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What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.”
“...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.”
“Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency Increasing opportunity Increasing emergence Increasing complexity Increasing diversity Increasing specialization Increasing ubiquity Increasing freedom Increasing mutualism Increasing beauty Increasing sentience Increasing structure Increasing evolvability”
“Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”
“The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.”
“If you watch the curve of science and everything we know, it shoots up like a rocket. We’re on this rocket and we’re going perfectly vertical into the stars. But the emotional intelligence of humankind is equally if not more important than our intellectual intelligence. We’re just as emotionally illiterate as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and the vertical are getting farther and farther apart. And as these things grow apart, there’s going to be some kind of consequence of that.”
“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes.”
“As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options. ”
“The web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about a hundred billion neurons. Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links—but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is.”
“the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life.” In this view, “life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution,”
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Book Keywords:
humanity, posterity, ideas, technology, contentment, thinking, purpose, future