Tools, the Technium, and the Importance of Agency
Res Extensa #65 :: Technology's evolution and why humans make it unique
During a dive trip to observe crustacean behavior for research, writer Peter Godfrey-Smith picked up a hermit crab to move it back up onto a rock after it tumbled down on top of him:
When I picked her up, a mass of bright-orange streamers, like tiny fireworks, came pouring out. These are defenses, stinging strands called acontia, emitted not by the crab but by anemones. As well as adopting shells, some hermit crabs pick anemones up with their claws and carefully arrange them on the outside of those shells. They use the anemone's stingers to protect themselves from predators, especially octopuses. In some hermits, the odor of an octopus induces them to pick up anemones if they are under-dressed, and dominant individuals sometimes remove anemones from the shells of other crabs and put them on their own shell.
This crab, in any case, determinedly scampered back under the ledge, as far back as the shell would allow. Her eyes, on long stalks, glared out at me.
(Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind)
Tool use has evolved in hundreds of different species. Species of mammals, birds, fish, cephalopods, and even some insects have knowledge of using tools to solve problems. Otters break open shells with rocks. Dolphins will cover their snout with sponges to protect them while foraging. There's a species of falcon knows how to "fire forage", intentionally carrying burning sticks to start new fires and smoke out prey. In some instances — like the hermit crab story above — the tool is itself another living organism.
When two unrelated species evolve a mutual relationship like this, we call it "coevolution": each one develops characteristics entangled with the other's. We coevolve with our environments, as well as the collection of inhabitants there with which we interact. No organism exists in a lifeless void, evolving alone. In some cases a species bends the inorganic environment, in others it bends its biological neighbors. The anemone's stinging threads become a crab's technological discovery.
Defining technology
All tools are technologies, but how can we define a "technology" more specifically? W. Brian Arthur calls it "a means to a purpose": any means that harnesses another phenomenon to achieve a goal. A sail captures wind to create motion. An eye receives light to sense surroundings. When stuck to his shell, our hermit crab's anemone pal becomes a technology. It becomes crab armor. In a sense the crab is a technology to the anemone, too — in exchange for performing crab defense, it gets to eat scraps of food and move around the reef thanks to its mobile home.
We humans are, of course, descended from a long line of tool users. Starting from the first use of stone tools in the paleolithic all the way up through our now-banal space capsules and satellites, technology has seen an evolution of its own. With a couple million years and a significant increase in brain size, we've continued our development of new technologies in an endless, exponential process. One technology is created, enables dozens of new ones, and gets incorporated into future bundles of subtechnologies. These assemblies then beget even more advances. To stretch the biological analogy further, each new tech or subassembly further diversifies the "gene pool" of available components.
But humans take tool use to another level. We're super tool-users, and tool-makers. We use creativity to generate knowledge, create explanations for how and why things work, and purposefully build new solutions for problems we encounter.
In fact, we develop tools so advanced, based on deep knowledge of our own biology, that they merge with our bodies. From eyeglasses to wooden legs to pacemakers to CRISPR gene editing, our development of tools isn't limited to the external. And with artificial intelligence we're on a path to recreate the human brain in silicon. It's not a far leap to imagine combining advanced AIs with a neural lace to embed them inside of us, creating the real-life version of William Gibson's "microsofts".
The Technium
I've been reading Kevin Kelly's 2011 book What Technology Wants, in which he makes a bold claim: that the collection of technologies surrounding us has gotten so massive, intricate, and interconnected, it's begun to take on self-generating biological qualities of its own. He dubs this collection the technium:
So I’ve somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the technium. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections.
Collect every technology humanity has produced into a giant bucket — including intangibles like religions, art styles, and languages — that's the technium. Kelly considers the technium the "extended human", our knowledge and ideas manifest outside of ourselves:
The extended human is the technium. Marshall McLuhan, among others, noted that clothes are people’s extended skin, wheels extended feet, camera and telescopes extended eyes. Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build.
One of these technologies we invented, originally brought to us by Linnaeus, is the taxonomic hierarchy for classifying lifeforms. We all learn this in early biology class — domain, kingdom, phylum, et cetera. It gives us a framework for understanding evolutionary lineage. At the top it starts with six kingdoms, including the familiar plantae, animalia, fungi, and other simpler forms.
Kelly's radical notion is that the technium has become so complex and self-evolving that we can consider it the seventh kingdom. He sees it as a "technological superorganism", one that's taken on its own forward motion and imperatives distinct from us. Even though we sparked the technium ourselves, it's outgrown us.
Between Kelly's work in this book and Arthur's Nature of Technology, there's deep insight here into the mechanics of innovation and how technologies begin to take on biological qualities, in the way they ladder together in a modular tangled tree. In biology we can trace a trait like the eardrum back 200 million years. Each generation stacks tiny improvements on top of one another, and the trait will hang around as long as it's useful — and eardrums still work. In technology, we can look at something like the screw. First invented to move liquids, it's now still a pervasive technology, inside of most of the things around us.
As similar as they are, there's still a big difference between the innovation in biology and technology. The former comes about through purely undirected mixing of matter and energy. The latter requires both of those, with the addition of human agency.
Agency matters
Nearly everything around us is a technology we created, produced by human-created knowledge, design, production, and markets. This march of progressive innovation appears to be a self-perpetuating inevitability with a life of its own, and this is Kelly's argument. But I think what makes the technium different than one of mother nature's biological kingdoms is that all of it appears downstream from human knowledge. Humans generate knowledge, and human agency produces the technologies of the technium.
Every new innovation had its origins in some sort of problem. Even discoveries that arose through random chance — like the accidental discoveries of Teflon, penicillin, or Velcro — may have had their first instance appear accidentally. But they became technologies when we adopted them for solving problems. If Teflon appeared unplanned, and also brought us no value, you'd never have heard of it. All technologies that persist are created and adopted with intent. They come to be, spread widely, and are incorporated into future technologies because we find a purpose for them. And because new innovations always beget new problems, this cycle continues infinitely.
With the invention of things like robotics and AI, it's possible that these automated technologies will derive new ones to support themselves. Think of robots with artificial minds creating new sorting algorithms to help themselves work more efficiently in an Amazon shipping warehouse. This is part of Kelly's perspective: that the technium becomes self-generating given enough complexity.
But if you follow the causal chain back far enough, the purpose of any technology we (or our computer-driven doppelgängers) create exists to solve an ultimately human problem.
In the future we'll create supercomputer-controlled rockets that fly to distant asteroids, and deploy portable mining "kits" to robotically harvest heavy metals. Another ship might then send this material to a neighboring rock, home to a robotic rocket factory and launchpad, churning out probes to send to the next rock over. Follow this system back far enough and it exists because humans had the agency to automate things we didn't want to (or physically couldn't) do ourselves. The asteroid belt mining operation comes to be because we determine we want to expand our reach in the solar system.
But perhaps Kelly's onto something here. With the one-day invention of AGI, a full replica of a human brain with its own capacities for creativity and knowledge-creation (albeit with wildly higher total throughput), maybe the human-spawned technium truly does fork off into its own kingdom, with its own future lineage, its own goals, its own purpose. But until then, I think we're different, and that makes the technium different.
Humans are special in that we're the only (known) species that has created something like the technium. The other kingdoms of life didn't use their knowledge to intentionally create another kingdom. And the technium itself demonstrates remarkable properties. Sometimes almost inexplicable qualities no one person can wrap their head around. Like the pencil in Leonard Reed's famous essay, even a simple technology is composed of a baffling array of subtechnologies. But the individual processes that generate the pencil wouldn't be happening without the problem of writing things down that we want solved. Even with this degree of self-perpetuating complexity, I still believe the technium requires the spark of human agency.
I recommend reading What Technology Wants. It paints an optimistic and inspiring picture of human ingenuity. Also check this talk Kevin gave at the Long Now Foundation a decade ago, covering many of the same ideas. Inspiring, thought-provoking.
Thank you for reading. If you found this useful or interesting, please forward on to your friends and colleagues.