It’s a good thing I don’t have an over-active imagination, or reading Kevin Kelly’s [amazon_link id=”0143120174″ target=”_blank” ]What Technology Wants[/amazon_link] after [amazon_link id=”0091936969″ target=”_blank” ]The Fear Index[/amazon_link] by Robert Harris might be giving me nightmares. The Harris novel is a page-turning thriller based on the premise that an algorithm undertaking super-fast digital trading in financial markets develops a mind of its own and sets out to cause extreme real world events in order to profit from them. I won’t say any more in order not to spoil the book for those looking for a decent thriller for the Christmas holiday season.

In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly argues that technology – the bundle of all technologies, labelled ‘the technium’ – is a seventh kingdom of life, following on from animals, plants, fungi… He sees technological innovation as an inevitable dynamic process heading in specific directions determined by the same natural physical and chemical forces that underlie all of life. The book isn’t as weird as this summary might make it sound. Once consciousness in humans was conceived of as an emergent phenomenon from the masses of neuronal connections in the brain, it is perfectly logical to ask whether the internet could become conscious too. Ray Kurzweil famously did so. Kelly’s book veers too far into the mystical for my tastes – “The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness” – but the questions it poses are perfectly valid and rather marvellously provocative.

There are signs of selective argumentation. At the end of an interesting discussion on the pervasiveness of multiple simultaneous invention (the calculus, agriculture, lightbulbs etc etc), Kelly suggests the deliberate attempt to accelerate innovation is a logical step. His example is Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures; but it’s not clear where patent trolling fits into this bright techno-teleology. Arguing for the inevitability of specific inventions once all the prior inventions and conditions are in place, Kelly says leapfrogging is not possible – and to the obvious counter-example of mobile phones in Africa not requiring a fixed-line network he says, ah, but the growth of mobiles meant the fixed network had to grow too. Errr? I think his section on the inevitability of laws such as Moore’s Law or similar trends in say air transport or disk drives is weak as it turns out the bizarrely regular trends apply not to a specific technology but to an outcome – travel, computation speed. There could well be a sort of reverse Goodhart’s Law in operation here, whereby what you are trying to control becomes measurable (G’s Law says that whatever you target becomes thereby uncontrollable).

However, all in all I think this is an entertaining book, ranging widely across the field of human knowledge and provoking many questions. It has loads of interesting facts, of the kind which prompt one to say: ‘Did you know…?’ (well, members of my family are well used to that phrase.) I do have a soft spot for Kelly, having spoken at a conference with him once in Aarhus in Denmark, and spent a long coffee break in its small airport discussing things of which he knew much and I knew little; he was very kind, he writes well, and actually I like his optimism especially in these gloomy times. I prefer his version of the technological future to Robert Harris’s.

[amazon_image id=”0143120174″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]What Technology Wants[/amazon_image]