What if the Internet wakes up? Wired Magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly discusses "The Technium", a global superorganism composed of 13 sextillion transistors, 5.4 billion users, and 2.5 quintillion bytes of daily data transfer. These are key metrics for today's internet, but The Technium is more than the sum of its parts.
The Technium is a vast interconnected network of technologies that evolves and adapts like a living organism, which Kelly calls the "seventh kingdom of life". In Greek mythology, Gaia is the personification of life on Earth; Futurist Byron Reese proposed a the superorganism "Agora" for human life, and The Technium is humans and technology together.
In "Holos Rising", Stewart Brand differentiated The Technium from Gaia and Agora, writing "There are pace differences, with Gaia slow, humanity faster, and the Technium really fast. They are not replacing each other but building on each other."
The Technium is artificial in nature, composed of people plus machines, but is it a product of natural selection? Ray Kurzweil suggested that evolution is outpacing biology, making machine intelligence an inevitable endpoint.
Kelly has written about New Minds emerging from the Technium. Does this include Artificial Intelligence and augmented humans using of brain implants from Neuralink & Synchron that blur the line between human and machine? Does the internet serve as a nervous system for this superorganism, and could it be a New Mind as well?
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking, the founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years, former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and the author of multiple best-selling books about the future of technology.
Kevin is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture. His writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harper's Magazine, Science, Veneer Magazine, GQ, and Esquire, and his photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines.
LINKS & RESOURCES:
What Technology Wants (2010)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Technology_Wants
Out Of Control (1992)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Control_(Kelly_book)
The Singularity Is Always Near
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/
Holos Rising / Technium Unbound (Summary by Stewart Brand)
https://longnow.org/seminars/02014/nov/12/technium-unbound/
Kevin Kelly Official Homepage
https://kk.org/
The Technium: Evidence Of A Global Superorganism
https://kk.org/thetechnium/evidence-of-a-g/
The Technium: The Seventh Kingdom of Life
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-seventh-kin/
The Technium and the Seventh Kingdom of Life
https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium-and-the-7th-kingdom-of-life
The Technium, and how Kevin Kelly Changed His Mind
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/the-technium-and-how-kevin-kelly-changed-his-mind/
Kevin Kelly (WIkipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)