It was great watching your speech. What struck me most was your friendliness which I, for some reason, didn’t expect. You talk with true love and consideration about technology, you say technology is our child, you say technology is part of us, not alien. One thing is completely absent in your speech: the desire to use technology for domination. I think your strongest point is this attitude because it is so rare.

To me the central thesis is: “technology is the seventh kingdom of life.” The idea appeared to me ever since I read Daniel Dennett about Darwin. In my own field of engineering I found a lot of things that didn’t fit somehow. Then, when Dennett explained the difference of evolution (in nature) and intelligent design (in technology, not in nature) I had to think all the time: what you say about evolution applies for engineering as well. This notion, I think, improved my work but made me feel lonely at the same time because anyone around me still has such an “old-fashioned” approach of technology. So now you have your story and I am very glad someone else is having the same thought and actually taking the effort of telling the world.

When we talk about evolution there is always this big question about the origin of life, was it intended? was there a big plan? or was it just “coincidence” as Dennett says? I tend to agree with Dennett and see life – and for that matter extropy – only present under very specific circumstances like on earth. You say extropy is in the whole universe…
But in the end it doesn’t really matter, whether you start your story with the Big Bang or with the beginning of life, the message is just as spectacular.

What I can say is that for the profession of engineering this will make a huge lot of difference. Current engineering is based upon physics and “one-truth” mathematics and has huge difficulty in dealing with complexity. Future engineering will be more about diversity, resilience, trial and error, evolution mechanisms, dealing with complexity…

I wish you well in preparing your next talks.

Great talk, really enjoyed it. How about technology as a drive to reduce risk. If we are risk averse as a species then technology and its adoption is a logical extension of risk aversion. Rogers in “Diffusion of Innovations” uses a working definition of technology borrowed from Thompson and Eveland “technology is a design for instrumental action that reduces uncertainty in the cause-effect relationships involved in achieving a desired outcome.” He goes on to outline two aspects of technology as having a hardware and software component. Software in this sense is simply the information base of the physical tool or hardware. This software is perhaps instructions to make it useful and it is this information that embodies the reduction of uncertainty in accomplishing a task. Adoption of the technology is also an information process or software aspect of it and this diffusion process not only reduces the risks inherent in adoption, like questions of its consequences, but also the risk reduction of using it directly to accomplish a task. I certainly would use “R” to solve a complex statistical problem though I could do it by hand with pencil and paper and perhaps a calculator but I would run the risk of making an error using “R” reduces my risk or uncertainty of my solution being wrong. I trust the “R” language to have the right algorithms embedded in it but so did users of SPSS until an error was discovered in its algorithms, long since corrected. There is a tendency to be favorably disposed to a technology or anything for that matter that already exists and is widely adopted. We depend on this information or software to form our opinions and make choices. And sometimes we are wrong to do this but this is the risk of technology itself.

Taking the two definitions, risk aversion (certain death for example) as a motivating factor for technology adoption and reduction of risk or uncertainty in the accomplishment of a task we might have a macro and micro definition of technology. The macro aspect of technology is that it has consequences that are seen over longer timescales like the availability of fresh milk in New York City in the 19th century was dependent on rail transport but it reduced infant and child mortality that wasn’t immediately observable, it just happened. The micro aspect of this is just that there was a current demand for fresh milk and people liked it.

Kevin, this is terrifically provocative. I commend Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” to you …

“Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that what pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.

Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this Conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”

@Kent Schnake

Only in the mind (human mind, that is) of a religious person would such a minor semantic detail spark a theological debate.

Also, bringing up the concept of “god” in lack of better scientific understanding of our origins does not contribute to this discussion. It is an off-topic argument that will only lead to a dead end. I recommend Richard Dawkins for more on this subject.