What Technology Wants

To understand the future of innovation & entrepreneurship,
listen to the technology. Don’t talk. Listen. Carefully !!!

from Strategy+Business.com 11/11 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

“Listen to the technology” is Carver Mead’s mantra. He is the eccentrically brilliant Caltech engineer is an apostle of & evangelist for Moore’s Law – which states that Chip circuit density reliably doubles every one to two years. Mead thinks that Moore’s Law is more about “belief systems” than technology. “When people believe in something,” he observes, “they’ll put energy behind it to make it come to pass.”

Belief Systems that inspire great faith and even greater investment are powerful. Technologies & technical challenges that evoke such passion & commitment deserve to have their stories told. This year’s best technology books are well-crafted tales of what happens when people really listen to technology & believe what they hear. At their core, these books describe how people and technology successfully co-evolve to compete. The heroes here aren’t technologies, technologists, or entrepreneurs; they’re the innovation eco-systems that create transformative value & growth.

Technium & evolution of our species. That’s why Kevin Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, in which Mead is featured, reads like technology’s The Origin of Species. This sprawling compendium of argument & analysis asserts that technology is best understood not as materialized tools or actionable artifacts but as what he calls a “Technium” — an ever-evolving belief system driven by the inter-action of technology & people. By contrast, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, & Shapes Our Lives is Steven Levy’s superb, surprisingly comprehensive Guide Book of what makes Google Google. Levy captures the accelerating evolution of a global innovation juggernaut & their quirky collective of entrepreneurial talent.

Technology Lives. For Kelly, What Technology Wants amplifies & expands upon Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Perseus, 1994), – exploration of emergent behavior and complex systems. A complexity junkie, Kelly is a co-founder and former Executive Editor of Wired magazine. He is always on the prowl for under-appreciated systems inter-relationships. He listens diligently to people and technology alike. What Technology Wants (2011’s best technology book), fully commits to Kelly’s conceit that humans and their technologies co-evolve. One is practically meaningless — or inert — without the other. Like the bacterial flora & fauna digesting food in our gut, he says, “Technology is like a life force”. The book is studded with biological metaphors & analogies. The suspension of disbelief that Kelly asks of his readership is the willingness to see technologies as living things. With no apologies to Darwin, Kelly’s take on technology is more rooted in “ecology” than biology.

[ The Technium is, Choicefullness, Google’s Mind in Premium Content ]