← What Technology Wants :: Book Review

[2/5] tl;dr: Fun read, but not sure if it’s worth it. Whole book felt like a whirlwind of topics that were tangentially related to the notion of a “technium” or the super-organism of technology that we’re surrounded by.

What if the technology around us has become an organism? If you squint just the right way, then it seems that the large mass of things around us almost has the same needs and wants as normal biological creatures. I didn’t take super detailed notes, but here are some parts that stuck with me.

Culture & Technology

Culture and technology are really one and the same. They’re both advances in knowledge and help us discover new things. Technology is kind of just what is developed when you’re a kid. For me, that means things like the internet or phones, not really? Things like computers, GPUs, self driving cars? That’s technology. In that case though, culture also was a technological invention way back in the day.

All technology is dual use

In Silent Spring, we’re shown the effects of DDT on communities. How it ravages fields and kills birds, but DDT can also be used as an effective pesticide in protecting against mosquitos in moderate amounts. Should we deny people that? Fission has both the capability to take thousands of lives in a moment along with generate unimaginable amounts of energy. Technology isn’t inherently “good” or “bad”, it’s humans that harness it for those ends.

Implicit tech tree

Often times when someone invents something, there are a lot of parallel patents of people inventing the same thing. Given the cultural and intellectual climate, it’s interesting that it isn’t just one person who normally discovers a thing. It’s almost as if the idea is ripe for the picking given the cultural tides.

I don’t know if this was in the book, but I find it very interesting how a lot of our technological developments are inspired by the sci-fi and fiction we read. My personal theory is that invention is a bit of a lonely pursuit, and by having someone who’s also explored an idea before you, then even if they didn’t bring it to life, it still feels as if you aren’t quite as solo in this pursuit. The more obvious answer is that sci-fi also highlights and inspires what is considered an “interesting problem” for the next generation. Maybe this is all also part of the implicit tech tree where even if someone like Asimov hadn’t wrote Foundations, someone would’ve wrote something equivalent?? I have no clue, but I think this brief aside is getting a bit too long.

Okay, I appreciate law a little bit now

I’ve never understood law as a discipline. For the most part, it seems like an inside joke for lawyers to make a lot of money arguing one another, but I think this book slightly changed my views. Law is a technology, but also law acts as a pillar of stability.

I currently have money invested in the stock market. If things go to plan, that money won’t be touched for the next 20-30 years at minimum, and this implies two things. One, I think the world economy probably won’t completely tank and crumble in my lifetime, and two, I trust my financial and judiciary institutions enough to leave my money in the bank. The whole notion of investment is on top of a foundation of trust, trust that is in part created by a shared law.

From this lens, law is software. It’s a very hacky solution we’ve come up with because although the human brain is a technical marvel, it still isn’t enough to deal with cooperation at such large scales. Wielded this way, law gives people the ability to trust one another and the chance to excel at what they’re good at.

Random Tidbits

As always, if you think something I wrote is very wrong, or if you’ve read the book and want to chat: my email and socials are somewhere on this website. Probably :)