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Tech as the 7th biological kingdom?
Let's see... when it comes to life there's plants, and animals, and fungus, and a few others.. The question has arisen: is "technology" the 7th biological kingdom?
The link for the question is to an article on radar.oreilly.com: a political and for-profit private commercial forum all at once. The well connected and Kevin Kelly, "Senior Maverick" of Wired Magazine, makes the case for technology as life in a video interview there.
Briefly summarizing his points in the interview:
The net had a big impact on the elections. The form and function of web sites and other technology has great impact on the behavior of users. Technology can be regarded as a life form with its own "wants". We (humans) are the sexual organs of technology. A mode of analysis similar to Dawkins' "selfish gene" concept is worth applying to technology.
I hope people appreciate just the news above. I humbly submit one more thing:
I have a reply to both Kelly's reasoning and to its appearance on "radar.oreilly.com". My reply appears to have been censored from "radar.oreilly.com" and so, I offer it below the fold.
Um...
Isn't he really adopting a kind of ethical nihilism here by attributing to "technology" a teleology that denies the role of humans as the ultimate "deciders"? To unpack that a bit:
He talks at length about what technology "wants". For example, he says, technology wants clean water for the manufacture of chips. He says technology wants clean air (for unexplained reasons). And, yes, there's that quip about humans being "the sexual organs of technology".
Well, this is some very old school sophistry -- that word game goes way back. A little green alien landing on the planet 250,000 years ago might wonder, upon first glance at things, whether a web is part of a spider's toolkit for making more spiders or if it isn't the opposite: perhaps a spider is a web's way of making more webs.
Both are true in the most vacuous sense but once our little green alien observes the life cycles more clearly, surely the conclusion will arise that it's more natural to recognize that spiders make webs as part of the process of making more spiders (spider makes web, spider catches food, spider converts energy from food to make more spiders). The spider's web is a passive thing and the main thing it "wants" to do is fall apart: thus we see spiders constantly repairing their webs and making new ones.
There being a cycle there -- spiders and webs locked in an inter-dependent relationship -- we could poetically say that "the universe here 'wants' to make spiders and webs" but that hardly says anything more than "spiders and webs exist".
Technology, like spider webs, seems mostly to "want" to fall apart and stop functioning. A running internal combustion engine, for example, "wants" to keep running for a while while there is fuel coming in but it "wants" to use that fuel up, with wear and tear, then stop, then rust in place. The engine has no tendency -- no "want" -- to drive to a refueling station or, for that matter, to go exploring for oil. The engine, as any mechanic can tell you, wants to be rock.
Rocks don't have sex organs.
He makes a kind of comparison of his way of talking about the "wants" of technology to Dawkins' "selfish gene" concept and yet, if we take the most defensible version of the selfish gene concept, it's nothing like technology. A gene is a partial-control element within a metabolism such that -- and this gets to the key ethical point -- such that the metabolism is constrained by physical law to honor the gene's control. Taking a simple single-celled asexual life form, for example: in certain environments the cell will reproduce. There is no choice. The fundamental laws of physics assure it. It "wants" to reproduce in exactly the same sense that the universe "wants" the cell to be there in the first place: the existence of the cell is real (the universe "wants" precisely "what exists") and an aspect of what exists is an unavoidable, fated reproduction of the cell (in a suitable environment).
Technology is quite different. Its reproduction is a question of choice. We can only start calling the reproduction of technology a natural "want" of technology if we assume that humans have no choice over the matter. And that's why his position is one of ethical nihilism: Why, there's nothing we can do!
One can see how such nihilism would be attractive in the context of trade press like radar: the last thing you want to hear when you are trying to make money on the margins of cheerleading an industry is "all of our techno-niche here is a big mistake and we should kill it." But you are in no danger at all of having to contemplate such a question if you just assert from the beginning, perhaps helped with a little grey-beard sophistry, that, well, the technology is just going to do what it will do because it "wants" to so let's make the best of it. Ethical nihilism.
I found more interesting his earlier comments (prompted by your interview questions) about "setting defaults". He looks at examples like "opt-out vs. opt-in" or the rules that give structure to the editing process of Wikipedia and exclaims some fascination about how those defaults and that structure "nudge behavior" of crowds.
That's not sophistry it's only trite but it does refer to empirical facts. It refers to "what the universe wants". People know this well from time-motion studies, from marketing studies, from studies of the human factors of user interfaces, and on and on.
Yet it's an uncomfortable area to get into here, at "Web 2.0" central, precisely because to the extent we take it seriously it isn't ethical nihilism but ethical problematics. Perhaps it is wrong to not be deeply critical of, say, Wikipedia precisely because of the power imbalances that are reinforced by the structure given to it by its elites. Perhaps spinning flattering yarns about its evolution is wrong because it encourages powerful people to invest huge sums in trying to make more of the same, or similar.
But there, we are no longer talking about the "wants" of technology at all but rather of the wants and relations among people. When we start doing that we have to start recognizing that much of technology is in fact employed as human-on-human weaponry and that the dynamics of its creation, promotion, spread, and acceptance are all-too-human questions.
But if we go down that path we might start hesitating. We might trying to resist and substitute. We might try to extinguish a given technology and replace it on ethical grounds.
So much simpler if we can just suck up to power and explain away their actions by saying "Why, they're powerless! It's just what technology 'wants' to do!"
-t