Technology, contends journalist Kevin Kelly, has a life of its own, describing how technology advances independently of humans. He introduced the term “technium”, a term that embodies the sum of all technologies, the society and culture of tools, and the self-reinforcing system of creating them.
At some point of evolution, our system of technology tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it .. began to exercise some autonomy.
At first, the notion of technological independence is hard to grasp. we are taught to think of technology first as a pile of hardware and secondly as inert stuff that is wholly dependent on us humans. In this view, technology is only what we make. Without us, it ceases to be. Technology does only what we want. And that’s what I believed, too… But the more I looked at the whole system of technological invention, the more powerful and self-generating I realized it was.
There are many fans, as well as many foes, of future technology who strongly disagree with the idea that the technicum is in any way autonomous. They adhere to the creed that technology does only what we permit it to do. In this view, notions of technological autonomy are just wishful thinking on our part.
But I now embrace a contrary view: that after 10,000 years of slow evolution and 200 years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts has given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.
Read more about this in this technology book:
What Technology Wants, by Kelly Viking, 2010