Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will

Kevin Kelly helped us understand that asking what technology wants is a useful North Star, a compass for riding with the current instead of fighting it.

The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve.

Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power. And perhaps the single overriding characteristic of the coming wave is that it will democratize access to power. As we saw in part 2, it will enable people to do things in the real world. I think of it like this: just as the costs of processing and broadcasting information pl

Over the long term the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.

should have some say in how technology develops; that it could develop in more than one direction; that some of those directions would be better than others at turning innovation into progress for most people.