Extropy is neither wave nor particle, nor pure energy. It is an immaterial force that is very much like information. Since extropy is defined as negative entropy — the reversal of disorder — it is, by definition, an increase in order. But what is order? Despite our intuitive sense, we lack a good operational definition of order, which seems to be tied up with complexity (see Ordained Becoming). For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don’t have useful metrics for extropy. The best we can say is that extropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information.

We can not make an exact informational definition of extropy because we don’t really know what information is. In fact the term “information” covers several contradictory concepts that should have their own terms. We use information to mean 1) a bunch of bits, or 2) a meaningful signal. When entropy (disorder) increases, it produces “more information” as in more bits. But when entropy decreases, it is the same as a rise in extropy (negative entropy) which produces “more information” as in more structured meaningful bits.  Until we clarify our language the term information is more metaphor than anything else. I try use it in the second meaning here (not always successfully): as in bits that make a difference.

Mudding the waters further, information is the reigning metaphor of the moment. We tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature was described as a body, then a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine in the industrial age. Now in the “digital age” we apply the computational metaphor (see The Computational Metaphor). To explain the how our minds work, or how evolution advances, we apply the pattern of a very large software program processing bits of information. None of these historical metaphorical pictures are wrong; just incomplete. Ditto for computation. But extropy must be more than information alone. We have thousands of years of science ahead of us. Information and computation can’t be the most complex immaterial entity there is, just the most complex we’ve discovered so far. We might eventually discover that extropy involves quantum dynamics, or gravity, or even quantum gravity. But for now, information (in the sense of structure) is a better analogy than anything else we know of for understanding the nature of extropy. Following information will reveal a larger pattern.

In the initial era of the universe, energy dominated existence. At that time radiation was all there was. The universe was a glow. Slowly, as space expanded and cooled, matter took over. Matter was clumpy, unevenly distributed, but its crystallization generated gravity which began to shape space. With the rise of life (in our immediate neighborhood) information ascended in influence. The informational process we call life took control of the atmosphere of Earth several billion years ago. Now the technium, another informational processing, is reconquering it. Extropy’s rise in the universe (from the perspective of our planet) might look like this chart, where E=energy, M=mass, and I=information.

The billion-years rise of extropy — as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind and the technium — can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.

This is more clearly seen at the extreme. The difference between four bottles of amino acids on a laboratory self and the four amino acids arrayed in your chromosomes lies in the additional structure, or ordering, those atoms get from participating in the spirals of your replicating DNA. Same atoms, more order. Those atoms of amino acids acquire yet another level of structure and order when their cellular host undergoes evolution. As organisms evolve, the informational code their atoms carry is manipulated, processed, and reordered. In addition to genetic information, the atoms now convey adaptive information. Over time, the same atoms can be promoted to new levels of order. Perhaps their one cell home joins another cell to become multicellular — that demands the informational architecture for a larger organism as well as a cell. Further transitions in evolution — the aggregation into tissues and organs, the acquisition of sex, the creation of social groups — continue to elevate the order and increase the structure of the information flowing through those same atoms.

The technium can be understood as a way of structuring information beyond biology. Foremost among all inventions is language, and its kin writing, which introduced a parallel set of symbol strings to those found in DNA. But the grammar and syntax of language far outstrips the flexibility of the genetic code. Literary inventions like the book index, punctuation, cross-references, and alphabetic order permitted incredibly complex structures within words; printing broadcast them. Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music. The invention of the scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques. Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated. The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium. Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization. The invention of paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of information. Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we’ve ever built – say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information. There are many more hours of design poured into them than hours in manufacturing. Finally, the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information. The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

For four billion years evolution has been accumulating knowledge in its library of genes. You can learn a lot in four billion years. Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell. That thread (DNA) learns something new each generation, and adds that hard-won knowledge to its code.  Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage.  Now multiply the unique information held by every individual organism by all the organisms alive in the world today and you get an astronomically large treasure.  Imagine the Noah’s Ark that would be needed to carry the genetic payload of every organism on earth (seeds, eggs, spores, sperms). One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information. That’s a lot.

And that is only the biological information. The technium is awash in its own ocean of information. Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10^20) of information, many orders smaller than nature’s total, but growing. Technology expands data by 66% per year, overwhelming the growth rates of any natural source.  Compared to other planets in the neighborhood, or to the dumb material drifting in space beyond, a thick blanket of learning and self-organized information surround this orb.

This store of order is a surprise. Earth’s great heap of structure, complexity and knowledge does not seem to be contained “in” the physics that govern non-extropic stuff. Where do you hide 10^29 bytes of organization? The rules behind the fundamental behavior of the elemental particles and energies that make up our reality are very spare, almost naked.  It might take books and books to explain them in words, but the laws themselves can be compressed into a very small amount of information. If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk. Amazingly, one plastic plate could contain the operating code for the entire universe. Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times bigger, it would fit onto one high-density “disk” in a few years from now.  The total code for matter/energy is an infinitesimal fraction compared to mountain of extropic information that has accumulated on this planet. In fact the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics.

Another way to say this is that the laws of physics don’t (as far as we know) improve with time, but extropic systems like life, mind and the technium do. Over billions of years they gain order, complexity, and their own self-organized autonomy — all things not present in the universe before. As Paul Davies points out, “life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history.” Life, and by extension mind and the technium, are only loosely governed by physics (just 1%); mostly they are ruled by their own self-creation.

But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow “built into” that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years.  This is true to some extent, but not entirely.

In an important way, this unfolding information is not contained in the physical realm. To be clear, I do not mean that it is supernatural. Either extropy must exist in the universe it is transforming, or it must exist outside of it as a supernatural force. If outside, then its dynamics are outside the range of science and of this book. I make the assumption that extropy is not a mystical supernatural force but operates in the lawful realm of physical reality. That is, we can measure it.

However it is immaterial. It is immaterial in the way that a bit is immaterial even though every bit must be incarnated in a physical medium of mass and energy. It takes measurable energy to accomplish computation, to self-organize, to add order. And that work must be stabilized, ratcheted, in matter. So information and extropy must flow through the physical world. Yet the results of that flow through matter and energy is a set of immaterial qualities: knowledge, increasing order, increasing diversity, and increasing sentience.

Another way to read the long-term trajectory of extropy is to view it as an escape from the material and the transcendence to the immaterial. In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned. The rules of chemistry, torque, electrostatic charges and other such reversible forces were all that mattered. There was no other game. Self-organization introduced a new vector into the world. Evolution and life open up possibilities for matter and energy that did not exist in the pre-extropy universe. These possibilities (like a living cell) did not contradict the rules of chemistry and physics, but in a certain sense they allowed the new forms to escape the ordinary strictures of these laws, which would otherwise lead to simple mechanical forms. Paul Davies summarizes it well: “The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis…Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.”

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move towards the immaterial. (Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more valuable.) In six years the average weight per dollar of US exports (the most valuable things the US produces) dropped by half. Forty percent of US exports today are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). Disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium. We substitute intangible design for heavy atoms, making materials simultaneously stronger and lighter, or devices smaller and more powerful. Generally we make things more valuable by adding intangibles such as design, flexibility, innovation and smartness.

Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium’s ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial. For instance, science (starting with Newton) has been able to abstract massive amounts of evidence about movement into the very simple law f=ma. Likewise, Einstein reduced enormous numbers of empirical observations into the very condensed container of E=mc^2. Every scientific theory is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries stacked with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated information.

As extropy self-organizes the universe into more complex structures, with more abstraction, and greater compression of information, it overthrows the constraints of the material realm. The  arc of extropy is the slow, yet irreversible, liberation from the imperative of matter and energy. It shifts dominance to informational processes such as evolution, learning, and invention. It unleashes the intangible and immaterial.

Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a “spirit.” But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well. Although it may not dominate matter’s behavior, information must rest in the essence of matter. That’s a lot less intuitive. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn’t feel like we knocked into information. But that’s the idea many physicists are formulating.

Once scientists built large scopes to examine matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, they saw the world was incorporeal. They discovered that matter is, at the bottom, empty space and waves of quantum uncertainties. A particle’s existence is a continuous field of probabilities, which blurs the sharp distinction between is/is not. Yet this fundamental uncertainty resolves as soon as information is added (that is, as soon as it’s measured). At that moment of knowledge, all other possibilities collapse to leave only the single state of “is” or “is not.” Indeed, the very term “quantum” suggests an indefinite realm constantly resolving into discrete increments, precise yes/no states. Quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are mostly made of nothing but binary logic.

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term “black hole”) claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of 1’s and 0’s. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, “Its are from bits.” He elaborated: “Every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits.” All movement, all actions, all nouns, all functions, all states, all we see, hear, measure, and feel are elaborate cathedrals built out of bits. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains of the primeval “it” is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, “Who are you?” the being says, in effect, “Am.” One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible.

All creation is assembled from irreducible bits. The bits are like the “atoms” of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life. Everything that is! Movement, energy, gravity, dark matter, and antimatter are elaborate circuits of 1/0 decisions. Every mountain, every star, each flight of a thrown ball, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind,  is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together.

Wheeler adds, “What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.” In this new perspective, as two hydrogen and one oxygen bind together to form a water molecule, each hydrogen atom uses quantum processes to decide yes/no for all possible courses toward the oxygen atom, until they arrive at the optimal 104.45 degrees union. Thus every chemical bond is thus “calculated.”

Computation is the muscle of extropy. Computation is a type of self-organization that juggles and manipulates these primal information bits. It silently employs a small amount of energy to rearrange symbols into greater order. The input of computation is energy and information; the output is order, structure, extropy. The final result of a material computation is a signal that makes a difference — a difference that can be felt as a bruised knee.

“Computation is a process that is perhaps *the* process,” says Danny Hillis, whose book, The Pattern on the Stone, explains the formidable nature of computation. “It has an almost mystical character because it seems to have some deep relationship to the underlying order of the universe. Exactly what that relationship is, we cannot say. At least for now.”  There is even a suspicion, though no one has proved it, that life’s self-organization may rely on computation.

If the essence of creation is a bit, then gravity, the speed of light, Higgs bosons, relativity, evolution, quantum mechanics, human emotions, and the thoughts in your mind at this moment would all be squirming piles of intersecting loops of yes/no bits, and each phenomenon would need a computational explanation. We are a long way from having a unified theory of everything in the language of bits, but we have a couple of hints that the process of computation may lie at the center.

Our awakening to the true power of computation rests on three suspicions. The first is that computation can describe all things. To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation. With the advent of digital signal processing, we can capture video, music, and art in the same bit form. There is a lot of debate about how much of art can be reduced to bits, but clearly much can be. Even emotion is not immune. As one example, researcher Cynthia Breazeal at MIT built Kismet, a computational robot that exhibits primitive feelings in response to human actions. Less controversially, formal creations in mathematics, music, and language can be expressed as a valid computer program.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. Surprisingly almost any kind of material can serve as the matrix for a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well. So can sticks and strings. In 1975, as an undergraduate student, Danny Hillis constructed a digital computer out of skinny Tinkertoys. In 2000, Hillis designed a binary computer made of only steel and harden alloys that is indirectly powered by human muscle. This slow-moving device computes time in a clock intended to tick for 10,000 years. Hillis hasn’t made a computer with pipes and pumps, but, he says, he could. Recently, scientists have used both quantum particles and minute strands of DNA to perform computations. Many other complex systems have been shown to be capable of computation.

The third postulate is: All computation is one. In 1937, Alan Turing and Alonso Church proved a theorem now bearing their names. The Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration. One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC, or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. A Dell laptop could, if anyone wanted it to, emulate an iPhone. In other words, all computation is equivalent. Turing and Church called this universal computation. Mathematician Stephen Wolfram takes this idea even further and suggests that many very complex processes in the realms of biology and technology are basically computationally equivalent. The physics of person munching on a banana is computationally equivalent to the best possible virtual simulation of the same act. Both phenomenon require the same degree of universal computation, one in particles, and one in electrons.

The consequence of these three propositions — that computation is universal, ubiquitous, and equivalent — suggests that the logical processing of bits is the most potent form of self-organization at work in the universe. While not all self-organization reaches the threshold of computation, universal computation can potentially erupt anywhere. There is currently a lot of research investigating how computation might fare in quantum dimensions and whether quantum computation might be the basis for human consciousness. It’s still an open question, but the three axioms also suggest a rather spooky corollary: If everything can compute, and all computation is equivalent, then there is only one universal computer. All the human-made computation, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggyback on cycles of the Great Computer, also known as the Universe.

No one wants to see themselves as someone else’s program running on someone else’s computer. Put that way, life seems a bit secondhand. But doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, “at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source.” This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

The flow of intangible bits is at the core of the astounding complexity we see in this part of the universe. The trend toward increasing order, diversity and intelligence over time, beginning 14 billion years ago and accelerating now, is driven by the increasing structure of information. It is compressed, computed, layered, and lifted to new levels. This emergent self-organization is an immaterial quality arising from physics that continually gains in the face of increasing entropy.  This long trajectory — from the beginning till now — is the arc of extropy.

[For those who care, portions of this posting were recycled from an earlier Wired article I wrote.]

We don’t usually lose technologies. In the annals of the technium there are extremely few cases where a society has given up a working technology without substituting something superior. Occasionally specific know-how may disappear. In the 6th century Byzantine empire some pyrotechnical wizards invented a incendiary weapon called Greek Fire, or warfire. This fire could not be extinguished by water, in fact it would burn on top of water, and it would eat itself while incinerating anything it touched, a most miraculous and handy weapon at that time. From a distance of up to 50 feet soldiers would shoot the spectacular fire onto ships and forts, which spread fiercely, and quickly consumed targets with unquenchable flames. But warfire’s exact chemical composition, always a highly guarded military secret shared by a few keepers in the Asia Minor, was lost during the medieval ages. The current consensus is that warfire was crude oil shot through a long bronze pump, and alternatively lobed by a catapult in clay jars wrapped in burning cloths. Perhaps because warfire required crude oil seep wells found only in the mid-east, this technology died out as the most advance warfare technology drifted to Europe.

Another three well-known examples of lost technology: Around 100 BC tinkerers in ancient Greece, maybe even Archimedes himself, invented a “laptop” astronomical calculator, now called an antikythera, that could predict eclipses and serve as a kind of portable planetarium to determine the positions of celestial bodies. There were at least four models of this small analog computer made in ancient times,  but all were lost with no influence on subsequent technology. Two thousand years later scuba divers found a corroded remains in an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the sea in Greece. The precision, miniaturization, and ingenuity of its metal parts and fine gears of the original calculator were not equaled again until 18th century clocks, yet somehow this sophisticated technology was abandoned for cruder technology.

In the 10th century Arabs compiled a nine-volume encyclopedia of medical knowledge and philosophical notes written by the renowned physician Al Razi, said to be longest medical text ever written by a single person. Two hundred years later this book was forgotten in the Islamic world. No copies in Arabic have ever been found. We only know about it through a Latin translation made in 1279. While some of its wisdom was found in other writings, the bulk of it disappeared in the Islamic world, the center of civilization at the time.

Japan gave up gun technology for 200 years. The first guns in Japan were imported by Portuguese traders in 1543. Within 50 years Japanese master metal smiths had cloned them and were exporting firearms for cash. Even before 1600 guns and cannons were deciding battles in Japan. In a extremely chivalrous culture (10% of Japanese men were samurai) the gun was assigned to low-class uneducated foot soldiers, while the art of the sword was the more honorable choice for rulers. As the gun became common it became unfashionable, vulgar, despicable in its ability to kill indiscriminately. Its slow removal was a type of arms control — the gun was seen as too deadly for civilized people. Europe made similar, but ineffectual, attempts to ban the gun around the same time. Martin Luther called firearms “devilish.” King Henry IV in France prohibited non-royal manufacture of gunpowder and King Henry VIII in England outlawed firearm ownership by anyone earning less than 100 pounds per year. Neither edict was successfully enforced. However, Japan was able to centralize gun production and banish the weapon from their island by 1668. The Japanese reverted to their beloved swords, and since they were closed to outside influence during this period and only fought among themselves, the gun did not return until Commodore Perry forced it in 1879. For two centuries the Japanese retreated from the manufacture of complex firearms and instead perfected the manufacture of the world’s most sophisticated swords (they could slice through a barrel of machine gun).

These four examples of reversal are fascinating primarily because they are so scarce. Despite these exceedingly rare retreats, the technium moves relentlessly forward. Generally, a society does not abandon a new technology to return to an earlier version. When a current technology is suspended in the natural course of evolution it is usually displaced by a more complex variation, and the old version is swept aside as a viable minor alternative, or at least a curiosity, but rarely goes extinct. For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren’t really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.

Rather than a series of linear displacements climbing a ladder of evolution, the technium progresses as a widening field of accumulation. Existing technologies keep operating almost intact, but are subsumed under additional new, more complex layers. Beneath the fancy hi-tech digital world a viable industrial foundation provides rare-earth metals, electricity, copper wire, and plastic keyboards. Beneath the industrial foundation a viable agriculture swells. As any modern farmer will tell you, the glories of virtual worlds and e-commerce depend upon a rather primitive cycle of poking seeds into dirt and harvesting the replicants into large bins, a routine that has not changed much in 8,000 years. The agriculture era has not disappeared.

Because human population is still growing, the size of the agricultural layer of the technium continues to spread. The shrinking cohort of farmers in the developed world is more than offset by their growing numbers elsewhere. There is more agriculture on this planet than ever before (one third of land surface). In the past 40 years of the industrial revolution alone, cropland has increased globally by 12%. At the same time, and for the same reasons, the widening base of farms and foodstuffs permits industry to expand. The industrial age is nowhere near ending. Its continual expansion permits new post-industrial technologies to expand. The leading edge of technology (lightweight, disembodied, highly leveraged stuff — solar panels, gene therapies, and quantum computers) races forward, but only because its subsumed foundations also march forward.

But why does the technium so rarely go backwards? Why are forgotten calculators, weapons, and medical encyclopedia so uncommon? Why is there a one-way directionality to technical progress, so that in its broadest outlines it inexorably moves towards the more complex with so little retreat?

Four reasons. First, the natural momentum won by any entrenched system bestows a directionality. The more established a process is, the harder it is to change, the more it proceeds along its path. Big technology is hard to stop. For instance, the US electrical system achieved technological momentum by the time it set its standards for voltages and frequencies in 1900, and they have not changed since. For all practical purposes the flexibility of a technological system is eliminated once its initial choices and defaults are fixed. As systems scale up they acquire inertia. The components of global technologies like container freight shipping, or integrated circuit design, or hospital x-ray equipment, tend to create a kind of autonomous movement simply because of their size. 

The scale of many technologies dwarfs us individually. The span of pulsating power lines continue beyond our vision to wrap around the earth.  This grid, built 100 years ago, lighted your grandparent’s home, and our parents’, and now brightens mine, and will light the lights of our grandchildren and probably their grandkids. The wires, towers, circuit breakers, and network of connections might eventually persevere as long as the aqueducts of Segovia, Spain built in 100 CE. That technology conducted drinking water for 75 generations. Roman roads outlived the Romans. This technological longevity is almost a kind of immortality that transcends our comparatively brief lives. The technium’s scope exists outside of our oversight, especially outside of our personal oversight. Its omnipresence together with its relative immortality grants it a version of autonomy.

The second way that technology gains a measure of autonomy is through its self-creation of needs. When we purchase a mobile phone that is just the beginning. The cell phone “needs” a voicemail box, a charger, an ear piece. Previously phones did not need apps but now phones are defined by their cousins, computers, so they do.  As historian David Nye observes, the mobile phone and by extension any tool, “enters into the determination of its own utilities, suggesting new ideas for its own definition.”  The more ways a technology insinuates itself into the existing fabric of the technium, the more autonomy it can acquire.  As its supporting web is cast wider, it can come to rely upon hundreds of technologies, and in turn sustain hundreds itself. And of course each of those assisting technologies is subsidized by a web of others devices. In many cases inventions co-support each other. The entire ecosystem of interrelated technologies begins to act as a whole.

In that curious way of life, growth triggers more growth. The web of technologies is ever expanding because a particular technology will self-generate new needs, new demands, and new appetites. David Landes summarized the technium’s emergent self-making with this succinct story in Unbound Prometheus, his history of the industrial revolution:  “The invention and diffusion of machinery in the textile manufacture and other industries created a new demand for energy, hence for coal and steam engines; and these engines, and the machines themselves, had a voracious appetite for iron, which called for further coal and power.  Steam also made possible the factory city, which used unheard-of quantities of iron (hence coal) in its many-storied mills and its water and sewage systems…  And all of these products–iron, textiles, chemicals–depended on large-scale movements of goods on land and on sea, from the sources of the raw materials into the factories and out again to near and distant markets.  The opportunity thus created and the possibilities of the new technology combined to produce the railroad and the steamship, which of course added to the demand for iron and fuel while expanding the market for factory products.  And so on, in ever widening circles.”

These multiplying connections and ramifications thicken into a whole that exhibits idiosyncratic quirks, and expresses its own needs. We are all familiar with the temperamental gasoline engine that won’t start unless kicked, or the laptop that doesn’t like to go to sleep. A few years ago MIT graduate student Eric Brende dropped out of technological society to imitate the Amish. With each power tool he discarded he came to see machines as autonomous children: “A modern technology machine is no mere tool. It is a complex fuel-consuming being with needs of its own. It gobbles up energy, it demands care and maintenance; it even has bouts of temperament. In many cases no diaper will contain its mess. For these reasons, it not only serves but must be served. But it is more than another mouth to feed; as it becomes more involved and involving, it can easily invade the living space we formerly reserved for ourselves, taking on functions once our own.”

Autonomy in technology is encouraged in a third way: we design it in. Science fiction guru Isaac Asimov offers a good analogy: “A chipped pebble is almost part of the hand it never leaves. A thrown spear declares a sort of independence the moment it is released… The whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct control and more and more seem to have the beginning of a will of their own.” Clever engineers have designed the calculator that turns itself off, and the rice cooker that turns itself on. Anything “smart” has a bit of autonomy designed into it. Our smart modern kitchens are remodeled with semi-autonomous appliances that decide on their own how much to wash dishes, or toast bread, or make ice cubes. Technicians first engineered autonomy into transportation by creating “auto mobility” in the first automobiles; now cars have the semi-autonomy of cruise control which drives at a steady speed. The next escalation in autonomy is a car that can drive itself. Experimental vehicles such as Stanford University’s  Stanley can navigate itself across country without a human driver. You can also buy self-parking car prototypes. Unmanned auto-piloted airplanes now form combat units in the US Air Force. Asimov’s thrown spear declaring its own independence is now a launched missile that completely steers itself as a bird might.  If this is not a full measure of autonomy, what is?

But the fourth reason autonomy arises in technological systems is the most important. Every technology (even an early Sapien’s hammer) is assembled of parts. When the web of parts contributing to a technology reaches a sufficient degree of complexity, the whole can spontaneously self-organize. Out of this self-organization springs autonomy.

We know from thousands of controlled experiments in many fields of science that complex systems can reliably self-organize. Not in every case, but under certain conditions, stable forms will emerge from messy networks. We’ve seen this emergent order happen in chemical systems, ecosystems, complicated communication networks, biological processes, in human social webs, celestial dust clouds, in evolution and in tens of thousands of computer simulations. “Order out of nothing” emerges when outputs from one  process are diverted as inputs into another, and then circulated back as outputs in an amplifying loop. As an example, anaerobic algae in a warm pond may breed furiously producing a toxin which kills off competing water plants, depleting the oxygen plants normally make, which boosts the growth of anaerobic algae, which kills more plants and so on encourage algae growth, as if the algae had organized the pond. The results of these “strange loops” and recursive circuitry in many complex systems — including technical systems such as computers and the internet — is that a higher level order materializes out of the disorder among many component parts.

The examples of self-organization are legion, and many books have been written about this paradoxical phenomenon, including a very long book that I wrote 15 years ago. At that time I could find no better example of emergent self-organization than a bee hive. Without any central command, thirty thousand individual honeybees can select a new home, manufacture a palace of precise comb for a queen they choose, and oversee the colony’s surplus fuel storage (honey) —  tasks that the bees are incapable of doing individually. Critically, individual bees need the colony to reproduce since all honeybees, except the queen, are sterile. The bee colony is an emergent self-organized form. A beehive can remember nectar locations longer than any bee can, it will outlive the short life span of individual bees, and as a colony it is a warm-blooded animal maintaining a constant temperature while the tiny bees are cold-blooded. Yet, no where in the outward behavior or internal structure of a bee do we see the form of a hive. Where do the plans for the beehive hide? The order of the colony only emerges from the complex interactions between the honeybees. Its form is not imposed from without, or mimicked from the parts, or dictated by the beehive brain, or the queen, but rather the hive is organized by the emergent autonomous “self” of the whole.

Autonomous self-organization can occur in relatively simple physical systems like a sand dune (self-organization is what gives the dune its shape), in the dendritic pattern of a draining river in a delta, in a boiling pot of water (creating tiny vortexes), or in bits of iron that spontaneously magnetized. Specific solutions of chemicals can form themselves into tubular structures (micelles), or into clock-like oscillating reactions, or even self-assemble into more complicated compounds. Life abounds with self-organized patterns such as the leopard’s spots, the spiral coil of snail shells, and the geodesic spheres of diatoms. We know these are patterns that direct themselves and not patterns dictated by the organism itself  because the same pattern can be replicated using random inputs. In other words, if you could take a million blank white zebras and supply their skins with a few simple rules governing how to darken their hides as camouflage, the familiar solution of black and white stripes would appear over and over again.  Rather than being designed by the zebra’s brain, or even governed by their genes, the stripes self-organize from the uncoordinated, decentralized actions of millions of pigment cells in the skin interacting together according to a small set of conditions.

Real zebra left, self-organized model right.

Similar autonomous patterns emerge on the patterns of mollusk shells, and in the bark of trees, and in colonies of fungi. Beautiful dynamic patterns reminiscent of microscopic creatures autonomously emerge in a simple mathematical visualization (called a cellular automata), completely independent of any physical form, strongly suggesting  that these kind of emergent patterns are inherent in any kind of complex adaptive system — including the technium.

There is only one technium on Earth, and it does not lend itself it to easy experiments. But we can demonstrate the technium’s inherent tendency towards autonomous self-organization by modeling the system in computers. At the Santa Fe Institute economist Brian Arthur crafted such a model of simplified technium. His model is based on the idea that in the real world different technologies serve as inputs or outflows for dozens of other technologies. A large factory drillpress might be used to manufacture many smaller retail tools. Your laptop relies on the input of your phone line. The engine in your car needs a water pump which in turn supports a radiator which in turn cools the engine. Each machine might prop up hundreds of others. Recall all the technology that goes down when the electricity goes off!  In Arthur’s simulation, each so-called “machine” is a bit of elemental computer logic. Alone, one scrap of logic can do nothing, but when these elements of logic are strung together the abstract “machine” will accomplish a task, such as sorting a large pile of numbers. Just as in the real technium, tens of thousands of machines in various degrees of interdependencies create a vast dynamic web of relationships. So in the model technium one logic machine might spawn ten other logic machines. It is impossible to unravel the full consequences of removing or adding just one technology, but as in the experiment with zebra stripes, when Arthur re-runs such simulations multiple times, mixing up the combinations of machines and inventions at random, he finds that stable patterns of complex “machines” emerge again and again. These autonomous forms are not reflections of constituent pieces, but are independent of them because if you remove or add a few, you get the same results. In the artificial technium, the specific arrangements between inventions don’t matter.  The patterns are inevitable in this sense. Just as important, the patterns are autonomously self-generated.

Computer scientist Abbe Mowshowitz reminds us that “to assert that technology has become an autonomous agent of change is not to attribute an occult quality to the growth of modern society which transcends human choice. It simply means that mechanization… creates a foundation for further development along certain lines.”  This is what large systems can do: they develop new organizational modules.

Nobelist Herbert Simon conjured a timeless fable to illustrate this principle. Imagine two old watchmakers assembling a batch of fine gold watches built from 1,000 tiny parts each. One of the watchmakers (call him Tempus) starts with the first gear and keeps adding the next part until the watch is done. If Tempus gets a phone call and puts down his work, the delicate assembly falls apart and he has to start over again. However the other watchmaker (Hora) assembles the watch in subgroups of 10 pieces each. Now if Hora is interrupted and puts down his work he loses no more than one hundredth of his progress. Simon calculated that if there was a one in ten chance that the watchmaker’s next step might be interrupted (since both watchmakers had many loyal customers clamoring for their quality craftsmanship) then it would take Tempus on average 4,000 times as long to make the same watch as Hora.

In Simon’s fable, Hora’s invention of modularity forms a ratchet which prevents his progress from backsliding. Science philosopher Jacob Bronowski calls that ratcheting “stratified stability.” Risky innovations are stabilized by operating as modules. The worst that can happen is that complexity will collapse down to the stratum of the previous stable unit. This modular method of advancement is widely used in modern manufacturing for the same reasons of efficiency. Modularity was the key to the unlocking the power of factory mass production in the 1860s when it was first used to make guns: assemble all the firing mechanisms first, then all the handles, then all the barrel sections, then assemble these interchangeable units into rifles. Today large factories that “manufacture” automobiles don’t make anything; instead factories are the interchange  where hundreds of pre-assembled modules (reduced risk) are brought together as the final step. Engineers like Hora usually design the modularity. But in large-scale complex systems, such as a living organism, or in evolution, or in the technium itself, modularity is an emergent pattern.

Modularity is ubiquitous in life, and essential in evolution. The disbelievers in the fact of biological evolution are right about one thing: the chances of all the little atoms found in the first living organism coming together randomly is nil. Even if they did come together once, they would degrade instantly. For life to succeed many such unlikely molecules would have to randomly assemble many times. Such a coincidence is statistically impossible. That’s true if you calculate the probability of all the parts acting independently. But that is not how life works. Evolution progresses by self-organizing in a modular fashion. It creates complexity by stabilizing and building upon rare combinations when they happen. For example, a pool of pre-biotic compounds might occasionally self-assemble the complicated molecule A, which sadly, is unstable. Yet while A exists it can produce molecule B, which is also short lived, but B degrades into C, which is rare yet fairly stable. But as it happens in this case, C acts as a catalyst for the creation of molecule A! It’s a loop! Because C is stable, it can keep making a steady supply of unstable A and B, which pumps up the quantity of C. Suddenly this self-organized recursive circuit fills the pool with persistent, unlikely complex molecules. The probability of the whole is paradoxically greater than the sum of its improbable parts. These stable auto-catalytic molecules serve as modules for more complex compounds in the same self-generating manner.

In the same way, a million monkeys in a million years will never type out Hamlet if they type only letters. But if their typing system evolves a mechanism that organizes keystrokes to type random words — a new modular unit — then suddenly Hamlet is not so unlikely. If further self-organization created keystrokes for random sentences — a yet more complex modular unit — then over a million years Hamlet is almost certain. The progression from modules of letters to words to sentences is stratified stability, and a product of self-organization.

Brian Arthur realized that technology, too, got its traction from the ratcheting buildup of modular units. “New technologies are never created from nothing.” Arthur observed. “They are constructed—put together—from components that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building blocks—for the construction of further new technologies.” A modern jet engine is composed of a dozen extremely complex subunits like compressors, turbines, and combustion chambers, which themselves are composed of dozens of smaller, equally complex components. Some of these modules have not changed in function since the first jet engines a century ago. New technologies, Arthur points out, are mostly “fresh combinations of what already exists.” Successful older combinations of simple technologies become foundational modules that are reused, recycled, and retained.  The combination of an electric motor plus pulley was invented shortly after electricity was tamed, but can be found in your car today.

The technium today is entirely populated with combinations of primitive technologies that have been ratcheted up into more complex devices. A century ago scientists combined existing modular components such as the triode vacuum tube and paper foil capacitor into the first amplifier circuit. The amplifier then became a new module that was combined with resistors, ear phones, and other components (themselves assembled from many parts) to produce a radio receiver. The radio found hundreds of uses; combined with other modular ingredients it made a radar; the radar unit, mixed with thousands of other subassemblies, yielded a battleship.

Arthur’s artificial technium was able to invent incredibly complex logic circuits capable of adding 8 bits, a significant feat even for a human programmer.  “Complicated circuits constructed themselves from simpler ones,” Arthur writes.  But these complex inventions came about only because the system created stable intermediate modules along the way. When it discovered a particularly useful logic circuit, like a 2-bit adder, it would  then recombine them to produce more complex forms. Arthur calculated that odds of all 9 varieties of 16 logic units assembling at once in the correct combination to a produce working 8-bit adder circuit was one in 10^177,554 — or a certain impossibility. Yet here the ‘miraculous” machine was, operating in his tiny world.  The ratcheting in his artificial technium produced improbable novelty.

In the technium, as in other complex systems, self organization regularly yields improbable novelty,  a ratcheting up of levels, a rise in autonomy, and an unsettling sense of the inevitable. Over time, self-organizing also generates a non-mystical directionality. This last result may take a bit of explaining:

A long arc flows through the cosmos. It begins with the first bits of matter, then is lifted by life, and passes through the technium today. Presumably it continues into the future. The course and direction of this great arc began long ago in the physics of the big bang. Most of universe then, as well as today, operates in the realm of the very very tiny, and includes most of what we consider real: atoms, light, radiation, chemistry, gravity.  With few exceptions the laws governing this microworld are reversible. A time-lapse movie of atomic particles colliding into each other, or zooming around space, would be indistinguishable played backwards or forward. This physical reversibility at the smallest scale is an essential trait of the material world. In a formal sense, time does not have a direction in this realm.

Time only gains direction in the macroworld, the scale at which we live. In the realm of planets, stars, volcanoes, periwinkles, elephants, and of course movies, we see an ineradicable direction, which we call time. However it is not the larger scale of the macroworld per se which points time one way. Sensual time gets its direction from extropy. Extropy (also known in physics as negentropy, or negative entropy) is the cosmic force behind the great arc that assembles complexity into larger and larger visible scale, and that builds up the universe while entropy drains it down. The contrast between the two — entropy and extropy — gives us our embodied sense of time.

Narrow window of feasibility (white area) in trajectories of expanding Universe. (From Rees)

The seeds of extropy are infused into the particulars of the micro world. Ours is a very precise universe. The uniformity of motion and mass from one end of the universe to the other is astounding. Furthermore, if the strength of the forces between parts of the universe, the invisible energies binding its myriad particles together, had varied even infinitesimally from the values it does have, the universe (as we know it) would not hold together. These exact values hold a surprise. The precise settings of the 30 most important constants in the universe — like the value of gravity, the energy density, the strength of electromagnetism — enable bits of matter and energy to organize themselves into structures which can not only persist in the face of entropy, but persist with modification.  Extropy is the innate inclination buried in the very fundamentals of reality for small things — starting at the subatomic level — to cooperate as a larger unit (could be an electron, an atom, molecule, or a cell) long enough to extend the inclination toward yet larger units. It is a self-ballooning force that bootstraps its way into greater existence.

The very slow cooperation of subatomic particles to form the hundred or so elements in the furnace of stars took several billion of years. The massive self-organization of stable planets took several more billions of years. Because extropy is a self-creating cycle it ramps up slowly from almost nothing. But the more structure it creates, the faster it creates more structure. Biological evolution accelerated extropy in at least one local area (Earth); technology even more so. The technium is overrun with self-generating powers.

“What has brought life by slow steps up a ladder of increasing complexity is stratified stability,” says Jacob Bronowksi in his Ascent of Man lectures. “And we know this is true not only of life but of matter. If the stars had to build a heavy element like iron, or a super-heavy element like uranium, by the instant assembly of all the parts, it would be virtually impossible. No. A star builds hydrogen to helium; then at another stage in a different star helium is assembled to carbon, to oxygen, to heavy elements; and so step by step up the whole ladder to make the ninety-two elements in nature.” 

The self-organization that is common to chemistry, life, and the technium moves through the universe and time in the same way. From myriad parts extropy organizes structures that lock-in order at a higher level — stratified stability.  The new emergent order stabilizes as a new “whole” which then serves as a component part for the next round of self-organization. So the atoms that build themselves into a glycine molecule are subsumed into a protein; then that protein, with millions of other proteins, is subsumed into the higher order of a whole cell. And so on. The technium, too, is built this way.

It is this stratified stability created by extropy, evolution, and self-organization which prevents the collapse of complexity. If complexity had to re-assemble itself at every instance, nothing really complex would be possible.  Structures as sophisticated as ourselves would be unthinkable. How could our bodies, let alone our minds, arrange themselves from a billion atoms at once? The modular nature of self-organization encourages complexity to bootstrap creations, and it prevents backsliding. Extropy keeps things moving forward. In Bronowski’s lovely phrase, it “gives the arrow of time a barb, which stops it from running backward.”

That’s a gorgeous image.  It’s the irreversibility of extropy that gives us a sense of things going forward, and supplies the “barb of time” that sets our world apart from the reversible microcosm of the quantum world. All the time-lapse sequences that fail to play backwards are sequences generated by extropy: the development of a toddler from an infant, the evolution of a fish from a sea worm, even the slow aggregation of this planet from sun dust. Billions of these parallel narratives, all impelled by the extropic barb of time, smother us with the impression that universe flows in only one direction (even if it is only the things we care about that actually do).

But extropy does even more than illuminate the temporal. The ratchet of its self-organization is the “barb” which pushes progress. Progress is not an mirage. Progress is what evolution and extropy do. Complex systems tend to get more complex because the levels of emergent order keeps systems from devolving in reverse. Order doesn’t retreat (on average) while it remains pushed by extropic system. The stratified stability of evolution and self organization act as a valve, constantly directing change in one direction — towards higher levels. On average biological organisms rarely devolve into simpler organisms. Almost always categories of living creatures evolve towards more complexity, more specialization, more diversity, more sociality, more sentience, and ubiquity. The same is true of individuals. We start off as a single undifferentiated cell and develop into more complex beings. Likewise our institutions, which tend to get more complex in their own lifespans.

The technium too advances through an escalation of stable coherent forms. Once  crops are domesticated  they almost never go wild again. Once a society adopts agriculture it rarely surrenders its farms to return to hunting; most farm societies evolve crafts and more technology. Once money is common, it rarely disappears. Instead coins beget banking, investment, interest. Once electricity is installed in a region, it does not dim. Yes, wars and bandits can rip out its wires in a temporary illness, but in general electrification forms a stable base upon which the complexities of industry stand.

This is why the loss of a technology is so rare. The ratchet of self-organization prevents technological backsliding, and so we marvel at how an ingenious weapon like Greek warfire could have been lost, or how an analog computer built 2,000 years ago could have been forgotten. The particulars are perplexing, but these are the statistically expected exceptions. Evolution is a probabilistic function, and there will be outliers like the retreat on guns in Japan. The real marvel, instead, is the remarkable consistency of cosmic progress.

From the moment of their genesis at the big bang, matter and energy have coalesced into increasingly complicated units — despite the relentless resistance of entropy. Quantum particles clump into subatomic particles, and these in turn clump into lightweight atoms. In the fires of stars 12 billion years ago massive quantities of lightweight atoms combine with more cosmic particles under their own self-generated stellar gravity to generate heavier elements. These heavy elements self-organized into planets, some exhaling self-sustaining atmospheres. All the while entropy nibbles at these islands of self-order. In small pockets on a planet, atoms self-organize a most remarkable molecule: a self-replicating double helix. While self-organization continues to birth emergent order in the cosmos, the double helix unleashes an additional generative force: evolution. Now self-organization is amplified by the learning that evolution brings, and extropy is accelerated. The resilient molecule of DNA creates a stable base for the invention of millions of adaptable organisms, and each of these creatures — every one of the trillions that have lived — create more order in one corner of the universe, and pay the price with more entropy. Through innumerable stages of increased structure (limbs, nerves, eyes), the biosphere continues to arrange itself in greater units of order until it learns to improve its learning with a brain. Biology forms an irreversible base for the launch of mind, which can now generate more complexity, faster, then ever before. The mind adds another force to extropy. It unleashes the technium, which multiples conscious learning, broadcasting its ability to create new levels of complexity and structure completely around the planet. The technium stands upon the base of biology (and therefore must nurture it). Biology stands upon the base of self-organized matter in the swirling galaxies and twirling planets. And all these layers rest upon the precise initial conditions at the big bang that still solicit this billion-years unfolding.

Matter and energy’s propensity to self-organize propels them outward in celestial forms, life, mind and the technium. Self-organization ascends the levels of complexity and bequeaths the great thrust not only its directionality, which gives it an disconcerting sense of inevitability, but also with its increasing autonomy, which also unsettles us.

The circle of my closest friends are fans and boosters of technology. They unleash the technium for a living. Their job is to discover new forms of machines, to invent new ways to leverage intelligence, and to create entirely new stuff. When I asked them about the inherent value in technology, the majority of the technophiles I interviewed claim that technology is a means to an end, and therefore neutral. They generally hold an upscale version of “guns don’t kill, people do.” We have a choice in how technology is applied, but fundamentally, they would say, technology is neither good nor bad, it’s neutral. The good in technology comes from wise decisions in employing it.

To be honest, I used to feel the same way. History counseled that dynamite could be used to carve tunnels or blow up schools. Insecticides could boost crops or poison drinking water. GPS satellites can guide you if you are lost, or track you down with no place to hide. Surely the sum value of new invention was up to us. And the idea that we choose the valence of technology’s charge is very appealing to our egos. But it does not match the evidence of technology’s rise, nor its deep roots in life and the cosmos.

Nothing that re-arranges energy in the face of entropy; that builds up dynamic forms lasting billions of years (galaxies); that is able to bootstrap self-replication from inert molecules (DNA); that stabilizes increasing complexity (life), that crystallizes permanent change in the form of a mind (you), that amplifies learning with tools (technology) — nothing like that can be neutral. Is life neutral? Is your mind neutral? Is a baby neutral? While we might list certain species or ideas as negative, we understand that in general the more life and ideas, the better. The technium is in the same class, only more so. Technology is as neutral as the biosphere, which is to say that it is not neutral. It comes with biases and autonomy.

There are good and bad uses for television, but the media of television itself is biased toward certain uses — and certain abuses. As Jerry Mander argued in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, the physical nature of television of the  1960-1970s— its flickering cathode ray screen images broadcast one-way over a centralized network  — induced a bias of physiological passivity. There was nothing to do but sit back and receive. TV as it was structured was biased to producing couch potatoes.  It was also an effective propaganda device. In the west most of the propaganda was generated by corporate advertising. In Mander’s view television manipulates our psyche with clever emotional pitches to convince us we need more technology  in our lives; that we can’t be happy without a cellphone or car. Among the gadgets it persuades us we need are more media devices, which in turn will manufacture more desires for more technology. Thus technology encourages (or forces) us to produce more technology , so we become mere vehicles in technology’s takeover.

That wasn’t television’s only bias, because TV also accelerated the transition to the middle class in developing countries like Brazil and India. The addictive soap operas that seemed to recycle a small set of human dramas, also acted as incredibly effective role models for illiterate women, who decided their daughters should be like the women on TV. More than any government contraception program, the passive consumption of mindless TV persuaded women into having smaller families and educating their daughters. As Jerry Mander pointed out, as a propaganda device, television is unrivaled.

Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, puts it nicely: “tools insist on being used in particular ways.”  Neil Postman, who wrote says “the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself.”  He argues that each technology’s architecture suggest the metaphors we use to manage it, its speed biases the politics and the economics it generates. Mander declared that  “Many technologies determine their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.”  Thus, if devices have ideologies built into them, big technology may require big centralized government.  Alfred Chandler, a die-hard capitalist who wrote a monumental history of American business, argues that the construction and day-to-day operation of the technium’s industrial subunits, such as its sprawling transportation network, skyscraper cites, food and water systems, and communication grid all required large-scale, centralized hierarchical organizations. He says matter-of-factly, “the operational requirements of railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.” Die-hard environmentalist Dennis Hayes takes it to the next step: Because nuclear power relies on many layers of fail-safe security, and heavy doses of police and soldiers to guard it from terrorism, “the increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism.  Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.”

Like in the emerging internet today, the emerging electrical grid a century ago was seen as  vehicle for ideology. David Nye reports that Charles Steinmetz, the leading scientist at General Electric in its first decades a century ago, “expected socialism to emerge along with a national electrical grid.” Steinmetz claimed: “The electric power is probably today the most powerful force tending toward coordination, that is cooperation [socialism].” And, “Lenin famously declared that only when the Soviet Union had been completely electrified could it attain full socialism.”

We know that large-scale technologies can sport fundamental biases because they have been deliberately designed to do so. In a famous example, the legendary New York urban planner Robert Moses restricted the public — that is the poor, lower class public — from new city parks and beaches by a clever and subtle technological discrimination. According to his biographer, Moses lowered the clearance on the 200 overpasses he built on the Long Island Parkway so that public buses (the untidy poor) were unable to use this highway to get to Jones beach, but (middle class) cars could. If intentional bias can be inserted so effortlessly, couldn’t inadvertent bias emerge just as easily?

Ironically, those who most clearly see that technology is not neutral are those who recoil from it. The writings of technology critics Neil Postman, Wendell Berry, Jerry Mander, Langdon Winner, Eric Brende, Marshall McLuhan offer keen insights into the autonomous nature of the technium. But they also rail against it.  They worry about it’s momentum. No one has written about the autonomous nature of the technium with more clarity, nor with more alarm, than Jacques Ellul.

Ellul was a French theologian born in 1912 of aristocratic European parents.  He was educated in an Eastern Orthodox school (his grandmother was Serbian) and as a young man he experienced a mystical religious conversion when he was 22. After delving deep into Christian theology, he came under the spell of Karl Marx, and later joined the French Resistant movement against the Nazis, where he worked to rescue Jews. Theologically his ideas breached the usual denominational categories, so he was never fully embraced by any church, sect, or even secular movement. For instance, he preached universal salvation, meaning everyone is saved no matter what they do, a dogma that did not endear him to the orthodoxy. He identified himself as a Christian Anarchist, which meant he belonged to a church of one. Yet he was a prolific theologian, and wrote almost 50 books on Christian theology. But Ellul is best known for his one monumental book on the technium published in 1954, and released in English in 1964 as The Technological Society.

In French Ellul called it la Technique, and he meant what I mean by the technium  — all the hardware, instruments, and cultural inventions, institutions and technological infrastructure that flow from our inventions. For Ellul, the rise of technique, or the technium, was a sacrilege against God. Our collective creation, the technium, had taken on a autonomous life of its own, a life much bigger than our own, and we were beginning to idolize it. We were being bewitched by this most powerful earthly force, and it was our most holy duty to see the technium for what it was — a spiritual “tyrant”  — and resist its dominance. Ted Kaczynski, the disgruntled math teacher who built postal bombs aimed at murdering prominent technologists claimed to have read Ellul’s book five times while hiding out in his remote Montana cabin.

To Ellul the emerging autonomy of the technium was starkly obvious, though in the early 1950s it was not so obvious to others. Throughout  La Technique, Ellul sounds his alarm: “Technique has become autonomous… It is a power endowed with its own peculiar force… a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its own special laws and is own determinations… It is an end in itself.” “Technique pursues its own course more and more independently of man. This means that man participates less and less actively in technical creation, which, by the automatic combination of prior elements, becomes a kind of fate. Man is reduced to the level of catalyst.”  Ellul argued the rising technological autonomy of the technium lowers the human being to “a slug inserted into a slot machine.”  In fact, Ellul declares, “there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy.”

Of course, Ellul was not alone. He had compatriots and disciples. Rene Dubos: “Technology cannot theoretically escape from human control, but in practice it is proceeding on an essentially independent course.” John Kenneth Galbraith: “I am led to the conclusion, which I trust others will find persuasive, that we are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.”  Martin Heidegger: “No one can foresee the radical changes to come.  But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped.  In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology.  These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain and drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other–these forces…have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision… Technology is in no sense an instrument of man’s making or in his control. It is rather that a phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history.”

These technophobes are right about so many things. The technium is the phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history. It is outgrowing our capacity of understanding. It is advancing faster and faster without end. It is proceeding on an autonomous course. It is an end in itself. It is a kind of fate.

This is scary. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing off to remake our essential nature, yet it zooms beyond our capacity to understand or control, accelerating in power, yet biased in its direction. No wonder the autonomy of the technium provokes such genuine concern.

Yet the very same innate forces of extropy and self-organization that nurture the technological imperative, also are responsible for real progress. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing the advance of diversity and intelligence,  it multiples on its own, yet it is headed in the direction we’d all like to go — more options, choices, possibilities and free-will.

The very best things in the known universe are products of this thrust. Redwoods, the milky way, dolphins, antibiotics, garage door openers, the members of your family, the internet, and the 5 kilogram organ now reading this have all been summoned forth by the process of extropy and self-organization. The real advances in human society in the last 8,000 years — increasing longevity, increasing literacy, increasing knowledge of our home, increasing circle of empathy for others — have all been due to the same essential force that also scares us: the inevitable technological imperative.

This cosmic drive — this measurable, falsifiable, actual, non-mystical organizing principle — creates the mechanical autonomy that worries us, and the sense of inevitable that unsettles us; yet this same cosmic organizing principle also generates the progress we want and will always head towards.  We can’t have one without the other, and this stirs up an irreconcilable tension.

I believe this Janus-faced god is the source of our great unease. We fear the technium for its otherness and lack of control, and yet we crave it for its blessings. We hate it for it usurping our autonomy, yet we love it for increasing our freedoms. We deny its inevitable progression, yet we expect its inevitable progress. The deal seems to be that technology can improve our lot, only if it can improve its own at the same time.

Ellul, I am sure, would state the deal different terms. He might say: The cost of human progress (and let’s grant it is real) is the loss of human autonomy.

Would that be worth it? If humanity never changed, if human nature was fixed, immovable, or sacred it would not be. Sacrificing such a gem would too steep a price for progress. But is human nature taboo? There are many among us who define the current state of humanity as sacred, and worth protecting, and will refuse progress because it will inevitably tamper with our spirits. I am not one of them.

I think that humanity is our own invention, that we are a technology ourselves, particularly as we live in the modern world. Humans are tools disguised as animals. We have long ago ceased to be independent beings, and as a species are symbiotically dependent on the technium. If all technology were to disappear tomorrow — and by that I mean all — stone points, clothes, control of fire, spears included — most of humanity would disappear in a matter of weeks, and the remnant that survived without any tools whatsoever would not be called human by any of us now.

As the technium rises, so does its gift of progress. But as progress rises, so does the technium’s autonomy. As a self-made invention, we are an element of technology’s rise. “To quarrel with technology is to quarrel with the nature of man,” says Jacob Bronowski. Based on our current direction, humans will move closer to symbiotic union with technology each year forward. Because of this deep dependency we will redefine ourselves, just has we have been doing for 8,000 years. The technium’s long arc will widen our circle of identity and I suspect we’ll come to see the technium’s autonomy as part of our own. 

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth’s land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

From the moment Sapiens emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, their inventions began to alter their environment. Sapien’s hunting tools and techniques had far reaching affects: their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of people shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick — burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains — disrupted vast regions of the continents.

Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100 km (60-mile) wide atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO2.  Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept the next ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle which would have ordinarily refrozen the northern most portions of the planet by now. In other words, agriculture made (and still makes) the world safe for more agriculture. Like most complex technologies, agriculture — the integrated system of domesticated crops and animals, irrigation infrastructure and soil management — is self-sustaining and will alter its environment to further its own benefit.

Long before the industrial age, humans were altering the Earth’s climate.

Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO2 furthered altered the balance of the atmosphere as the number of machines multiplied. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum eating machines not only transformed the ease, productivity, and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), machines also drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO2 exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals, and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces. Alan Weisman, writing in the World Without Us, suggest that the modern technium is the geological equivalent to a series of ceaseless volcanoes: “by tapping the [fuels of the] Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.”  And this impact is not only global, but extremely persistent:  “Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we’re gone is our redesigned atmosphere.” Climatologist Tyler Volk estimates that a natural geological cycle — with no technological mitigation — would take 100,000 years to return the agricultural and industrial induced CO2 atmosphere to pre-technium levels.

Each year the technium consumes more than 40 trillion pounds of coal, 1.6 trillion pounds of iron, 200 billion pounds of gypsum, and 1.2 trillion pounds of wheat, just four inputs among thousands of others needed to appease its appetite, and all those totals grow more than 5% per year. On average the technium must process twenty tons of atoms per year to support each man, women and child in the modern world. 

The technium gains its immense power not from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, like books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!) which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul) which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift. That shift will often suggest another idea to someone else (use a cow to pull the wheeled sled), which in turn produces yet another disturbance, another rebalancing, another shift. Once started the teetering continues for many generations. As one ideas sparks two new ones and two ideas spark four, and four eight, this chain reaction of technology reverberates through the society, always gaining in accumulating energy and ceaseless movement. Efficient machines enable industry to make even more efficient machines. Smart chips assist humans in making even smarter chips. These virtuous circles are like rubbing the genie’s lamp and getting three more wishes for the last wish. Magical self-amplification is a story retold in every domain of technology.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of  synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world. 

On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it’s overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

All change in society can be traced back to the products of our minds. The history of civilization is an ever up-cascading sequence of social organization that we invent. Societies begin as leaderless bands of hunter-gatherers, and over generational time acquire chiefs, put down roots (literally) with farms, land and water rights adjudicated by authorities, hatch cities, and eventually become states and nations. Each step in civilization is characterized by more social organization, more different kinds connections between people (beyond family relations), more webs of interdependence, producing more of what Robert Wright, author of Non Zero, calls “non-zero-sumness,” that is, self-reinforcing mutual benefit. Each emergent organization in the evolution of society serves as a platform for citizens to birth yet more new ways to organize. This self-improving recursive “3-more-wishes” loop goes round and round, amplifying its original force.

The power of cooperation is not new, but this virtuous circle is more than ordinary altruism, because participants are often not consciously cooperating, and may in fact compete, or even be parasitic. A merchant in Athens selling a barrel of raisins is not cooperating with the grower of grapes in Macedonia, or the speculator in Corinth hoarding stock, but the three form a system (an emergent market) that expands all their interests. It’s a win-win condition. This kind of accumulating social organization exhibits an almost mathematical flavor that transcends neighborly kindness. Rather than happy camaraderie, this increasing structure is built on information flows that tighten both trust and rivalries into a web of interdependence. As these links increase, so does the power of amplification and acceleration.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that evenly applied laws, rather than nepotic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions and as much products of our minds as light bulbs and telegraphs.

The larger point is that this cyclotron of social betterment is not propelled by ethics or religion, but by technology. Society is evolved by injecting it with incremental doses of that most powerful force in the world; each rise in social organization throughout history is driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, “Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history.” In White’s view the adoption of the foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry, and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup was not the only technological cause blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice, and launched a global economy. The invention of the contraception pill in 1960 aided the blossoming of feminism. The invention of moveable type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion’s founding text themselves, make their own interpretations, and launched the very idea of “protest” within and against religion. Way back in 1620 Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three “practical arts” — the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — that had changed the world. He declared that “no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” Bacon help launch the scientific method which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium. 

Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divvied up an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science, and all it’s many cultural descendents. He says, “The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began.”

It’s never a good idea to assign a single cause to any large scale cultural change. The  greater the number of people a change effects the more likely numerous factors are behind it. A web of complex conditions must converge to produce the hallmark transitions in a complex society. But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea. 

That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents. The technologies of ultrasound fetal inspection and routine abortion enabled sexual selection of children so that now males outnumber females in the youth of China and India. This imbalance will leave an immense surplus of unmarried males in society, an excess which in the past has been a source of unrest, crime, and war. Still young, their story has not fully played out yet, but because of the sheer numbers involved (hundreds of millions in Asia) its concluding effect will be global. Whatever the consequences of this sex-ratio excess are — an increase in international prostitution, a surge of ambitious entrepreneurs and military recruits, or a massive outward migration to places like Africa — the effects will be broader, and less technological that what might be expected from the invention of ultrasound equipment.

Name a disruption in culture today, either positive or negative, and if you press far enough back you’ll find an tangible invention that sets off the imbalance.  Globalism? Cheap, ubiquitous global communications. Social Security overhang? Medical advances for increasing longevity and decreasing fertility. Obesity epidemic? Cheap monoculture food system combined with passive entertainment technology. Gay rights? Emboldened by science showing gender preferences are biological. Celebrity obsessions? Broadcast media. Militant jihadism? Islam has been around 1500 years. But an imbalance between a medically enabled population explosion without a corresponding explosion in economic or political progress disrupts the former social equilibrium.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both realized from reading Malthus’s work on population that natural selection is propelled by the difference between two growth patterns in the wild: population versus food. The greater propulsion of population growth could not be contained in the lesser geometric gains of its food production. This tension between the overwhelming multiplication of population and the slower expansion of its material container is the drive behind evolution.

The evolution of the technium likewise gains its unmatched power from the difference between two growth rates. The number of ideas and their transmission via computers, books, telephone lines, patents, and so on increases in an exponential fashion. Information is, in fact, the fastest growing thing on this planet. Information is especially conducive to amplification and compounding. As the number of facts increase, the connections between facts increases exponentially faster. Because the mathematical law of combinations, the number of links between pages explodes faster than the number of pages increases. New inventions in certain fields like communication, which are powered by increasing combinations of connections, can increase the speed of invention overall, revving the engines of creation. Everywhere we look, the technium is wired with self-amplifying loops ballooning up the scale of change. Fundamentally, discoveries in the science of how to discover, and inventions in how to invent (the genie process we call science) accelerate the rate of discovery and invention everywhere.

But our human ability to absorb or process this explosion of ideas increases only linearly at best. Despite years spent in education, or bathed in the best nutrition, our brains are not doubling in speed, memory, and insight every 18 months, as computers do. In fact, biologically speaking, our brains are remarkably similar to the brains of the first Sapiens 50,000 years ago. The smartest humans are not exponentially smarter than the average ones, and the average IQ of a human is only slowly increasing over time by the most minute amount (a few percent per decade in modern times). Even collectively, unaided human intelligence is only growing in tandem with the number of humans. The gap between the escalating growth of information generated by us and our machines, and our tiny marginal improvements in being able to understand the oceans of information and make meaning from it is the driver behind the rapid evolution of the technium.

The work of understanding all this information is migrating from humans to the technium. We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions. The technium contains an elaborate knowledge processing  system consisting of encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext, and the web. These technologies organize the output of our collective minds — both intangible ideas and tangible inventions — into a semantic structure, much like an ecosystem. This incredibly complicated mesh of connections, interdependencies, associations, and emergent structure gives the technium a “meaning” that is outside our of understanding.

It’s reasonable to figure that since the technium is simply “that which the mind produces” then at its root the most powerful force in the world must not be technology but the human mind. If this were so we’d have to recalibrate the equation above to state that the origin of all change in our lives lays in the mysterious force of intelligence and consciousness hiding between our ears. (That assertion reminds me of a joke I heard from a friend who said “whenever I get the idea that human mind is the most powerful thing in world I just remember what it is that is telling me this.”) But the claim that the human mind is foremost power is not valid. No matter how much we use our biological mind’s awareness to reflect upon our mind’s workings, this type of mental introspection and self-improvement leads to extremely limited improvement at best, and usually none at all.  Contemplation (even in a zen position) to optimize our own mind just doesn’t scale up. Unaided, the mind makes very little headway in amplifying itself. 

However, the technium, which is a product of our brain, can alter the circuits that produced it. People who grow up immersed in the technologies of writing and reading think differently. I don’t mean humans think differently while reading. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain memorizes facts and conceptualizes ideas, and these changes stimulate abstract thinking. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences in how their brains work whether or not they are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and “the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age.”  Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that “the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general… not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking.”  Literacy — a human invention — rewires the human mind.

It is not just writing. Music, another invention, also alters the brain in a sustainable way. Many studies have shown how listening to music strengthens the communication wiring between brain hemispheres. Beside fostering an expected growth in auditory regions of the brain, regularly playing musical instruments significantly strengthens the thickness of the corpus callosum fibers and activates the cerebral cortex.  Our mind makes a drum and flute, and the drum and flute remakes our mind.

Certainly, other tools that we devote lots of attention to should also alter our brain to a similar degree. How could a brain which spends 7 hours per day (!!) watching the fine flickering lines of television not find its perception circuits permanently rewired? The average adult American spends one hour per day driving a car. Cruising through terrain at 60 mph is not a skill the Sapien brain was evolved for. So the technology of the automobile must reshape our plastic brains, too.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a  2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity  in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

Progress of any type, especially literacies such as reading and writing, or web surfing, are not inherited in our genes (so far), nor re-invented each generation. Rather literacies are carried forwarded by the technium.  Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don’t quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.

Technology may not only be the most powerful force in the  world; it may the most powerful force in the universe. If an embryonic amount of technology can so affect a planet, unintentionally, the same force applied intentionally several centuries from now could be aimed a star, and with time, at a galaxy. The libraries of science fiction are filled with plausible schemes by which advanced civilizations terraform planets, tame stars into generators, reroute stellar orbits, and re-arrange matter and energy on astronomical scales. Vast space colonies, death stars, ring worlds, and Dyson Spheres are some of the imagined projects that indicate the cosmic power of technology. If these ambitions are at all possible, they would be direct extensions of the same compounding circuits operating in the technium today. To manage these galactic-scale manipulations, our minds would have to amplify themselves by creating artificial minds smarter than us, just as we have amplified our bodies by creating artificial machines stronger than us, machines such as cranes, trucks, and robot arms. A technium populated with machines capable of their own indefinite upcreation could keep progressing way beyond our current understanding.  This complex system would invent a system superior to itself in an infinite loop until the whole cycle reached its natural limits (which all real things have). Many believe that a technium like this is already operating at galactic scale somewhere else in the universe; this speculation is to only point out the technium is not solely an Earth-bound, human phenomenon.

Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds.  In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child.

The force of this uroborous is incomparable. There is no nuclear energy, fusion, plasma bolt, black hole, white dwarf, cosmic nebula anywhere in the universe that can uplift itself in the way that technology can. For certain there will be further evolutions of the technium. The great story that begins with the big bang and bootstraps itself up into persistent evolving systems that keep building up more complex systems will certainly keep going.  First persistently dynamic planets hatch life, which uplifts itself to make minds, which then uplifts itself to make technology. Technology will uplift itself to create the next level of extropy. But it will continue the same arc. The same big history. Whatever technology evolves into, it will carry on in the direction it has been headed so far for the past 14 billion years: towards greater complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, socialization, consilience, energy density, and sentience. A future meta-technology will be unrecognizable on its face, but fundamentally continue these trends.

As far as we can see, for at least a hundred light years in all directions, there appears to be only the bleak unbending forces of physics at work: radiation, heat, gravity, momentum, and always, entropy. But we are lucky. We live on a membrane of floating sphere that is infected with a rampant case of the most powerful force in the universe, a force that is curiously more potent that the immense powers governing the stars around us. Unlike the eternal constancy delivered by the universal laws, this most powerful force is in constant change.  The technium is in fact,  changing the nature of change, an ongoing process of becoming, and we are, to a statistical approximation, right in the middle of it.

As a biological species born of life, we embrace our origins in life. And as a thinking species, we embrace our mindfulness. But now in the middle of this long evolution it has become clear that we are a technological species as well. Our self image says that we are a thinking animal that reluctantly produces the most powerful force in the world. That is true. But actually something more wondrous is going on. In reality we human beings are the product of the most powerful force in the universe. We are technology. The self-manufactured uroborous.

So far, humanity is our greatest invention, and we aren’t done yet.

By Yorgo Nestoridis
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The evolution of the technium is self-directed. Over time it unfolds a sequence of self-organizing forms. Because these self-organized forms are inevitable, we can prepare for them. But the inevitable aspect of the technium provokes resistance because it appears to be opposed to human free will.

The author Isaac Singer once declared, only half in jest, that “we have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.” That kind of mad desperation often crops up in the almost reflex denial of directionality in technological evolution. “We have to reject an inherent direction in the technium because it reduces the sacred role of humans to decide our own fate.”

But what does science say? While the evidence for evolution’s self-direction is only circumstantial today, the claim of directionality is testable one way or the other.  We might be able to prove that biological evolution is self-directed by employing synthetic biology to induce life’s self-assembly numerous times in the laboratory and measuring how often parallel evolution occurs. Or, someday we could scout the galaxy for other planets with life, and when we find living systems, we can tally up the degree to which those alien evolutionary paths parallel our own. These findings would be falsiable evidence. If science did prove that biological evolution was self-directed along a certain universal trajectory, we would not reject that fact just because human choice had no impact on life’s direction. The scope of human choice and evolution’s direction are independent assertions. Yet if science gains evidence that the technium, which is a quickening of evolution, is also self-directed by its own emergent order, humans want to refute this fact because they believe that directionality in the technium denies human choice. But whether it diminishes the scope of human choice should not influence the facts of whether the technium is self-directed or not.

In fact, the worry about diminishing human choice is misplaced. Free will is not hampered by a technological imperative; instead it is expanded by it. The inherent imperative merely shifts the venue of our freedoms. Once inexpensive communication systems circle the globe, as they have recently done, knitting a thin cloak of nervous material around the planet, an electronic “world brain” of some kind is inevitable. The choice for humans is: what kind of internet do we choose to make out of this envelope? Is the system default open, or closed? Is it easy to participate, modify procedures, share, and hide, or is it difficult, burdensome, proprietary? The details of the web can go in a hundred different ways, although the technologies themselves will bias us in certain directions. Yet how we express the inevitable global web is a significant choice we own.

More importantly, the arrival of this inevitable technological stage opens up vast new territories in which we can exercise our free will, despite the inherent inevitabilities in its path. The arc of the technium’s progression contains a clear bias towards increasing free will, options and possibilities.  Technology wants choices.  The internet, to a greater degree than any technology before it, offers choices and options. While the web itself is still embryonic, hardly 6,000 days old as I write this and still a prototype, we can see in this infantile neuronal layer many ways in which this technology can expand the sphere of choices for us personally.

But the technium is expanding not only human choice. It is also extending the long-term expansion of free will in general, non-human and mechanical. This enlargement of volition was first ignited 4 billion years ago by the arrival of life and the birth of tiny things that choose to go here or there, and do this or that. In fact, like the other extropic trends, the increase in free will really began at release of atomic particles in the big bang. As theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson has noted, the exact moment when a subatomic particle decays, or the direction it chooses to spin, must be described as an act of free will. All the microscopic motions of a particle are reversible and predetermined by the laws of physics from the particle’s previous position/state. Yet a particle’s spontaneous dissolution into sub particles and energy rays, or the choice of its direction of rotation are not. Its moment of decay or change in spin is not reversible or predetermined by laws of physics. We call this decay into cosmic rays, or direction of spin, a truly “random” event in an otherwise deterministic realm but this indetermined ” randomness” is really the manifestation of the tiniest quantum bit of free will. Mathematician John Conway, inventor of a computer life-like  display known as the Game of Life, argues that you can’t explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left. He writes,

Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own. 

There are other technical arguments for free will in particles. Theoretical biologist and physicist Stuart Kauffman suspects this non-random indeterminism, or free will, is a result quantum decoherence and recoherence of the kind we see in the famous delayed-choice two-slit particle experiment. In this classic demonstration  a single photon is fired towards two parallel slits. But the photon, which is a wave/particle only chooses (note the verb) whether to pass through the slits as either a wave or as a particle after it has already done so and is measured. In the lingo of quantum physics, the decoherence of being both wave/particle (a superposition) is collapsed to a singular choice when the particle is measured later. According to Kauffman the shift in quantum coherence is the source of volition. It’s a wild idea, but the idea that particles have free will is not. 

Very long ago as quantum matter clumped into larger structures such as atomic compounds and spinning clouds of dust and eventual nucleic acids, the tiny slices of quantum volition inherent in particles were leveraged by that increase in organization. For instance, a cosmic ray blasted from a spontaneously decaying particle can trigger a mutation in the highly ordered structure of a DNA molecule. When a “random” cosmic ray knocks a hydrogen atom off of a Cytosine base, say, that indirect volition can birth an innovative protein sequence. Most innovation bring death sooner, but with luck a mutation will confer a survival advantage to the whole organism. Since beneficial traits are retained and built upon by the DNA system, the positive effects of free will can accumulate. Volitional cosmic rays also trigger synapse firings in neurons, which  introduce novelty signals into nerves and brain cells, some of which indirectly nudge an organism to do this or that. By the complex machinery of evolution, these remotely induced “choices” are captured, retained, and amplified as well. Mutations triggered by the free will of particles, in aggregate and over billions of years, evolve organisms with more senses, more limbs, more degrees of freedom. As usual, this is a virtuous self-amplifying circle.

Following the long-arc of evolution, the leading edge of life becomes more complex. The prime way that complexity is revealed is in the increasing ways that an organism can choose. A bacterium has a few choices — perhaps to slide toward food, or divide. A plankton, with more complexity, more cellular machinery, has more options. It can detect and follow more chemical gradients, move toward light, or not. A star fish can wiggle its arms, flee (fast or slow?) or fight a rival, choose a meal, or a mate. A mouse has a million choices to make in its life. Right or left? Now or later? It has a longer list of things it can move (whiskers, eyeballs, eyelids, tail, toes), and a wider range of environments to exert its will upon, as well as a longer duration of life to decide in. More complexity expands the degrees of possible choices.

A mind, of course, is a choice factory, often creating options and demanding decisions that are internally generated (rather than coming from outside). Artificial systems likewise generate a zillion new options, and like bacterium, these systems make unconscious, but real choices. Whenever you send an email, an extremely complex systems of data servers, rules, protocols, and fancy algorithms decide the path of intermediate relays your message will hop along to get to its destination. The path of stepping stones (one out of millions of possible ones) is chosen in real time to minimize congestion, and maximize speed of the network over all. So a second email sent to the same long-distant address even a moment later will require a second choice and is not likely be routed along exactly the same path. The internet is making billions of these non-deterministic free will decisions every day.

A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago, the total freedom available within the fine mist of light atoms and zipping particles drifting in the universe was stifling narrow. The possible arrangements between them were dreadfully few. You could count the actionable options for a helium atom on one hand. Compared that prison to the universe one billion years ago (at least in the neighborhood of Earth), when life unleashed an overwhelming explosion of freedoms. Millions of species, each of them an engine of options, filled the surface of a planet with staggering choices. The same restricted hydrogen atoms could now bind with a hundred new elements (created by the stars), in innumerable compounds. Compare that relative cornucopia to today. The technium takes the magnitude of choices unleashed by life and ups it by many exponential orders. We have invented many new ways to arrange chemical elements that do not readily occur in nature, and we have invented new kinds of life, and we have invented machines with new kinds of behavior, never before witnessed in the universe. (Think of hundreds of avatars in a virtual world collectively constructing a treasure hunt.) Once machines unleashed possibilities as fast we could think them up; now they unleash possibilities without waiting for us.

Not only do all these inventions widen the space of what is possible, and stretch the parameters in which decisions can be made, but just as important, the technium creates new mechanisms which can exercise free will. Gadgets such as fuzzy-logic appliances make real choices. Their tiny chip brains weigh competing factors and in a non-deterministic way the fuzzy logic circuits make a decision about when to turn off the dryer, or what temperature to heat the rice. Many kinds of complex adaptive contraptions — for example the sophisticated computerized auto pilot that flew the 747 jet you rode the other day — expand the range of free will by generating new kinds of behaviors out of reach of either humans or other living creatures. An experimental robot at MIT can catch a tennis ball using a brain and arm that is manyfold faster than a human brain/arm combo. This robot shifts so fast while deciding where to put its hand, that our eyes can’t even see it move. Here free will has expanded into a new realm of speed. When you type a keyword into Google it considers approximately a trillion documents before it chooses (and that is the correct word) the page it believes you want. No human can possibly encompass that planetary volume of material. In this way, a search engine gives free choice a scale way beyond the human.

In the world of tomorrow, say a hundred years from now, artificial intelligences and smart stuff will stream self-directed decision-making deeply into the technium. Hi-tech automobiles that park themselves will make as many free-will choices as we do when we park. To varying degrees, technology will practice free will at greater levels than it does today.

New ideas, new technologies contain new freedoms —an expanded range for action. The more powerful a new technology, the greater the new freedoms. This expansion includes possible abuse as well. New technology provides new avenues for freely-chosen horror, as well as good. Present in every new technology  the is the potential to make new mistakes. In fact, unless a powerful technology can be powerfully abused, it is not powerful. Nonetheless, as technology expands so does the space in which our free will operates.

Starting at the big bang, self-organization has steadily increased the range of volition from the tiny choice inherent in elemental particles, to the more visible choices made constantly by living organisms. The self-directed trajectory of evolution continues that expansion into the technium. The technium is designed to expand free will. First by expanding the range of possible choices, and secondly by expanding the range of agents which can make choices.

Although we cannot say that increased technology causes increased freedom, it is clear that multiplying options goes hand in hand with multiplying liberty. Nations of the world with plenty of economic choices, abundant communication options, and high education possibilities, tend to rank highest in available liberty.

“With more choices, we have more opportunities,” declared Emmanuel Mesthene, a technology philosopher at Harvard.  “With more opportunities, we can have more freedom, and with more freedom we can be more human.” 

While every advance in the technium reduces some options (our electronic age provides fewer choices for steam cars), and while evolution converges on invariant forms that may seem to limit human choice, in reality, the technium continues to expand free will as it unrolls into the future. What technology wants is more freedom, expanded free will.

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1 Author Blog by Semiomantics
1.1 What is an Authors Blog and CMS
1.2 Author Blog Theme
1.3 Author Blog Code
1.4 Author Blog and CMS Seminar by Ycademy

Author Blog by Semiomantics
Semiomantics is developing a new Concept for its Author Blog and Content Management System based on WordPress. The Goal is to provide Authors with a self publishing framework [...]

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1 WP Shop Version 3 by Semiomantics
1.1 WordPress Shop Version 3 by Semiomantics
1.2 Semiomantics Shop on Google
1.3 WP Ecommerce Theme by Semiomantics

WP Shop Version 3 by Semiomantics
WordPress Ecommerce Shop development for our customers is an interesting task, as each product and each brand requires customized solutions. For this reason we are [...]