Kevin Kelly on Technology and What Technology Wants

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

Ethics, Philosophy, Economics, Books, Science, Business, Courses, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Interviews, Education, History

4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2010

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about technology and the ideas in the book. Kelly argues that technology is best understood as an emergent system subject to the natural forces underpinning all emergent systems. He argues that any technology creates benefits and costs but that the benefits typically outweigh the costs (perhaps by a small amount) leading to human progress. This is a wide-ranging conversation that includes discussion of the Unabomber, the Amish, the survival of human knowledge, and the seeming inevitability of the advancement of knowledge. The conversation closes with a discussion of the potential for technology to make an enormous leap in self-organization.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is November 18, 2010, and my guest is Kevin Kelly. His latest book is What Technology
0:46.5	Wants? Kevin, welcome back to Econ Talk. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. Our topic
0:53.0	today is Technology and the ideas in your book. It's an extraordinary book. It rimming with
0:58.3	ideas, provocative examples, great writing. I just can't tell you how much pleasure and inside
1:08.5	I got from reading it, and I look forward to talking about it with you. The central idea
1:12.6	that underlies the book is that the technology that surrounds us is alive. It has its own
1:18.2	forces of existence that we do not fully control. The book is about making the case for that
1:23.9	idea and understanding the benefits and costs of those forces. I like to start by having
1:29.2	you describe the world of technology and in particular the term that you've coined to
1:34.0	summarize this phenomenon, which is the technium. What do you mean by the technium? Why don't
1:41.8	you just call it technology? The problem that I set out in the book to solve was a problem
1:57.3	of coming up with a framework for understanding all the stuff that's in our lives. We're kind
2:04.4	of surrounded by more and more of it, and we spend maybe more and more of our lives making
2:13.4	it or trying to market it or trying to sell it. For me trying to understand how I should
2:23.3	think about the new things coming along. It seems as if our theory of technology was
2:29.3	just one thing after another, and one object, one gadget, one invention after another,
2:36.3	and that was pretty unsatisfying. It's not really a theory at all. I set out to look at it
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Library of Economics and Liberty, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Library of Economics and Liberty and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.