Most of the problems we have today are from technology that we’ve invented in the past. But I’m also a techno-centric person. I believe that the solutions to the problems created by technology is not less technology, but better technology. I equate technology to a type of thinking. And if you have a stupid idea, or a hurtful idea, the solution is not to stop thinking. The decision is to have better thinking, better ideas.
This really has me thinking about what it is we constitute as technology in the first place. I guess this is captured in Kelly’s notion of ‘technium’:
Technologist Kevin Kelly has pinned this simulative aspect on technology’s function as a kind of nascent biological entity with its own agency. The “Technium” as he refers to it, is “the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.” While some would interpret technology to be a driverless, chaotic system made all the more destructive by its attachment to a market economy, Kelly argues that it’s part of a system acting on its own vague accord, interacting with humans as a way to further itself.
In some ways this reminds me Ian Guest’s interview with Twitter as a non-human actor.