The Agenda of Technology
By Kevin Kelly

I take the view that living things, and technological systems and even ideas are all very complicated systems that obey basically the same rules.

The three are classes of one general category, systems that are able to self-replicate, they are able to self govern, they are able to persevere and in many ways they actually, sort of, have their own agenda. So the question that I am asking is if that is true, then what is the agenda of life and what is the agenda of technology? And I think that is a worthy question to ask because we can't really say no to it unless we know what it wants.

Well, if technology does have an agenda, then what might the agenda or wants of technology be? And the easiest way to answer, I think, is to say that technology wants to do the same thing that life does. What does life want to do? Well there are a number of things. It wants to make more copies of itself, it wants to make more diverse copies of itself, it wants to make copies of itself in more and more places and it never retreats in those places, it wants to make more specialized things, it wants to make more complex things and it wants to accelerate its changeability, its evolvability.

Well, if technology does have an agenda, then what might the agenda or wants of technology be?

And I would suggest that all those things are also true for technology, that it also wants to replicate itself into as many places as possible and will not retreat. It wants to become more complex, it wants to accelerate how fast it changes and when we begin to look at it that way, I think that it makes it a little easier for us to train it so we can let it go later on.

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