Watch as entrepreneur, essayist, and all around genius Paul Graham writes and edits an essay using a new playback feature for Etherpad.
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects – technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves — and also inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside of human desire. Kaczynski writes “modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts.”
read the rest on Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog
Morten Lund, Chief Ideologist of Lund XY Global Ventures, gives an erratic but heartfelt and inspirational presentation at the LeWeb conference shortly after losing €30,000,000 - all his cash assets.
His message: now is the time for startups with original ideas, as all the in-it-for-the-money people have either lost it all or have fled for more secure jobs.
Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.
The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.
Silver calls his flash of insight a “tremendous glimpse of the obvious” - namely that opticians weren’t necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.
- The Guardian
… contrary to the Precautionary Principle, a technology can never be declared “proven safe.” It must be continuously tested with constant vigilance since it is constantly being re-engineered by users and the co-evolutionary environment it inhabits. The automobile today embedded in its matrix of superhighways, drive-ins, seat belts, gps, hypermiling is a different technology that the model T one hundred years ago. And most of those differences are due to secondary inventions rather than the internal combustion engine. In the same way Aspirin today, put into the context of other drugs in the body, changes in our longevity, pill-popping habits, cheapness, etc., is a different technology than either the folk medicines derived from the essence of willow bark, or the first synthesized version brought out by Bayer 100 years ago, even though they are all the same chemical, acetylsalicylic acid. Technologies shift as they thrive. They are remade as they are used. They unleash second and third order consequences as they disseminate. And almost always, they exert completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity.
