We're really all here because of Stewart Brand, and this was his 1972 Rolling Stone article, turned into a book. And the title of it was Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

Random House 1974

And here we are. We're still here. Stewart's still hanging out among the computer bums. Stewart really helped make this industry, which was not an industry then. It was a hobby. He brought it to Rolling Stone and made it fashionable. That was a very important moment, and I urge everyone to re-read this. All the things we're still working on today were part of that original story. He went and visited the people who were setting up the first 20 nodes of the ARPANET, who were already using it for games. He talked to the people [at Xerox PARC] trying to build something called the Dynabook, which was a notebook computer, and way ahead of its time.

Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1972 (Stewart Brand on far right, wearing wristwatch). Photo by Annie Liebovitz for Rolling Stone.

And here we are. We're still here. Stewart's still hanging out among the computer bums. Stewart really helped make this industry, which was not an industry then. It was a hobby. He brought it to Rolling Stone and made it fashionable. That was a very important moment, and I urge everyone to re-read this. All the things we're still working on today were part of that original story. He went and visited the people who were setting up the first 20 nodes of the ARPANET, who were already using it for games. He talked to the people [at Xerox PARC] trying to build something called the Dynabook, which was a notebook computer, and way ahead of its time.

I'm a historian, and in the history of computing, there's an Old Testament and there's a New Testament. And, in the Old Testament, the prophet was Leibniz, from here in Germany, who believed in this perfectly digital universe in which everything could be defined with binary code, and all truths would be discovered. And he went to the grave believing in that, and it looked really good for a long time. Leibniz supplied the logic.

Leibniz's Digital Universe (design for a medallion presented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Rudolph August, Duke of Brunswick, 2 January 1697).

And the New Testament prophet was von Neumann, who built the machines that made Leibniz's dream come to life. And in between the Old Testament and the New Testament was Alan Turing, in 1936.

The moment I'm going to go back to is exactly 60 years ago, in 1951. It was in 1946 that this group of von Neumann's started to try and build a computer, the machine whose randomly-accessible storage matrix became this digital world we live in. And in 1951, they finally got the thing running. From 1946 to 1951, those five years, they were working on this thing.

I was last here at DLD in 2006, and now it's 2011. That's exactly the same span of time that those guys, against all odds — it was only a group of about six people — conceived and developed the technology, built this machine, got it running and de-bugged, and started solving serious problems. And in this whole similar amount of time, I've just been writing about it. It's very humiliating how much they got done.

In 1951, they finally get the machine running. And this is an actual image of the digital universe when it came to life in 1951.

32 x 32 array of charged spots on face of Williams digital memory tube, ca. 1952. Photo courtesy of the Archives, Institute for Advanced Study.

In the real universe, we can only imagine the origins, but here we can actually see it. It's a 32 x 32 bit array of charged spots, on the face of a cathode ray tube, that can be accessed by the control organ of the machine. In 24 microseconds, you can go to any spot [and read or write one bit]. And they had 40 of these tubes [in parallel]. Now, some people don't know what a cathode ray tube is. It's a glass tube, shaped exactly like this bottle.

Photo courtesy Hubert Burda Media

About the same size, but much thinner. And inside is a vacuum. There's nothing in there but electrons. And in this end is an electron gun that is producing a stream of electrons, and there's two coils that can aim the beam, on an X and a Y axis.

At that moment in time, in 1951, this was an analog device.

James Pomerene with digital memory tube made from an over-the-counter 5-inch analog oscilloscope tube, ca. 1952. Photo courtesy of the Archives, Institute for Advanced Study.

If you doubled the voltage, you doubled the deflection, and you could add numbers by adding and subtracting voltages, in an analog way. By producing this 32 x 32 bit matrix, they made the big switch from analog to digital. [They now had a 32 x 32 x 40-bit array of charged spots, equivalent to having 40,960 individual capacitors addressable by a high-speed, electronic switch.]

And that was the origins of software, because they started writing codes that would use this memory. We switched from having numbers that represented things and meant things, for the first time, to codes that were numbers that could do things. And that was a profound transition that we're all still living in the repercussions of. It took five bits to specify a position on this axis, and five bits on that axis: a total of 10 bits to address one of these memory locations, and there were 40 of these tubes [collectively storing 40-bit strings, or "words."] So you put in 10 bits [specifying an address, and 10 bits specifying an instruction] and you got 40 bits out. That caused a chain reaction, just like the [2-for-1 fission in the] nuclear weapons they were trying to design.

We went from analog to digital. And here is a list of the five different problems that they worked on, with an axis in time.

The 5 main problems (left) addressed by the Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project, 1946-1958, with time scale for comparison.

They worked on nuclear explosions, which were on a time scale of 10^-8 seconds. They worked on shock waves, which were fractions of seconds to seconds. And they worked on meteorology, which was in the middle: minutes to months to years. And they worked on biological evolution, over hundreds and thousands of years, and [they worked on] the evolution of stars and solar systems, up to 10^17 seconds. So, it's a time scale [ranging across] 25 orders of magnitude.

And what's interesting is, if you look at this, what's exactly in the middle?  The exact middle of that whole time scale is about two hours, which is the length of a Hollywood film. Somehow, in our perceivable universe, the time we take to tell a story is right in the middle. And that may just be an accident, or it may have something to do with what Kevin Kelly was talking about, how we [and our technologies] really are a product of this entire universe.

That's how we got here. Now, from that perspective, where are we going next? Where is this whole digital world going?  And I'm going to risk being thrown out of here by saying... not that digital is over, but that we've already moved into a new phase, that people just are not recognizing yet: back to analog. We're taking that cathode ray tube back the other way.

If you look at what's exciting people here most, it's the things like Facebook and Google, search engines and so on. And an awful lot of what's being done there is actually analog computing. In the world of nature, in the world of brains, there's no digital code where a certain bit has a certain meaning. The computation is done in the analog way, where frequencies have meaning, and where how things connect — topology — has meaning.

If you look at a search engine, that's exactly what's happening. It's counting the pulse frequency of connections between topological points. If you look at what Facebook does, if you took, say, a small high school and tried to write an algorithm that defined who was friends with whom, you would be completely lost very soon, because every day, somebody breaks up, and then somebody else's friend is not somebody's friend ... you could never keep track. And Facebook does this for 600 million people [in real time] and they did it by building an analog computer, by simply allowing all the people to connect with a very simple digital code. When you join Facebook, you download very little code. And then the whole system becomes its own analog computer, that maps the changes and the connections.

Pulse frequency coding and template-based addressing is how biology stores [and conveys] information. You get the next molecule by saying you want the next molecule that more or less matches this template. And that's how search engines work. You can address [a memory location] without having to give a precise numerical address.

Computers are now being used to program cells, and my parting thought would be that it's also the other way. That living cells have, for billions of years, been storing their genetic information outside the individual cell, in the viral cloud. Why do we all get colds? If colds were purely harmful, we would have stopped having colds millions of years ago. But we get colds because we need that input/output mechanism to convey genetic sequences through the viral cloud. That's an important interface. In many ways, life is using computers to further the agenda of cells as much as computers are using cells to further the agenda of technology. It's a symbiotic relationship.

In a way, we're still living in the world of Leibniz. But it's definitely going somewhere else. And a lot happened in 1951. We went from zero kilobytes to the memory of this computer I talked about: five kilobytes. You used to be able to say that this was the memory of a desktop icon, but there's been icon bloat, so now it's the memory of your cursor, five kilobytes. And the year I was born, 1953, the total memory in the world was 53 kilobytes.

The world before Darwin was very curious, because the theory of biology was that it was just a collection of things. There was really no other organizing framework. It was just one thing after another. And actually, today, although we're all involved in making stuff, we don't actually have very good theory of technology. It's just basically one thing after another, just like it was before Darwin.

I want to offer today a suggestion about a theory for technology, some framework that we could put it into so that we can understand what it means for us. And I want to start with the fact that we actually don't even know what technology is.

Here's a common definition of technology: It is anything that was invented after you were born. Or else, it's this one: It's anything that doesn't work yet. But actually, it has to be more than those things, of course. It's everything in this room. It's the carpeting, it's the structures, it's the conduit. But more importantly, of course, it's the intangibles, like calendars and other laws, software.

I actually think it's even more critical than that, which is that, if you take these two technological objects, the one on the left was something that anybody here could probably make. The one on the right is one that none of us here could make. In fact, all of us here together probably couldn't make it. But that's because the one on the right is actually composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of sub-technologies. Those sub-technologies require other technologies below, to compose it and to make it work. So actually, you might want to think of this object as more like a network. And as Geoffrey West shows, networks are what really make up everything that we make.

If we look at networks, we can understand, in fact, this technology, the one in my clicker, the one that's running the computers here, that these technologies actually form one large network, maybe one ecosystem of technology, or maybe even a super-organism of technology. I'm interested in that super-organism. I give it a name called the Technium, to indicate that it's more than just culture, that in fact, it is something that has its own agenda, something that has its own response, its own agency.

I talk about what technology "wants," to indicate that it has a leaning, a kind of a general urgency. And I use the word "want" provocatively. Here is a robot from Willow Garage. It's been programmed to find its own power by roaming through the hallways, looking for an outlet with its nine eyes. It takes its tail, and it plugs itself in to recharge. I stood between it and an outlet, and I could feel that it wanted electricity. It was not conscious. It was not deliberate. But there was an agency from that system. I use the same word to talk about what technology wants, what the system of the Technium wants. And I use the word "want" to mean the way in which a plant wants light, or a bacterium wants food. It's not intellectual. It's not conscious. It's a general trend in that direction.

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that this technology wants something of its own agenda. It's selfish. That's the bad news. The good news is that this technology has a moral dimension. It wants good stuff for us. There is a general, long-term, positive force for good in technology. I want to quickly give you a sense of where and how we can understand that.

I suggest that the way we can ask what technology wants is by asking a different question, and that's based on the fact that there was an amazing discovery 50 years ago: that the essence of life was not energy and was not carbon, but in fact, it was information. And of course, that's the essence of technology. And so there is a kind of equivalency between the world of the born and the world of the made. The stuff that is living and the stuff that's made. It's actually not as far apart as we thought. We can import biological evolution into computers, and of course, we can engineer life. And so, these worlds are a lot closer than we think. That gives us permission to actually look at evolution and life for suggestions about understanding technology.

So, what does evolution want? What are the long-term trends, the long-term agencies, in the evolutionary system? One we can understand and see easiest is increasing diversity over time in life, over 3.7 billion years. That's obvious to us. And actually, we can see that in the data.

There's also another long-term trend, which is this movement towards complexity. Things start off simple, and they go to the complex. That is a long-term trend. It's not just an apparent thing, and it's not just a projection. We actually can show that there is a slight drift to things becoming more complex. It's very, very rare when complex things actually become simple. So, we intuitively feel that there's a long journey towards the more complex.

I want to indicate that this trend is not suggesting that there's a ladder of evolution that we're kind of climbing up. I'm suggesting that, in fact, that it's a radiation outward. Every organism on earth today is equally evolved. There is an outward radiation. There's a direction, not a destiny.

The other directions that evolution is moving towards is not just greater complexity and diversity, but also specialization. There's increased mutualism. Fifty percent of the species on earth are either parasitic or symbiotic. There's an direction towards increased sentience. Evolution, again and again, invents brains and minds. There's a movement towards evolvability. The entire process of evolution itself is evolving. The process by which things change are changing. So, those are some of the general trends in evolution over time.

We see the same thing happening in the Technium. You can see the diversity of the made world. These are spark-catchers from 100 years ago, and they have the same kind of variety that, say, butterflies or beetles would have. That's one of the directions that technology is going.

Another is increased specialization. The first camera was a general purpose camera or hammer. But over time, we make more specialized versions. We make a panoramic camera, an underwater camera. Then we make more specialized versions of those. We make the panoramic underwater camera. And then we make the panoramic underwater infrared camera. We keep making more specialized versions.

You see the same thing in the Technium that we can see in life, so much that in fact we can almost map out the technological evolution as if it was a tree of life. The similarities are so great between the way the technological system evolves and the way the life evolves, that I suggest that we should think of the Technium as an extension of the six kingdoms of life. Those are the six kingdoms: plants, fungi, animal and three varieties of bacteria. We should imagine that the Technium is actually the seventh kingdom of life. It's actually been extended outward from the primates, and it behaves almost the same way.

If that is so, then we can ask ourselves, well, what does the Technium, the seventh kingdom of life, want? The answer to a first approximation is that it's going in the same very general trends, the same general tendencies, as evolution. So, what technology wants is what life wants, basically, to a rough degree.

What does that mean? Well, it means that every new invention that we invent also brings us new problems, maybe almost as many problems as we have solutions. I would suggest a couple consequences. One, most of the problems in the world today are technogenic. I would suggest that most of the problems in the world tomorrow are going to be caused by technologies that we have invented today.

At first, that might suggest that there is just a 50/50 wash, that in fact, maybe technology's just neutral. But I actually think there's something else going on, and it's not the full story. The full story is that, when we invented that first hammer, we actually created a choice to use it for ill or for good that we didn't have before. We could use the hammer to kill someone or build a house. But that choice, which did not exist before, is itself good, even if we use something for bad. So, having the choice itself is a positive good. That positive good tilts the balance slightly in favor of the good, even by a little tiny bit. ??But it turns out, a little bit is all we need. Because even if we use technology to create only one percent more than we destroy a year, that one percent delta, that tiny little delta, is all we need, compounded over centuries, to make civilization. So a tiny, incremental delta, created by the fact that we're creating new choices with everything that we invent, including the choice to use it for harm. So that is what we get.?That's what gives the long-term moral dimension to technology.

If I had a bad idea, nobody here is going to suggest that I think less. Or that I stop thinking. The proper response to a bad idea is a better idea. Likewise, the proper response to bad technology is not less technology. It's not no technology. It's better technology. That's a very technocentric view.

We always are increasing the options, and even when we have problems with the things that we've invented, the solution to these problem technologies is not to have less. The solution is: more and better. Including the problem that technology, at times, can be environmentally harmful. The proper response for that is not less technology. It's better technology, greener technology. So far as we've seen, to the best of our knowledge, we've not invented a technology that we could not invent an even greener version of.?That means that, in a certain sense, the Technium is not inherently anti-life. If it is the seventh kingdom of life, it is inherently compatible with life. We've always been able to make things greener. So, what that means is that we're involved in trying to relocate technologies. We want to make a convivial form of them, to find the right job for them.

DDT was a molecule that we invented and we sprayed it in millions of pounds, on millions of acres of agricultural lands, as a pesticide. That was a total environmental disaster. The same invention, the same molecule, relocated, and sprayed judiciously around households in the tropics, is the best eradicator of malaria, saving hundreds of millions of lives a year. We relocated that technology. Rather than ban it, saying "make less technology," we said, no, let's have a better idea.

In the end what does technology want? It really wants one thing. We could collapse that long list of things that evolution wants and say that what technology really wants is increasing differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities, freedoms. That's what we get from technology. That's what it is bringing to us, everything that we invent.

While we are at home or at work making new stuff, making new things, sometimes we feel, well, we may feel we're just kind of feeding consumerism, the capitalist machine that's driving all this stuff that we consume. And maybe it's ephemeral, or that we don't use it very long. We throw it out. And maybe, at times, we're seized with doubt about whether all this creation is worthwhile. It may be that we're not doing anything more than that at times, but in fact, we are. When we make new technology, we're actually increasing the possibilities and choices and differences in the world.

The reason why that is good is because most of us need some kind of tool to help us find and express our genius. Mozart needed the technologies of the piano and the harpsichord to find and develop his musical genius. Or that could have been Beethoven. But imagine if Mozart had been born 2,000 years before the invention of the piano or the symphony. What a loss to us and to him that would have been. Or imagine if Van Gogh had been born 2,000 years before we had invented oil paints and canvas. What a loss to the world, and to him, that lack of technology would have been. Or, you know, what if we had not invented the technologies of cinema before, say, Hitchcock or Lucas had been born? What a hole in our culture that would have been.

That means that, today, somewhere in the world, there is a boy or girl born, some Shakespeare of their generation, who is waiting for us to invent their technology, so that they can share their genius. So we have an obligation to actually increase the amount of technologies in the world. Just as we have benefited from those in the past who have invented stuff for us.

What we want to do is to increase those possibilities in the world, More importantly, this action connects us to something even longer. There is a long-term trend in the universe of increasing self-organization. It began with the Big Bang, and self-organized galaxies, then with self-organized stars, which are furnaces to self-organized, heavier metals out of lighter atoms. And those heavier metals and atoms would self-organize into a planet, and maybe an atmosphere. And those, at least on our planet, self-organize into life, which self-organize into the mind in the Technium.

That yields a kind of a long-term trend, beginning at the Big Bang, of increasing diversity, specialization, complexity. Which life is just extending. In fact, the cosmos, the bios and the technos are just one long string of this story. And the Technium is simply the most recent incarnation and acceleration of that long-term trend of the universe. So that when we make things, when we increase technological diversity and when we make and increase technology, we are re actually participating in something that comes way before us, and will run through and beyond us.

We are involved in much more than just inventing novelty. We're actually involved in something that's bigger than ourselves, that can bring meaning to our lives. We're involved in increasing the possibilities, both for us, our children, and for the world at large and that is what technology wants.