tools, birthing them in ritual, and guarding them from the uninitiated. As the scale of technology outgrew the hand, machines became a communal experience. By the age of industry, lay folk had many occasions to encounter complexifying technology larger than any natural organism they had ever seen and they began to fall under its sway. In 1900 the historian Henry Adams visited and revisted the Great Exposition in Paris, where he haunted the hall showcasing the amazing new electric dynamos, or motors. Writing about himself in the third person he recounts his initiation:

To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within an arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it.

Each summer tens of thousands of enthusiasts make a pilgramage to a nearby town along the Pacifica coast where I live to collectively bestow affection upon beautiful machines. The love-in, called Dream Machines, draws smitten fans of self-powered vehicles: cars, airplanes, steam engines. Rows of restored 1950s Chevys, and vintage Packards, in candy-color deliciousness woo their admirers. Rare species of airplanes, rivets gleaming, recline in a field, their painted propellers and exposed engines beckoning. A parade of oddly mutant motorcycles stream by. Behind one roped-off area a dozen old guys in overalls and greasy baseball caps tend noisy, hissing contraptions. This is the steam-powered zoo. Unlike modern machines, the innards of steam machines are visible, a kind of living transparency which solicits admiration for their mechanical honesty. One capped fellow demonstrates an insanely dangerous steam-powered cross-cut saw. Its naked teeth, as long as fingers, rake across a sacrificial log in a reptilian frenzy. The onlookers nod in approval.

I was there to witness the love. I was born lacking the normal male gene for car-madness. I am oblivious to the subtle differences in automobiles; I can't tell one sedan from another. I don't even know the model of the old van I drive. But I came to see others venerate classic technology. So it was weird to discover in one corner of this teeming rendezvous, three magnificent machines that snagged my soul as I tried to walk by. In an instant I was bewitched. I felt these were the most intoxicating vehicles I had ever seen. I had no idea what they were. A metal circular logo affixed to the front grill on each declared that they were Blastolenes.

Blastolenes are custom-built fantasies. They are oversized car-like monsters that retained the rough proportions of ordinary vehicles, only at a disturbing larger scale. Imagine your car three times its current size. One Blastolene was strapped down to a flat bed truck as if it were a trophy wild gargantuan captured by hunters, and it might bust its chains at any moment and zoom off. Like many vehicles it was animalish: the Blastolene's exposed circulatory pipes suggested guts, its rounded wheel cases were muscular hunches, and its chrome tie rods were obviously bones. People crowded around, sighing in satisfaction at its remarkable beauty. I was seized with a deep affinity for the creature.

The second Blastolene on display was a convertible sedan built around a hulking M7 Patton Tank motor. The motor emitted percussions rather than sound. Its gigantism was irresistible. I suddenly realized that for 40 years I had been driving baby cars; this was the daddy car. Timidly creeping up to it (can I touch it?), I felt a childlike awe. I could feel its abnormal density; the solid gravity pulling me in toward it, yet its intimidating scale, like an elephant, warning me away.

No doubt much of the attraction of these machines are the way they ape, so to speak, animal life. Maybe our technophilia is merely biophilia in disguise. But some of the magnetism that draws us to them is also due to the dynamo that peeks from their interior. Its rotational energy twirls us. Many decades ago California writer Joan Didion made a pilgrimage to the Hoover Dam, a trip she recounts in her anthology, The White Album. She, too, felt the heart of a dynamo.

Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am.

…Once when I revisited the dam I walked through it with a man from the Bureau of Reclamation. We saw almost no one. Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition. Generators roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was. And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and then into thirteen-foot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves. "Touch it," the Reclamation man said, and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine. It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.

…I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

Of course dams inspired dread and disgust as well as awe and admiration. Soaring, breathtaking dams frustrate the return of single-minded salmon and other spawning fish, and they indiscriminately flood homelands. In the technium revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates. On the other hand no one has ever been revolted by a cathedral of redwoods. In reality no dam, even Hoover dam, is eternal under the stars since rivers have a mind of their own; they pile up silt behind the dam's wedge so that eventually their waters can crawl over it. But while it stands, the artificial wins our admiration. We can identify with the dynamo revolving forever, as we feel our living hearts must do.

Passions for the made run wide. Almost anything manufactured will have adoring fans. Cars, guns, cookie jars, fishing reels, tableware, you name it. Their fans lavish attention by comprehensively collecting all variants of the technology, or modifying the standard form, or by imitating their own version. Not surprisingly, fans of a feather gather together. I tallied up the number of online forums for manufactured items commonly adored. One might think of these as churches. I found over 40,000 online congregations dedicated to honoring various cars, more than 10,000 different fan groups enamoured of motorcycles, 6,000 assemblies really into boats, 5,000 fellowships serving avid gun owners, and 1,000 denominations obssessed with all types of cameras. The list for other artifacts, tools, and machines commanding their own smitten followers would run into the hundreds.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an "evocative object." These bits of the technium are totems that serve as a springboard for identity, or for reflection, or for thinking. A doctor may love his/her stethoscope, as both badge and tool; a writer might cherish a special pen and feel its smooth weight pushing the words on their own; a dispatcher can love his ham radio, relishing its hard-won nuances, as a magical door to other realms that opens to him alone; and a programmer can easily love the root operating code of a computer for its essential logical beauty. Turkle says, "we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with." She suspects that most of us have some kind of technology that acts as our touchstone.

I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it's the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places, and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars prove. Our first encounters with the internet/web portray it as a very distributed electronic dynamo – a thing one plugs into -- and that it is. But the internet is closer to the technological equivalence of a place. An uncharted territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I've entered to web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life.

It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.

I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields up my desires, like a lover. Secret knowledge? Here. Predictions of what is to come? Here. Maps to hidden places? Here. Rarely does it fail to please, and more marvelous, it seems to be getting better every day. I want to remain submerged in its bottomless abundance. To stay. To be wrapped in its dreamy embrace. Surrendering to the web is like going on aboriginal walkabout. The comforting illogic of dreams reigns. In dreamtime you jump from one page, one thought, to another. First on the screen you are in a cemetery looking at an automobile carved out of solid rock, the next moment, there's a man in front of a black board writing the news in chalk, then you are in jail with a crying baby, then a woman in a veil gives a long speech about the virtues of confession, then tall buildings in a city blow their tops off in a thousand pieces in slow motion. I encountered all those dreamy moments this morning within the first few minutes of my web surfing. The net's daydreams have touched my own, and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can't give you directions to a stranger's house, why can't you love the web?

Our technophilia is driven by the inherent beauty of the technium. Admittedly, this beauty has been previously hidden by a primitive phase of development that was not very pretty. Industrialization was dirty, ugly, and dumb in comparison to the biological matrix it grew from. A lot of that stage of the technium is still with us spewing its ugliness. I don't know whether this ugliness is a necessary stage of the technium's growth, or whether a smarter civilization than us could have tamed it earlier, but the arc of technology's origins from life's evolution, now accelerated, means that the technium contains all of life's inherent beauty – waiting to be uncovered.

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and "useless." Since technology is born out of usefulness, this is a long haul. Robots will proliferate in a million different varieties and levels. Most will never be as smart as a grasshopper, and only few droids will surprise us with their intelligence. But the goal of every robot, and every machine and tool, is to exist for its own sake. To exist not only because it is useful, but because its existence is beautiful. There is evidence of that back on the fields of the Dream Machines, in the rows of mechanical glamour. While the Blastolene and lollipop 1950s Chevys are potentially useful – as transport – few are actually used that way. They are coddled, nursed and nurtured, repaired and improved, adored and honored, and sculpted into longevity by the sheer love of their innate beauty. They are art.

Today, at the start of the 21st century, there are tens of million species of tools and technologies at loose in the world. Assuming a modest increase of only 5% additional new tools and kinds of artifacts every year, by the end of the century our planet will be overrun by manufactured possibilities. Our own human needs are not expanding at this rate. The continual rise in technological variety is propelled by the needs of other technologies. You have a house, then you get a car. Now your car needs a house, too. It doesn't have hands like you do, so it needs a garage-door opener for its house. It needs check up equipment to keep it healthy, and add ons to keep it comfortable. The same goes for other kinds of hardware. Handheld devices need jackets, houses need paint, computers need peripherals. I estimate that about half of the denizens of the technium are technologies serving other technologies. If you remove a keystone technology from your home – say the computer – how many other devices and equipment would immediately become redundant? Remove your car, and what else can go? Remove your stove, and then count the pieces of gear no longer needed.

But we won't let these subordinate technologies go, based on the evidence so far. We don't "need" a lot of what we maintain. We keep specific technology around not only because it may be useful, but because we like to have it around. The gear, devices, networks form an interdependent ecosystem of interrelated parts, and we have a technophilia for its survival. We love the jungly mesh of the technium, and the way we can lose ourselves in it. We rebel at the negative costs of this interrelatedness, and its negative externalities such as pollution (global warming is a type of pollution), but we have a deep affinity for its web. We continue to manufacture new ideas and new artifacts, not because we always need them, but because the technium needs them, and because we find the technium attractive.

Most evolved things are beautiful, and the most beautiful are the most highly evolved. Cities display this principle clearly. Newborn, unrefined cities lack depth, and so, throughout history humans find new cities ugly. The first few versions of London were considered heinous eye sores. But over generations, every urban block in that city and all others are tested by daily use. The parks and streets that work are retained; those that fail are demolished. The height of buildings, the size of a plaza, the rake of an overhang are all adjusted by variations until they satisfy. But not all imperfection is removed, nor can it be since many aspects of a city – say the width of streets -- cannot be changed easily. So urban workarounds and architectural compensations are added over generations. Additionally, every available opportunity to build within a city is grabbed. The tiniest alley way is utilized for public space, the smallest nook becomes a store, the dampest arch under a bridge filled in with a home. Over centuries, this constant infilling, ceaseless replacement and renewal, and complexification – or in other words, evolution -- creates a deeply satisfying esthetic. The most beautify places are those that reveal layers of time. They accrue forms uniquely fitted to that place. Every corner in a city carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by it.

The superb special effects magicians working for Hollywood discovered how to exploit the principle of evolutionary beauty when filming made-up worlds. Their fantastic cities and convincing props of the future are in reality new items, having been imagined only days earlier. To give them the convincing heft of reality, and the attractive richness we associate with beautiful things, the effects wizards devise a layered evolutionary backstory for each item or place. Model makers layer on "greeblies," or intricate surface details that reflect a fictitious past history. This artificial evolution produces objects and places that exhibit what George Lucas calls the "used future." For instance a detailed ray gun arrives at its current design via an imaginary backstory in which its predecessors were once longer and powered by a different energy source; the gun thus contains vestigial ridges and tubes. We feel authenticity. A backstory assumes that a 22nd century city had been bombed in a previous age; its earlier primitive steel ruins under gird the foundation of recent crystalline towers. It looks beautiful.

Evolution is not just about complications. One pair of scissors can be highly evolved, and beautiful, while another is not. Both scissors entail two swinging pieces joined at their center. But in the highly evolved scissors, the accumulated knowledge won over thousands of years of cutting is captured by the forged and polished shape of the scissor halves. Tiny twists in the metal hold that knowledge. While our lay minds can't decode why, we interpret that fossilized learning as beauty. It has less to do about smooth lines and more to do about smooth continuity of experience. The attractive scissors, or beautiful hammer, or gorgeous car, carry in their form the wisdom of their ancestors.

Not all stuff will attract our emotions, and the same life-likeness and sentience will often infuriate us. Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia. For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded. What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: "It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it's alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it's alive enough to be tortured."

We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us. In her laboratory Turkle observes how ordinary people feel about anthropic technology. She has been surprised at how little encouragement humans need to surrender love for machines. The merest suggestion of human-like eye movement, the tiniest hint of active eyebrows, and the roughest ready smile on an otherwise obviously metal machine can make a person melt before it. Even feel bad about turning it off. Humans will treat any minimally anthropomorphized droid like it not only deserves our affections, but in some strange way is returning our love. That worries Turkle because she is concerned whether we will diminish our own humanity in order to match this minimal humanity we spy in our creations. If we let robots take care of the elderly as they want do in Japan, will the elderly become robot like to meet them? As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: "We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don't worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber."

In the future, we'll find it easier to love technology. Machines win our hearts with every step they take in evolution. Like it not, anthropic robots (at the level of pets at first) will gain our affections, since even minimal life-like ones do already. The internet provides a hint of the maximal passion possibilities of the technium. The global internet's nearly organic interdependence, and emerging sentience make it wild, and its wildness draws our affections. No human can turn away from the trick of anthropomorphism, and not be seduced by the humanity we project onto look-alikes, but the attraction of highly evolved technology is not only in its reflection of our faces. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution. Humans are the most highly evolved organs we have experienced, so we fixate on imitations of this form (quite naturally), but our technophilia is fundamentally not for anthropy, but for evolution. Humanity's most advance technology will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously non-human intelligences, and obviously non-human robots, and obviously non-earth-like life, and all these will radiate an attractiveness that will dazzle us.

As it does, we'll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it. In addition the accelerated arrival of tens of millions more artifacts will deposit more layers onto the technium, polishing existing technology with more history, and deepening its embedded knowledge. Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this technology's charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.

And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

Increasing Ubiquity

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:03:53 -0800

The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ubiquity. Given enough resources, duplication of one type will keep going until all its construction resources are consumed. All things being equal, dandelions, or raccoons, or asphalt will replicate till they cover the earth. Evolution equips a replicant with tricks to maximize its spread no matter the constraints. But because physical resources are limited, and competition relentless, no species can ever reach full ubiquity. Yet all life is biased in that direction. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Because humans are limited (only 6 billion alive at the moment) and there are tens of millions of species of technology or memes to spread, none can reach full 100% ubiquity, although several come close.

Nor do we really want all technology to be ubiquitous. It would be best for ourselves if remedial technology like artificial hearts never became very common. Preferably, we would engineer away the need for replacement hearts through genetics or drugs or diet. In the same way, the remedial technology of carbon sequestration (removing carbon from the atmosphere) would ideally never become ubiquitous. Best would be an energy system based photons (solar), fusion (nuclear), wind, or very least, burning hydrogen rather than burning carbon. The spread of fuels relying on zero carbon, or little carbon (wood, coal, oil and gas have a ascending percent of hydrogen per carbon in that order) would thus negate the spread of carbon sequestration technology. Thus rival technologies keep themselves in check.

Individual species of technology, like species of weeds, tend to multiply towards ubiquity to fill their available niche. But a technium packed with remedial technologies does not have a long-term trajectory, just as an ecosystem composed only of weeds will not survive as long as one with less opportunistic components. Artificial hearts do not offer as many long-term options to a person, or society, as does a natural heart kept healthy by other technologies. Remedial atmospheric solutions do not offer as many future options as superior energy sources. The niche for replacement hearts, cataract surgery, pollution reducers, data recovery, and so on are in the long run – at civilization scale – narrow places for ubiquity. Once their niches are filled, they lead no where else. They are stop gap and self-limiting. Like a small pox vaccine. Ideally a vaccine has no future if it is universally successful.

Rather than self-limits the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively.

From a planetary biosphere perspective the most ubiquitous technology on Earth is agriculture. The steady surplus of high quality food from agriculture is vigorously open-ended in that this abundance enabled civilization and birthed its millions of technologies. The spread of agriculture is the largest-scale engineering project on the planet. Nearly half of Earth's land surface has been altered by the mind and hand of humans. Native plants have been displaced, soil moved, and domesticated crops planted in their stead. Great stretches of Earth's surface have been semi-domesticated into pasture land. The most drastic of these changes – such as uninterrupted tracts of giant farms -- are visible from space. Measured in number of square kilometers, the most ubiquitous technology on the planet are the five major domesticated crops of maize, wheat, rice, cane sugar and cows.

Other more subtle technological alterations are visible in the ecological history of a place. By many experts' account, there have not been any wilderness areas on this planet for perhaps five thousand years. Most of the areas we ordinarily consider wild (like the Amazon or the Congo, or the American West) are in fact the result of thousands of years of human intervention. By setting seasonal fires, by selectively hunting certain species, or by selectively harvesting certain plants, tribal people groom the landscape for food production over the centuries. No territory on the planet has completely escaped the inquisitive and disruptive impulses of the human mind to tame the environment. Hunter/gatherers now live or have lived everywhere (except for some Antarctic areas) and wherever people dwell, they use technology to modify the "natural" ecology and terraform their continent.

The third most ubiquitous planetary technology are roads. Simple clearings for the most part, dirt roads extend their root-like tentacles into most watersheds, criss-crossing valleys and winding their way up many mountains. The web of constructed roads forms a reticulated cloak around the continents of this planet. A string of buildings follow along the dendritic branches of roads. These nodes are made of cut tree fiber (wood, thatch, bamboo) or molded earth (adobe, brick, stone, concrete) and may be fourth commonest technology.

This map of the world shows travel time to major cities, closer is lighter, farther is darker. In essence it is a map of the global road network. (via New Scientist)

Not as visible, but perhaps more pervasive at the planetary level, are the technologies of fire. Controlled burning of carbon fuels, particularly mined coal and oil, has led to changes in the Earth's atmosphere. Reckoned in total mass and converge, these furnaces (which often travel along the roads as engines in automobiles) are dwarfed by roads. Though smaller in scale than the roads they ride on, or the homes and factories they burn in, these tiny deliberate fires are able to shift the composition of the globe's voluminous atmosphere. It is possible that this collective burning may be the largest-scale technological impact on the planet.

While magnificent stone and silica cities and their sprawl symbolize our technium, they are far from ubiquitous. Their footprint is small compared to agriculture, but megalopolis have rerouted the flow of materials so that much of the technium circulates through them. Rivers of food and raw materials flow in, and debris flow out. Every person living in a developed country in moves 20 tons of material annually.

Then there are the things we surround ourselves with. From the perspective of daily modern human life, the list of near-ubiquitous technologies include cotton cloth, iron blades, plastic bottles, paper, and radio signals. These five technological species are within reach of nearly every human alive today, both in the cities and in the most remote rural villages. Each of these technologies open up vast new territories of possibilities: paper -- cheap writing, printing, and money; metal blades -- art, craft, gardening, and butchering; plastic -- cooking, water, and medicines; radio –- connection, news, and community. Fast on their tracks follow the nearly ubiquitous species of metal pots, matches, and cell phones.

Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. But there is a practical ubiquity of near saturation, which is sufficient to flip the dynamic of a technology onto another level. In the developed world and urban places everywhere, the speed at which new technologies disperse to the point of saturation has been increasing.

Whereas it took electrification 45 years to reach 90% of US residents, it's taken only 20 years for cell phones to reach the same penetration. The rate of diffusion is accelerating. A straight line extrapolation would suggest that the rate of technological adoption should continue to accelerate until it occurs instantaneously. By the year 2100, a personal teleporter, say, should be adopted by everyone alive the year it is introduced. A new immersive VR suit the day after it is released. And a new wireless wearable communicator the hour after it is invented.

Rates of diffusion of consumer technology (via NYTimes)

However that scenario is unlikely to happen because technology specializes as fast as it becomes common, so most technology will not be adopted by most people. In fact the more complex the technology, the less likely it will reach near-ubiquity. The peak global penetration for the average technological innovation will drop over time. We can see a hint of that in the chart above. The level of peak penetration at which diffusion plateaus is falling over time. Any particular new species of communication device in the next century is unlikely to every reach the same ubiquity as machine-woven cotton cloth, or even the television.

But something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. A few automobiles roaming along a few roads is fundamentally different than a few automobiles for every person. And not just because of the increased noise and pollution. A billion operating cars spawn an emergent system that creates its own dynamics. Ditto for most inventions. The first few cameras were a novelty. Their impact was primarily to put painters out of the job of recording the times. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternative realities. The further diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the acceptance that something was not real until it was captured in a camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room ceiling forces a transparency upon society. Eventually every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous everything is recorded for all time. We have a communal awareness and memory. That's a long way from simply displacing painting.

I met a fellow many years ago who spent ten years wearing a tiny camera in front of his left eye. This head-mounted camera captured everything that happened in his life and transmitted it back to his website. When Steve Mann started his experiment of recording and broadcasting his life as a grad student, he was a lone eccentric. While he was standing there talking to you, with one eye open and the other filming, his unconventional approach to documentation seemed like performance art. One could not really object to it, because, well, he was such an outlier.

In the course of his years of living ordinary life as a one-eyed camera, going shopping, to school, to events with his friends, Mann discovered that ironically the more surveillance cameras a particular store, plaza, or gathering place had, the more their guards objected to individuals like him recording their own view. The watchers hated to be watched. Mann calls his inverse surveillance, sousveillance, a word coined by replacing the French "sur" for above, with the French "sous" for below, as in watching from the bottom up.

After he graduated from MIT, Mann became a professor and his grad students used the next generation of smaller circuitry to craft their own miniature sousveillance gear. Some were tiny enough to fit unobtrusively into sunglasses. The students would record each other. In the meantime, cell phones sprouted hi-res cameras and video cams connected to the net, which performed the same sousviellance actions. Suddenly, there were millions of public eyes watching each other. Sousveillance had gone from a node of one to near ubiquity. A few years ago when all this sousveillance was new, a girl on a Korean subway let her dog crap on the floor without cleaning up the mess. Her transgression was captured by several sousveillance phonecams and eventually broadcasted on national TV. She was shamed into apology by a new ubiquity.

One thousand live cameras always-on make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stop-light speeders, and record police misbehavior. One billion live cameras always-on serve as a community monitor and memory; they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs; they restructure the notion of the self, and a billion cameras demote the authority of authorities.

One thousand automobiles opens up mobility, creates privacy, supplies adventure. One billion automobiles creates suburbia, eliminates adventure, erases parochial minds, triggers parking problems, births traffic jams, and removes the human scale of architecture.

One thousand teleportation stations rejuvenate vacation travel. One billion teleportation stations overturn commutes, enhance globalism, introduce tele-lag sickness, re-introduce the grand spectacle, kill the nation state, and end privacy.

One thousand human genetic sequences jump-start personalized medicine. One billion genetic sequences every hour enable real-time genetic damage monitoring, upend the chemical industry, redefine illness, make genealogies relevant, unravel the packaging industry and launches "ultra-clean" lifestyles that make organic look filthy.

One thousand screens the size of buildings keep Hollywood going. One billion screens everywhere become the new art, create a new advertising media, vitalize cities at night, accelerate locative computing, and rejuvenate the commons.

One thousand humanoid robots revamp the olympics, and give a boost to entertainment companies. One billion humanoid robots cause massive shifts in employment, reintroduces slavery and its opponents, and demolishes the status of established religions.

In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question of what happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?

Usually it disappears. Electric motors, born large, rare and obvious, quickly became invisible and everywhere. Shortly after their invention in 1873 modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large expensive motor in the place where a steam engine formerly stood. That single engine turned a complex maze of axles and belts, which in turn spun hundreds of smaller machines scattered throughout the factory. The rotational energy twirled through the buildings from that single source.

Machinery for grinding crankshafts at the Ford Motor Company, 1915. (From Hounshell)

By the 1910s electric motors started their inevitable spread into homes. They had been domesticated. Unlike a steam engine, they did not smoke or belch or drool. Just a tidy steady whirr from a 5-pound hunk. As in factories, these single "home motors" were designed to drive all the machines in one home. The 1916 Hamilton Beach "Home Motor" had a 6-speed rheostat and ran on 110 volts. Designer Donald Norman points out a page from the 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog advertising the Home Motor for $8.75 (which is equivalent to about $100 these days). This handy motor would spin your sewing machine. You could also plug it in to the Churn and Mixer Attachment ("for which you will find many uses"), and the Buffer and Grinder Attachments ("will be found very useful in many ways around the home"). The Fan Attachment "can be quickly attached to Home Motor", as well as Beater Attachment to whip cream and beat eggs.

One hundred years later the electric motor has seeped into ubiquity. There is no longer one home motor in a household, there are dozens of them, and each is nearly invisible. No longer stand-alone devices, motors are now integral parts of many appliances. They actuate our gadgets, acting as the muscles for our artificial selves. They are everywhere. I made an informal census of all the embedded motors I could find in the room I am sitting in while I write:

5 spinning hard disks
3 analog tape recorders
3 cameras (move zoom lenses)
1 video camera
1 watch
1 clock
1 printer
1 scanner (moves scan head)
1 copier
1 fax (moves paper)
1 CD player
1 pump in radiant floor heat

That's 20 home motors in one room. A factory or office build would have thousands. We don't think about motors. We are unconscious of them, even though we depend on their work. They rarely fail. We aren't aware of roads and electricity because they are ubiquitous and usually work. We don't think of paper and cotton clothing as technology because their reliable presences are everywhere.

In addition to a deep embeddedness, ubiquity also breeds certainty. The advantages of new unknown technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. A new fangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can only offer uncertain advantages for certain trouble. Even after an invention has been perfected elsewhere, when it is first introduced into a new zone or culture it requires the re-education of old habits. The new type of waterwheel may require less water to run, but also require a different type of milling stone that is hard to find, or it may produce a different quality of flour. A new plow may speed tilling but demand planting seed later, thus disrupting ancient traditions. A new kind of automobile may have a longer range but less reliability, or greater efficiency but less range, altering driving and fueling patterns. That is why only a few eager pioneers are inclined to adopt an innovation at first, because the new primarily promises uncertainty and the unknown. As an innovation is perfected, its benefits and education are sorted out and illuminated, it becomes less uncertain, and the technology spreads. That diffusion is neither instantaneous nor even.

In every technology's lifespan then, there will be a period of "haves" and "have nots." Clear advantages may flow to the individuals or societies who first risk untried guns, or the alphabet, or electrification, or the internet, over those who do not. The distribution of these advantages may depend on wealth, privilege, or lucky geography as much as desire. This divide between the haves and the have-nots was most recently and most visibly played out at the turn of the last century when the internet blossomed.

The internet was invented in the 1970s and offered very few benefits at first. It was primarily used by its inventors, a very small clique of professionals fluent in programming languages, as a tool to improve itself. From birth the internet was constructed in order to make talking about the idea of an internet more efficient. Likewise, the first ham radio operators primarily broadcasted discussions about ham radio; the early world of CB radio was filled with talk about CB; the first blogs were about blogging; the first several years of twitterings concerned Twitter. By the early 1980s, early adopters who mastered the arcane commands of network protocols in order to find kindred spirits interested in discussing this tool, moved onto the embryonic internet and told their nerdy friends. But the internet was ignored by everyone else as a marginal, teenage male hobby. It was expensive to connect to; it required patience, the ability to type, and a willingness to deal with obscure technical languages; and very few other non-obsessive people were online. Its attraction was lost of most people.

But once the early adaptors modified and perfected the tool to give it pictures and a point and click interface (the web), its advantages became clearer and more desirable. As the great benefits of digital technology became apparent, the question of what to do about the have nots became a bothersome issue. The technology was still expensive, requiring a personal computer, a telephone line, and a monthly subscription fee – but those who adopted it acquired power through knowledge. Professionals and small businesses grasped its potential. The initial users of this empowering technology were – on the global scale – the same set of people who had so many other things: cars, peace, education, jobs, opportunities.

The more evident the power of the internet as an uplifting force became, the more evident the divide between the digital haves and have-nots. One sociological study concluded that there were "two Americas" birthing, as well as two worlds. The citizens of one were poor people who could not afford a computer, and of the other, wealthy individuals equipped with PCs who reaped all the benefits. During the 1990s when technologists such as myself were promoting the advent of the internet, we were often asked what we were going to do about the digital divide? My answer was simple: nothing. We didn't have to do anything, because the natural history of a technology such as the internet was self-fulfilling.

The have-nots were a temporary imbalance that would be cured (and more so) by market forces. There was so much profit to be made connecting up the rest of the world, and the unconnected were so eager to join, that they were already paying more per minute of telecom connectivity when they could get it. Furthermore, the costs of both computers and connectivity were dropping by the month. At that time most poor in America owned televisions and had monthly cable bills. Owning a computer and internet access was no more expensive and would soon be cheaper than TV. In a decade the outlay would reach a $100 laptop. Within the lifetimes of all born in the last decade, computers of some sort (a connector really) would cost $5.

This was simply a case, as computer scientist Marvin Minsky once put it, of the "haves and have-laters." The haves (the early adaptors) overpay for crummy early editions of technology that barely works. Their purchase of flaky version 1.0 of new goods finance cheaper and better versions for the have-laters, who will get it for dirt cheap not long afterwards. In essence the "haves" fund the evolution of technology for the have laters. Isn't that how it should be, that the rich fund the development of cheap technology for the poor?

We saw this "have-later" cycle play out all the more clearly with cell phones. The very first cell phones were larger than bricks, extremely costly, and not very good. I remember an early-adopter techie friend who bought one of the first cell phones; he carried it around in its own dedicated briefcase. I was incredulous that anyone would pay that much for something that seemed more toy than tool. It seemed equally ludicrous at that time to expect that within two decades, the $2,000 devices would be so cheap as to be disposable, so tiny to fit in a shirt pocket, and so ubiquitous that even the street sweepers of India and the rickshaw drivers of China had one. While internet connection for sidewalk sleepers in Calcutta seemed impossible, the long-term trends inherent in technology aim it towards ubiquity. In fact, in many respects the cell coverage of these "later" countries overtook the quality of the older US system so that the cell phone became a case of the "haves" and "have-sooners," in that the later adopters got the ideal benefits of mobile phones sooner.

The fiercest critics of technology still focus on the ephemeral "have and have-not divide," but that flimsy border is a distraction. The significant threshold of technological development lies at the boundary between common place and ubiquity, between the have-laters and the "all-have." When critics asked us champions of the internet what we were going to do about the digital divide, and I said "nothing," I added a challenge: "If you want to worry about something, don't worry about the folks who are currently offline. They'll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has 6 billion people, and they are all emailing at once; when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous."

When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt. Don't worry about those who don't have a car; worry what happens when everyone has a car. Don't worry about those families who cannot afford genetic engineering; worry what happens when everyone is engineering. Don't worry about those who don't own a personal teleporter; worry what happens when everyone has one. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.

And most of the good things as well. The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are open-ended: Communications, computation, socialization, and digitization. And no technology is as open-ended as the mind. The mind is nearly the definition of open-endedness since its limits are imperceptible and unimaginable. We see no closure to the possibilities of an ever-diffusing intelligence. If a human mind can upfold a greater mind, ad infinitum, this upcreation represents the ultimate open-endedness.

The all-pervasiveness of open-ended technologies settle further and further into the matrix of infrastructure. We are busy right now infusing our shoes, clothes, household appliances, vehicles, sports equipment, handhelds, pets, landscape – everything that we touch and touches us – with communication, computation and intelligence. In this ubiquity they open up more new technology, and trigger new levels of consequence.

Because of their open-endedness, the amount of computation and communication that can be crowded into matter and materials, stuffed into the environment, and invested into everything we make seems infinite. Like the magician who keeps pouring water into the bottomless cup, we can keep pouring mind, intelligence, and information into the technium without limit. There is nothing we have invented to date that we've said, "it's smart enough." In this way the ubiquity of technology is insatiable. It will absorb all mindedness.

The ever-expanding base of our creations works like a vacuum sucking technology toward it. It is constantly stretching the technium towards a pervasive presence. Pulled by open possibilities and pushed by relentless duplication, technology wants ubiquity.