 What I'm going to talk about is a suggestion for a story, a theory of technology. It's more than just one thing after another. I mean, it's not just we go about our lives and our history. We have a book, we have a bicycle, a cell phone, a car. It's just a collection of stuff. And imagine Darwin who invented the theory of evolution. Before Darwin, biologists were just collecting stuff. They had one organism after another. And what his theory introduced was a way to kind of understand biology as more than just one thing after another. And that's what I'm going to talk about is a theory, a story about technology. So, is this anything that was invented after we were born? But of course, technology has to be more than that. It has to be something that maybe it's anything that doesn't work yet. That's another idea. But I think it's something greater. Think of these two objects there, right? One of them is they're both kind of about the same size as this thing in her hand, it fits in her hand. One of them was something that was built by a single person. And the other one, the same size, none of us here could build it. In fact, all of us here couldn't build this thing. It's actually required thousands of other technologies to create it and keep it going. And each of those thousand probably require 100 other sub technologies below it. And what I'm interested in is that sort of network of technologies that make up all the things that we use. So, we don't make technologies that can stand alone. They are part of a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. And so, I call that ecosystem a kind of super organism of all technologies. I call that the technium. And the technium is that thing, that sort of larger thing that's like an ecosystem that is not just a bunch of collections of individuals. And that system, like any kind of a system, has its own agenda, has its own kind of inherent dynamics. Those inherent dynamics exert some influence. That is greater than the sum of the parts. And that is what I'm interested in. It's what is this greater sum of the technium's agenda, its influence. So I use the word want. And I have to say that when I use the word want, I'm not talking about an intelligent, conscious decision. I'm talking about something that's more like an urge, a tendency. And so, I had the privilege of standing before this robot, which is in Willow Garage, Stanford. And this robot was programmed to plug itself in when it wanted to recharge. So it kind of will roam around through the company's offices looking for a plug and when it finds a plug, it will stick its tail in and recharge its batteries. Now, the thing about it is, is I stood between it and its plug. And it wanted power. You could feel its want. It was not conscious, it was not deliberate. But it really wanted that and was kind of going around and trying to find it. So I talk about want in the way that I say a plant might want light. It is leaning in that direction. It's sort of moving its system, it's an urge, it's a tendency. And so I'm using what technology wants in the same question as, what are the general drifts, the tendencies in this large system of the technium that we've created and surrounding ourselves with? So I begin by saying, well, if plants want something, does life want something? Is there something running through evolution that suggests a direction? This is a minority view in biology, the idea that there's actually a direction in evolution. But I think that the evidence is sufficient to suggest that we have a direction that we maybe can imagine as the general movement towards greater complexity. We have a simple organism four billion years ago and the bacterium was very simple. And then there's a kind of a movement towards increasing complexity. And that increasing complexity is kind of in our brains. So we intuitively feel this and scientists can now talk about ways in which there is a general trend in complexity in evolution. So if there's a general trend, we also see a general trend toward diversity, increasing varieties of things, increasing types of stuff in the same way that we might have a collection of things over time. There are more different types of life on the planet. There are also these other general trends. We see through evolution a movement towards increasing specialization, increasing mutualism, increasing ubiquity, increasing mindfulness or sentence, increasing evolvability. What does that mean? That means that evolution itself has been evolving, has been changing. So it's now easier to evolve things than they were four billion years ago. So there is a general trend to increasing the ways in which things can evolve. That is one of the trends that we see in evolution. Now that would be interesting, but I think that there is a concurrence, an extension, an equivalency between life and the technium. We saw that first 50 years ago, there was a tremendous discovery that the basis and essence of life was not carbon or water-based tissue, but was in fact information. When we discovered DNA in the genetics, we realized in fact that life was really an information processing system. It was all about information. And of course, our technology is basically about information, rearranging the order of things, adding more order and information to the things that we make. And so there was a certain sense that, my gosh, life is like technology. And we have lots of experiments where we actually have made a criterion to program and calculate computer science programs by assigning little numbers to their genes. We also have an instance where we can move evolution into computers and evolve code. So if you use Microsoft Word, there are sections of that code that were actually evolved rather than designed. So we see the fact that we can take biological processes and move them into our world, and at the same time our world can be seen. The living world can be seen in terms of computation, showing that in a sense there's an extension that we have moved life into the technological realm. That the two of them are not really separate as we thought they are. So we can then look at our technological world and see that we also have increasing diversity. These are spark catchers from a century ago. They kind of almost look like specimens in a museum, the diversity and increasing diversity we see. And we see the same thing of specialization in tools. Tools began like a simple hammer. First one was very general, did all kinds of things. And then we have a specialized version of them. Or we have a camera that's a general purpose and then it becomes an infrared camera or a high speed infrared camera or a high speed underwater infrared camera. We keep specializing them over time. We see the same thing. We see an increase in the diversity of evolution, much like we would see in a living system. And this is sort of kind of like a genealogical tree of the evolution of medieval helmets. We can see this almost life-like. There are so many similarities between the evolution of the technium and the evolution of life that I'm actually suggesting that just as there are six kingdoms of life on Earth, the three bacteria and plants, animals and fungi that we can actually think of the technium as an extension of evolutionary process. And I would call it the seventh kingdom of life. It's coming out of the mammals. So this seventh kingdom of life is what we are surrounding ourselves with. And so I'm saying that when we ask the question what technology wants, we can answer it by saying technology is an extension of the same evolutionary force that runs through the world. And then what evolution wants is really the same thing that technology wants is the same thing what evolution wants. So we see a general movement in the technical sphere towards increasing complexity, increasing diversity, increasing evolvability. So one of the things we notice is that it's change is changing, change is happening faster. The technium is in fact evolving new ways to change the world. So technology also has its own agenda, like any kind of system, most of the power in the world is used to feed the technium. When you're driving a car, most of the power is not being used to move you, but to move the car. And maybe the car, if you live in a Northern climate, it needs a garage. So the car needs to be heated. So we're serving more and more of the technology to serve itself rather than us. And there's something like Moore's law, which is another kind of inherent bias. We see a straight line of computer development. It doesn't waver depending on how much we try. It still goes, it's almost like a law showing that there's some inertial agenda built into the physics of matter that suggests that chips can be made faster doubling in speed every year. Another example of the kind of agenda technology has is that every invention that we've ever seen has been simultaneously invented by more than one person, often many. There are 23 different inventors of the light bulb. Besides Edison, when an idea comes and all the precursor ideas are ready, that idea will appear inevitably. It doesn't matter, it's true throughout history. When the ideas are ready, when all the necessary complex neighborly ideas are ready, that idea will come. It's inevitable. You may be the lucky person, but someone will have that idea at the right time. So technologies are inevitable at the macro scale. Something like the web was inevitable, but not what kind of web. Not the expression of that idea. That expression is not inevitable. That's something we have a lot of choice over. Is it open or closed, transparent? Is it national, international? Is it commercial? Is it nonprofit? Those kinds of questions are things that we do have, the speciation of it. But at the large level, technologies are inevitable. And so what does that mean for us? It means that we have to embrace the technological expansion that we have right now. That doesn't mean we have to embrace everything, but the response to things that we don't embrace is not to prohibit technology. If we have a bad idea, the proper response to a stupid idea is not to say you need to think less. It's not to say stop thinking. It's to say let's have a better idea. So in the same way, because the technologies are kind of like ideas, the proper response to bad technology, like spraying DDT as a pesticide, is not to say we need less technology. It's to say, or to say we need no technology, it's to say we need better technology. So most of the problems in the world are caused today, are caused by previous technologies. But the response to that is not less technology, but better technology. I think we ourselves are kind of technology. We have made ourselves, we've invented ourselves, we've made external cooking, our external stomach through cooking, allowed us to digest new foods we could not otherwise, changed our teeth and our jaws, it changed our enzymes. We are now different biologically because of something we invented in our minds. Our genes are evolving 100 times faster than they were 10,000 years ago. We have been invented. We are the first domesticated animal that we have domesticated. And so we're not done yet. We are still making ourselves. And technology is sometimes selfish, sometimes serves us. That's the dual nature of being self-created. You're the created and the creator. So we have a tension in technology that will always remain between what technology wants and what we want. But we are part of technology in the technium, so that will never go away. But here's what technology brings us. It brings us increasing differences, increasing options, increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities, freedoms. Technology is not just neutral. It is in fact decidedly positive because each new invention creates a new option to do good or to do bad. But that option did not exist before and that option pushes the balance slightly in favor of the good. And we don't need very much. If we create, if we use technology to create only 1% more than we destroy every year, that 1% compounded over centuries becomes progress. So that's what technology gives us, something, accumulation of increasing options and opportunities. That's called progress. And what I'm suggesting, the story of technology, the larger context, the reason why this is important is that this increasing possibility that technology brings us actually connects us to a larger force beyond ourselves. That is this sort of self-organizing force of increasing order that actually precedes even life, starts at the Big Bang and explodes out from a small few general particles to increasing variety of particles to galaxies, which maintain an increased order over time to a star, which is a furnace, which is creating increasing order by making heavier atoms from lighter atoms, enduring for billions of years, then life, which is increasing the diversity of possibilities through its 3.7 billion years on Earth, now through the technium, making ever more choices than possibilities, and it's going to go beyond us. So we're part of this kind of long train of self-organization increasing order that began at the Big Bang, running through life, through the mind, through us. And the technium is just the extension and acceleration of that force of self-organization as it moves through. And the reason why this long arc that we can be part of by aligning ourselves with increasing choices. So when we're making stuff, when we're busy making stuff and new things, maybe they don't last very long or they're thrown away, we're actually still engaged in something really big and important. And that is that we are increasing the possibilities for everybody. Everybody here has a slightly different face, slightly different mix of talents and abilities. Often we need technology, something invented to help us shine, to make the most of our genius. I require the invention of the book and writing, publishing, and printing that many people in previous generations that enabled me to find my place in the world. Mozart required the piano and the symphony. But imagine if Mozart had been born 2,000 years before the harpsichord or piano had been invented. What a loss that would be for us in our civilization. Or imagine Van Gogh being born 100 years before oil paints had been invented, or maybe even Hitchcock or George Lucas or somebody being invented before the technologies of the camera. What a loss that would be to us all. Well that means that today somewhere in the world, maybe in India, there is a boy or girl, some Shakespeare of a genius who is waiting for us to make that technology for them, their technology, so that they would in fact be able to shine and share their genius. So we have a responsibility to find and discover all these things so that this generation and future generations would have the possibility of making the best use of their genius and sharing with us. So as we have benefited from the past generations, that's what we're doing with technology is using it to increase the possibilities and choices of the world, using it to expand and accelerate the same self-organization that runs through the universe. We are partaking in a larger story. It's just not making more stuff to sell. We are doing that, but we are also doing something even bigger. We are enlarging the possibility of the universe. We are partaking in something that is very cosmic and is something larger than ourselves. And by embracing technology and trying to make the best of what it offers, by trying to understand what technology wants, we are actually part of a greater story. And I think a story that might mean something to us today. So I thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thank you.