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Left: Diatoms arranged by researchers at the University Of California. Below a 5th generation micro-processor developed by Intel corporation. The wants of a microscopic single-celled organism are less than the wants of you or me, but all organisms share a few fundamental desires: to survive, to grow. The wants of a protozoan are unconscious, unarticulated, and more like an urge, or possibly, a tendency. A bacterium tends to drift toward nutrients with no awareness of its needs. There is no room beneath its membrane for a will as we know it, yet in a dim way it chooses to satisfy its wants by heading one way and not another. Perhaps not much room is needed to want. The astrophysicist Freeman Dyson claims that we should view the smallest known bits of organized matter — quantum particles — as making choices. For millions of years a particle will exist and then suddenly it decays. Why then? Dyson says that from the individual particle’s viewpoint, this moment can only look like a choice, a satisfaction of a want. It is only on the scale of statistics with millions of particles that a particle’s choice shapes up as a predictable radiation half-life. But even individual human wants and desires average out to weirdly predictable laws in aggregate. If a little one-celled protozoan — a very small package — can have a choice, if a l ea has urges, if a stari sh has a bias towards THE TECHNIUM IS THE SPHERE OF VISIBLE TECHNOLOGY AND INTANGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS THAT FORM WHAT WE THINK OF AS MODERN CULTURE. IT IS THE CURRENT ACCUMULATION OF ALL THAT HUMANS HAVE CREATED. certain things, if a mouse can want, then so can the growing, complexifying technological assemblage we have surrounded ourselves with. Its complexity is approaching the complexity of a microscopic organism. This tissue consists (so far) of billions of dwellings, millions of factories, billions of hectares of land modii ed by plant and animal breeding, trillion of motors, thousands of dammed rivers and artii cial lakes, hundred of millions of automobiles coursing along like cells, a quadrillion computer chips, millions of miles of wire, and it consumes 16 terawatts of power. None of these parts operate independently. No mechanical system can function by itself. Each bit of technology requires the viability and growth of all the rest of technology to keep going. There is no communication without the nerves of electricity. There is no electricity without the veins of coal mining, uranium mining, or damming of rivers, or even the mining of precious metals to make solar panels. There is no metabolism of factories without the ingest of food from domesticated plants and animals, and no circulation of goods without vehicles. This global-scaled network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, institutions, laws, calculators, sensors, works of art, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators — this whole grand system of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a very primitive organism-like system. Call it the technium. The technium is the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture. It is the current accumulation of all that humans have created. For the last 1,000 years, this techosphere has grown about 1.5% per year. It marks the difference between our
lives now, verses 10,000 years ago. Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself. Yet, like all systems it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants. To head off any confusion, the technium is not conscious (at this point). Its wants are not deliberations, but rather tendencies. Leanings. Urges, Trajectories. By the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops, any large system will tend to lean in certain directions more than others. The sum total of millions of amplifying relationships, circuits, and networks of inl uence is to push the total in one direction more than another. Every owner of a large complicated machine can appreciate this tendency. Your machine will “want” to stall in certain conditions, or want to “runaway” in others. Left to its own devices, complex systems will gravitate to specii c states. In mathematical terms this is called the convergence upon “strange attractors” — sort of gravity wells that pull in a complex system toward this state no matter where it starts. Of course we humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants. Beyond our desires, there is a tendency within the technium that — all other things being equal — favors certain solutions. Technology will head in certain directions because physics, mathematics, and realities of innovation constrain possibilities. Imagine other worlds of alien civilizations. Once they discover electricity, their electronics will share some, but not all, attributes with our electrical devices. That which they share can be counted as the inherent agenda of electrical technology. Throughout the galaxy any civilization that invents nuclear power will hit upon a small set of workable solutions: that set is the inherent “agenda” of technology. It would be wonderful if we could survey all alien technological civilizations to extract the common tendencies in technological growth. A large number of technological evolutions would reveal the culture-free dynamics beneath them all. Since we have a solitary sample of one technium back on Earth, we have fewer methods of unraveling inherent system bias in technology. Three lines of evidence present themselves: OF COURSE WE HUMANS WANT CERTAIN THINGS FROM THE TECHNIUM, BUT AT THE SAME TIME THERE IS AN INHERENT BIAS IN THE TECHNIUM OUTSIDE OF OUR WANTS. 01 We 02 03 can look back in history to when technological development was more culturally isolated. The pathways of technology in early China, South America, Africa, and Western Europe out with only minimal cross-over inl u- ence. Examination of their parallel developmental sequences can reveal inherent biases. More importantly, the major predecessor system to technology is organic life. Many of the dynamics of evolution and syntropy extend from living organisms into artii cial systems, primarily because they share similar disequilibrial states. We can see the direction of technology in the direction of life and evolution. The long-term history of our single technium shows high-level patterns which we can project forward. We can ignore individual inventions and chart long-term l ows which enable them. Much as we might want the compressed history of a growing creature and guess where it goes next. If the organism is a caterpillar we are out of luck; if it is a worm, it will succeed. <strong>USER</strong> 21
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Page 39 and 40: How many other things are you doing
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Page 46 and 47: FILM Everyone gets the future wrong
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Page 51: EVENTS 7.11.17 Rachel Dretzin: AMA
Page 54: Coming August VOLUME TWO SECOND NAT

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