For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits past interviews with technology pioneers Bill Moggridge, Jason Kottke, Anil Dash, and Kevin Kelly. These excerpts reflect on how technology emerged, how it shapes the way we live, and how these early thinkers imagined the future unfolding.
Bill Moggridge:
… very surprising how good the mouse is, still is.
Kevin Kelly:
… in AI, we’re going to see increasing numbers of specialized AIs to do different things.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.
On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on.
On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the tech pioneers Debbie has interviewed over the years.
Kevin Kelly:
… our computer science programs seldom contain ethics. That’s fascinating at any point.
Debbie Millman:
I began this podcast 20 years ago.
25 years ago, there was no such thing as a podcast. The technology simply wasn’t there yet, or at least no one had yet thought to connect audio to an RSS feed.
The world we’re living in today is built on technologies that are changing so fast that it can be hard to keep up. Fortunately, over the years, I’ve had a chance to talk and make some sense of it all with a number of tech pioneers, people who have extended our use with an understanding of technologies in new and innovative ways.
On this episode, I’m going to play excerpts from interviews with some of those mavericks. In many ways, the show today will feel a bit like a time capsule, given how much things have changed since I’ve had some of these conversations. But it’s also amazing to hear how much they still got right about the future that we’re now living in.
Bill Moggridge helped invent the laptop, and he co-founded IDEO, the design consultancy that centered the idea of user-centered design. I interviewed Bill in 2010.
Would it be true to say then that your fascination with what people want from everyday things is true?
Bill Moggridge:
Yeah, I think that’s right. If there’s a simple, easy principle that binds everything together, it’s probably about starting with the people.
And so the relationship people have to whatever you’re designing is the most important factor. And I’m interested in why people like things and what gives them rewards that are long-term, what gives them pleasures, what’s exciting. It’s about the effect that everything that you might design has on anybody, somebody.
It’s interesting that as so many things change around us, the evolution of technologies and social relationships and so on seem to change so fast. But that principle, start with people, you can rely on it.
Debbie Millman:
I was talking to somebody earlier today about interviewing you, and I was talking about all of your great accomplishments, and of course, talked about you being involved with the first laptop.
And he was really interested in whether or not you thought that the laptop was going to continue to exist, given the advent of first the iPod and now the iPad and all of the Kindle-type products.
Do you think that the laptop is still going to be around in 10 years?
Bill Moggridge:
10 years, no question. All the laptop is, is an input and output structure. And so the output is a display, and that display is fairly much the equivalent of a iPad, only bigger and better. So it could easily be replaced by another form of information display, a projected one, for example.
And then the input, very surprising how good the mouse is, still is. In fact, if you go back to the original research done on the mouse, the people who did that research were very surprised as well. But until we find something a lot better than the mouse, the mouse tool remains pretty good. The trackpad is pretty good, the stylus is pretty good.
So things that will allow us to input as well as a keyboard or better, and perhaps it’ll be voice recognition or handwriting recognition, sketching, mousing, all those input devices, they will probably still be resident in laptops. I think they’ll also be resident in workstations, which you can’t move around with you, because the opportunity to make those bigger and more easy to work with is growing.
But the compromise between the little thing in your hand, like a phone, smartphone, or the in-between size like the iPad, and that workstation, laptop’s still a very good in-between place to be.
Debbie Millman:
Several years ago, you wrote a book called Designing Interactions, published by MIT Press. It’s rather extraordinary. It was named one of the 10 best innovation and design books that year by Businessweek magazine in 2006.
And in the book, you talk at length about the creation of the laptop. How did you get involved in that endeavor in the first place? How did you get initiated into this project?
Bill Moggridge:
Well, I was just starting my second office. I started my first design office in London in ’69, and in ’78 I researched places in the US and found out about Silicon Valley, and was very excited about that because Silicon Valley was moving from just chips to products as well. So it was a great opportunity for a designer.
I’d already worked on computers and telephones a lot in Europe, in 10 different countries, so I had a fairly nice portfolio. And one of the people who also worked at PARC, John Ellenby, decided that he wanted to make a new company that would create a computer that was small enough to carry in half your briefcase.
And so I got to know him as he was about to embark on this endeavor, and he asked me to form his design and engineering department for the physical design.
Debbie Millman:
So you graduated in 1965. You then went to the United States to work a little bit. You came back to London and then did some additional coursework in typography and communications. Why?
Bill Moggridge:
Well, my first job was in Erie, Pennsylvania, working for a company called American Sterilizer, which was designing hospital equipment. In fact, I met my wife in Europe, and she came over and joined me in Erie as soon as I had enough money saved up, and we got married.
It seemed a little unfortunate to be working for a company called American Sterilizer, but we do have a couple of kids. And one of the things they asked me to do at that company was to design their corporate identity, and I did such a terrible job that I thought I had to go back and study something about graphic design, typography.
So we went back to Europe, and I started working in advanced studies department, which is a little postgraduate program. My wife was then studying furniture design, so we were both at the same school in North London.
In order to make ends meet, I started working for myself, and clients started to grow. And I found… Well, I said I founded the company when I had my first full-time employee.
Debbie Millman:
Now, while you were working on the laptop, did you have any sense of how significant a contribution to technology and culture it was ultimately going to be?
Bill Moggridge:
Well, I think there are very few opportunities that a designer has in a career to do something which is truly precedent-setting. And it was clear to me that because it was so new and so different from anything that had come before, and was really getting produced, it might make a big difference.
You don’t predict that it’s going to spread in the way it’s spread; you just have no idea about that. But it was clear that it was very important in the sense of being very innovative.
Debbie Millman:
You write in Designing Interactions that designing the laptop was about shrinking the computer so that you could take it with you, first as a luggable suitcase, then in your briefcase, and eventually your pocket.
The transition from desktop machines to laptops was about designing the physical interface to be small enough to carry easily, without changing the interactions on the display significantly because of the smaller size.
Did you ever feel while you were doing this that you weren’t going to be successful?
Bill Moggridge:
Well, in terms of the sort of challenges that we were meeting for the physical design, they were small things if you look at them as individual items.
For example, we wanted to know what the right weight would be as a maximum for the specification. So I made everybody in the company, with only seven people in the company, walk around with their briefcases containing what they normally had anyway. And I gave them one-pound weights and said, “Carry as many of these one-pound weights as you can, as well as your normal stuff, and then tell me when it gets unbearable.”
And we came out with a pretty good number, which was eight pounds. And so then we tried to design the thing to weigh eight pounds.
Same thing it was true of the impact. How far could you drop it on the floor without it breaking?
Debbie Millman:
That was Bill Moggridge in 2010.
He passed away in 2012, but his legacy as a designer and a thinker is still clearly very much with us.
Jason Kottke is a designer who has become one of the most influential bloggers of all time. He started blogging way back in 1998, when the word blog hadn’t even been invented yet. I spoke with him in 2013.
So your site is one of the longest continually-running blogs on the web, having been in operation for what you state as approximately 14.756 years, and you’ve published over 21,000 entries. What made you decide to start it in the first place?
Jason Kottke:
I was working as a web designer in 1998, and in my spare time, I was also doing this site called Oscillate, an episodic website where every few weeks I would produce something that would stand alone on its own as an episode.
And around that time, people started doing these things called web logs. And people had been doing diaries and things like that, and I decided that I wanted to try my hand at it and produced what became Kottke.org as an episode of Oscillate.
So it started as an episode, and then it just lived on, and I eventually moved it from Oscillate to Kottke.org.
Debbie Millman:
You consider yourself to be an editor, a curator, a writer, a designer, a developer, a blogger. How do you describe what you do?
Jason Kottke:
I think I’m most comfortable with blogger. I tend to stay away from the curating terminology and whole thing.
Debbie Millman:
How come?
Jason Kottke:
Curating strikes me as a term that’s a little bit highfalutin, if you catch my drift there. And what I do is not-
Debbie Millman:
Highfalutin?
Jason Kottke:
… highfalutin at all, I don’t think. 13 minutes of Russian car crashes isn’t highbrow material.
Debbie Millman:
But that’s only one small part of what you offer your readers. Some of it, I don’t know that it would necessarily be highfalutin to curators, but I think that there’s certainly quite a lot of seriousness to what you write about. And certainly your writing seems to be something that people take very seriously.
Jason Kottke:
Yeah, that’s true. The thing I like about blogging, or blogger as a term, is that I think a lot of people for a long time were very dismissive of people who had blogs and who wrote blogs, and still are to a certain extent.
And I like embracing that term and being, “Yeah, I’m a blogger. This is my blog, and this is what I do,” even though it’s a horrible, ugly word that doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think Heather Armstrong says that it sounds like a venereal disease.
Jason Kottke:
Just sort of like… Yeah, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Now, I read an interview wherein someone asked you how it felt to be internet old, and you responded, “Sometimes it feels as though I’ve overstayed my welcome at a party, like really overstayed. Like the hosts come out of their bedroom the next morning, and there I am at the kitchen table eating breakfast and asking when they’ll be home for dinner overstayed.”
And yet, you’re still staying.
Jason Kottke:
I guess part of it is just that I’ve done it so long that it’s just part of who I am. So that’s one piece of it.
I’ve got the 10 Malcolm Gladwell idea of the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. I’ve got that in, and so it’s like a second nature sort of thing to me. I can just do it. It’s not something I have to think about doing.
So when you do things that you don’t have to think about doing, there’s not a lot of stress involved. So it’s a very easy thing to want to keep doing.
But sometimes there’s obviously… I get burnt out sometimes and I don’t want to do it anymore. And sometimes I really enjoy it and I’m really into it, and there’s a little bit extra that I put into it when I’m really enjoying it.
Debbie Millman:
Where are you right now in that continuum?
Jason Kottke:
I think right now there’ve been a couple of recent events. Hurricane Sandy was one, and the shootings in Connecticut was another. And those two events have really got me thinking, “I’ve got this big platform, I have hundreds of thousands of people reading, and what do I want that to be doing?”
I think in the past I haven’t thought too much about that. I’ve just been a filter. I read a bunch of stuff, and whatever I find particularly interesting, I write about it and then I put it out there. And it’s not saying anything. It’s not getting people into action or anything like that.
But you have these events where thousands and millions of people are affected, and you have issues like climate change and gun control, and it’s like, “Maybe I should be doing something else with this readership that I have. Maybe I should be telling them to do something, or maybe I should be encouraging them to think about these more weighty issues and leave the funny videos and whatever behind.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, very interesting reaction from what happened after Sandy, and now what’s happened after the shooting in Connecticut after Sandy, you stopped writing for a while. It seemed that you found real disdain in the notion of entertaining anybody at that point, or being light or frivolous, whimsical. And so you stop writing for a couple of days if not longer.
Whereas now, there’s actually been quite a lot of activity online about how much you’re writing about gun control in a very positive way. And probably in these last couple of months, I feel more Jason in this space of Kottke.org, as opposed to just being someone that is providing information or inspiration. There’s more of a point of view.
Is that something that you feel is intentional and deliberate, or more coming from your reaction to these events?
Jason Kottke:
Yeah, I think a lot of it is just reaction. It’s not me saying I’m injecting more of my personality into the site. It’s coming from a place of not thinking about it, being emotional about it, being reactive to things that are happening that are terrible and scary and affecting my family.
And it’s like being a protective father. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and I don’t want us to fuck up the planet for them. I don’t want them living in a country with 300,000,000 guns and people carrying concealed weapons everywhere. I don’t want that stuff.
And I’m not quite to that point of maybe I can do something about it. I’m at that point where I’m confused and scared and worked up about it. And what am I going to do about it? I’m going to blog about it, or I’m not going to blog about it because I just can’t handle it right now.
Maybe six months from now I’ll know what to do, but right now I’m just being reactive.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk a little bit about how you go about choosing what to put on the site. You’ve written that you’ve recently realized that one of the topics you cover on your site is people are awesome and look at all the amazing things we can do that we’ve never done before.
This includes things such as people performing physical feats of novelty and amazement on bikes, on skates, on skis, on skateboards; kids from the projects making the cover of Fortune Magazine; scientists building a tiny sun in California; inventing 3D printers for human tissue; or quietly but completely changing how people think about space and time and so on, and so on.
So how do you decide what to write about? How many things do you have to read before you decide this is Kottke-worthy?
Jason Kottke:
Some days are easier than others. Some days I run across six things right away in the morning, and I write about them, and then that day’s work is done.
Some days I just don’t find stuff, and nothing is quite right, I guess.
Debbie Millman:
Do you try to do six a day? It’s funny because all these years of reading, I’ve never actually counted how many posts you do a day.
Jason Kottke:
Yeah, I think six is the magic number right now. It used to be more. I’ve scaled back and tried to spend a little more time in being choosy rather than doing 12 things a day that aren’t as good, maybe.
One thing I try to focus on a lot is picking stuff that’s going to be more or less timeless, rather than, “Here’s what’s going on right now in the news.” And I think if you go back in the archives, a lot of the stuff it’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s still interesting.” It’s not like, “Oh, this is irrelevant because it was about…”
Of course, Facebook bought Instagram for $1,000,000,000 eight months ago. Nobody cares about that six years from now. But the thing where you mentioned the physicist in California that built the thing to basically create a tiny sun and it’s this hugely powerful machine.
Debbie Millman:
Jason Kottke in 2013. Kottke.org is still one of my favorite daily reads, and it’s a great source of must-read information, entertainment, and inspiration.
Anil Dash is a software engineer and entrepreneur who is also an activist and writer. I spoke with him in 2017.
You now describe yourself as being in the technology industry, but you stated in a really remarkable interview with Krista Tippett that technology always means things invented after you were born. And so there was a time when the technology industry was the wheel, and there was a time when the technology industry was fire. And it’s every iteration along the way has been the first people to do agriculture were the technologists of their time.
And Anil, I’ve never thought of tech in this way. What do you imagine humanity will look back on in the tech we’re using today and think is prehistoric?
Anil Dash:
The things I already see, I have a five-year-old son, and I see the things he catches in movies. A lot of my friends and my peers that have kids have seen this too of: “Why is that phone connected to the wall?” That comes up a lot.
And I had to explain to him, “Not only did I have phones connected to the wall, they didn’t have any apps.” And he’s like, “Well, what did you do with it?” And I was like, “I ask myself that sometimes too.”
Or even that I had a computer that was not connected to anything, let alone the internet, it wasn’t connected to anything. It was just a computer. That’s like being given an empty box and try to imagine what you’re going to do to play with it. Those are basic concepts: the idea of disconnected experiences.
And in particular, one of those interesting things I think is not talked about a lot in the transition from party lines to home wall phones to mobile phones is a phone went from being connected to a place, to connected to a home, to connected to a person.
And so I look at when I was in high school, there was a girl I ended up dating because I was friends with her brother. And she would answer the phone, and I talked to her briefly before asking, “Is your brother there?” How would you even reach somebody unintentionally on a phone today?
Those kinds of shifts of person-to-person connectivity and devices being about a person and the idea that a device is useless it’s connected, which we’re seeing the extreme now with everybody trying to make the internet fridge and the smart thermometer and whatever else that they invent.
I think as humans we feel that connection is meaning. And because we anthropomorphize all the devices and the objects that we use, we try to project upon them that connection is meaning for them too.
Debbie Millman:
I think Dan Formosa said that we’re not in love with the devices, we’re in love with the feeling that we get when we’re using the devices and connecting with each other.
Anil Dash:
I balk at the critique of especially young people, where they say, “You’re not paying attention to the real world. You’re just looking at that phone.” The real world is full of strangers. This phone is full of people I love.
Debbie Millman:
Inasmuch as you’ve been blogging consistently, you’ve had many different jobs and positions in the tech business. You left the Village Voice to become the first employee of Ben and Mena Trott’s Six Apart. Ben and Mena are the creators of Movable Type, Vox, and TypePad.
You stayed there for six years and left as the Vice President of Evangelism. What does that mean exactly?
Anil Dash:
It’s a little bit of a fake title. It’s a title they give you when you’ve been around a long time and you’re almost a founder, but not quite a founder. They don’t know what to do with you, and they don’t want to promote you.
And what it eventually ended up being is an outward marketing role. You go to events and you talk about the products, you talk about the company, and you get people excited. And we were hiring a ton of people, so you get the new hires excited about what they’re doing joining the company.
And you’re the storyteller, but it’s a marketing role without the blocking and tackling, the actual functional things of doing marketing.
Debbie Millman:
After Six Apart, you created or worked with the following companies: Expert Labs, ThinkUp, MakerBase, Activate, and you’re currently the CEO of Fog Creek Software. What do you think of your career path?
Anil Dash:
It was not predictable, and I would not necessarily advocate it to anybody, but I have loved doing all of it.
Because in that mix of things you listed, there’s nonprofits that I had to write a grant proposal to the MacArthur Foundation to create Expert Labs, and I had no idea what that meant. All the way to the other end of ThinkUp was a fairly conventional startup with outside investors. And we really tried to make a go of it, and I’m very proud of the product, but we had picked the wrong time to bet on building a tool around social media the way we did. And so that didn’t work.
But we got this really great breadth, and the through line for me was always this how to find meaning in all this technology and all the social media and social networking that we were creating.
In some degrees, in retrospect, I’ve seen a lot of it as atoning for the choices that all of us made wrong when we created the world of social media and social networks. Because the company Six Apart, we were just talking about, we created some of the first blogging software. So we made the tools that we used to publish and create Gawker and Huffington Post and just countless sites like that that are still around today, for the most part, Gawker aside.
They succeeded, but we also set these norms around how a social network would function. And at that time, it was a very small cohort to sit down with the MySpace folks and the Facebook people when those teams were 10 people and say, “How should we do comments on the internet and how should we do sign-in and what should your identity be?” Things that we take for granted that we use every day.
And we since then, made every mistake that now is classic, whether it’s how do you accidentally reveal people’s information? How do you expose people to abuse? How do you enable harassment communities to form? How do you create all these antisocial behaviors? How do you allow false information to spread? Every single one of those is traceable to design decisions in the creation of social media and social networking tools.
They would never have been prevented, but they could have been greatly diminished, or not been so empowered, had we made different choices in the technologies we created. And once we started to see, some of us started to see that there were these errors, it was really hard to put the cat back in the bag. And more, I think to my chagrin, a lot of people decided that they didn’t care, because there was so much money to be made that there were going to be these negative effects, and that maybe they would fix it later.
Debbie Millman:
You talk a lot now on your personal blog, which you have been continuously writing since 1999, about your advocacy for making the tech world more humane and ethical. How inhumane and unethical do you think it is?
Anil Dash:
This depends. This varies a lot. Some of the people I know in tech are some of the most thoughtful, and genuine, and generous people I’ve ever met. There is incredible heart there.
I think one, the vast majority of people are not aware of the negative side effects of what they create because they just can’t see it. I’ve ranted a lot about the fact that our computer science programs seldom contain ethics curriculum, and there are implications from that where you just aren’t taught how to think about the social impacts of what you do.
Debbie Millman:
And yet there are so many ethics classes for lawyers and doctors.
Anil Dash:
Yeah, every other professional discipline.
Debbie Millman:
Do no harm, right?
Anil Dash:
That’s right. There were these aspirations that there were the people that didn’t know about the negative impact they could have.
And then the recent thing is the reveal of the Bond villains, the genuine bad actors, the Peter Thiels of the world who will carry on a years-long, decades-long vendetta behind the scenes using immeasurable resources to carry out the pettiest grievances with the worst secondary effects.
That was the thing I had not conceived of. I was far too naive to think that there were actual bad guys that were actually making bad plans to hurt innocent people for no reason.
And he cleverly picked a target that also had, there’s a lot of valid criticisms of Gawker. There are a lot of real reasons to say I don’t like some of their ethical choices, but there was no concern for the collateral damage.
And we’re seeing the follow-on effects of that now and will be for years.
Debbie Millman:
What’s frightening is how close Peter Thiel is now to the President of the United States.
Anil Dash:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that as a journalist, you see a real consonance between the moral challenge that tech has and the moral challenge that journalism has. You talked quite a lot about this with Krista. What do you see as the consonance?
Anil Dash:
A lot of things. I’m not a journalist, but when I was at the Village Voice and other places, got to work closely with journalists and I have a lot of criticisms of journalism. Everybody does, especially journalists. But there is a proud ethical tradition and a constantly negotiated set of expectations and guidelines around how to behave, which I think there’s a fair argument to be made that spend too much time navel-gazing and debating over that stuff.
But that’s such a contrast to tech, where it’s the literally “move fast to break things” is as close to an ethical framework as we have in the tech industry today. Yet the impacts are very, very similar in terms of the consonance between tech and journalism. Both are defining one, the framing of how we see culture.
They’re outlining the space and saying, “This is what’s in the boundaries of acceptable conversation and what is appropriate to focus on.” They’re both making very strong decisions about what to emphasize.
And one of the biggest things we see in culture right now are there are falsehoods, sure. There are lies through emphasis. And this is a thing that journalism and tech are probably equally guilty of. In the broader world of journalism, we see this on TV news, local TV news of “if it bleeds, it leads.” And as a result, there is almost nobody in America who thinks we’re at the lowest period for crime, violent crime in the history of the country. Yet that’s pretty much true. If not, we’re very, very close to it.
And so there’s a distortion through emphasis and tech exacerbates that, and in fact has a tendency towards that because of what are the easiest patterns for creating code for ranking things and designing things is basically a rich-get-richer algorithm. And so it’s very easy to say this is the most popular app in the app store and the most popular song in the music store and the most popular search result for this thing.
And what happens is you build these self-reinforcing networks that not just repeat the patterns of exclusion and inequity in the physical world, but amplify them and exacerbate them.
Debbie Millman:
Anil Dash in 2017.
Kevin Kelly is one of the founders of Wired magazine. For most of his career, he’s been thinking and writing about technology. One of my favorite books of his is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape our Future. I spoke with him in 2023.
You just said something that I discovered in researching your work that really, really intrigued me, and it was the idea of technological inevitability. And in reading your books and many articles, I came across this about the way in which technology has evolved.
And you state, “When looking at the order of technologies on different continents in prehistory, when there wasn’t really much influence between the continents, they actually follow roughly the same sequence. You’ll have the domestication of dogs before pottery, you’ll have the mention of sewing after pottery. There is a natural sequence which suggests that there is a certain inevitability to technologies.
Once you have the previous ones, the next ones are going to happen. And I would say once you invent electricity and copper wires and switches, you’re going to invent the telephone. And once you have the telephone, you’re going to invent the internet.”
So the internet was inevitable.
Kevin Kelly:
The internet was inevitable, but the character of the internet was not inevitable. This goes back to our former conversations. We still have a choice about who owns the internet, who runs it, is it national, international? Is it run by one country or not? Is it open or closed? Those are all things that we have a choice about and they make a huge difference.
But the fact that the internet arrived, it’s going to arrive on probably any planet where they discover electricity and wiring. They’re going to have an internet, but the character of the internet is going to be different than ours because of those social dimensions that we get to choose about.
And I fast-forward this into saying AI, AI is coming. Making minds is something that evolution wanted to do many, many times. It reinvented minds and many different lines of development that were all separate from each other. So minds and artificial minds are inevitable, but the character of those, the quality that we really choose about how it’s run, who has access to it, how much does it cost? Is it open or closed? These are all things that we do have decisions and choices about, and they make a big difference to us.
Debbie Millman:
Would you say then, in addition to the internet being inevitable, it is a mutation of technology?
Kevin Kelly:
So I wrote a book, What Technology Wants, and the short answer about what it wants is that it wants the same things that evolution wants.
Meaning, I use the word “want” not consciously, but like the way that a plant wants light, it leans to the light.
So these are-
Debbie Millman:
What technology seeks.
Kevin Kelly:
These are urges, tendencies. So the tendency of technologies are the same tendencies we see in evolution because it is, in fact, an extension of evolution. It’s evolution accelerated.
And so when we look at it that way, where it’s going is towards increasing possibilities, increasing forms. So I say that the evolution of technology follows the same thing, the evolution of life, and it’s kind of aimed in the same directions and which are towards greater complexity, greater specialization, greater mutualism.
And so technology will become more complex, and technology also becomes more specialized. And so my prediction would be that in AI, we’re going to see increasing numbers of specialized AIs to do different things, whether it’s images or language or music or equations or math proofs, that there’ll be increasing specialized versions of them just like we have specialized cameras.
And that there’ll be more mutualism, meaning that a lot of technology comes to depend on other technologies or may only be used by other technologies, meaning that there’ll be things that we’ll invent that humans won’t even use. They’ll be invented for other technologies to use. That’s mutualism, where they are embedded in the system itself.
And so my view is that those are the inevitable things, and they’re not at the species level. So I would say in evolution, any planet in the galaxy that had a gravity like Earth’s and an atmosphere like Earth, evolution will have quadrupeds. That’s inevitable because that’s just a physically elegant solution. Four legs, very, very stable.
But a zebra is not inevitable. That species is completely stochastic. It’s completely random. So species are never predictable or inevitable, but the larger blueprint is. So the internet is, but a website is not inevitable. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone in particular is not necessarily inevitable. And so we can say certain AIs are going to be inevitable, but ChatGPT-4 is not necessarily inevitable.
Debbie Millman:
So the notion that most inventions and innovations are co-invented multiple times simultaneously and independently is one of the properties of something that you call the technium. And I was wondering if you could define technium for our listeners.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. We talked earlier at the very beginning about technologies, plural, that we have a microphone and we’ve got a camera and we’ve got cars and even materials, Teflon, Kevlar. We understand these to be technologies, although it’s broader because, in fact, technologies would include things like a calendar and timekeeping. These are technologies too.
But we think of these as independent little things, and in our own lives, our life is a witness to a parade of new technologies as they’re invented. But in fact, the reality is much more complicated because these new things that are being invented rely on other technologies to make them or even to input them, like they’re eating them, they’re consuming them.
And so we have really something that’s much more like a rainforest of different technologies that are interdependent, co-dependent on each other. You can’t do farming today without computers and satellites and telephones and logistics, and you can’t do those logistics unless you have food for the workers. And so there is a complete ecosystem of these technologies that are co-dependent on each other.
And the important idea about this ecosystem, which I call the technium, is that the technium itself, the forest itself, has certain biases, certain tendencies that the individual components don’t have, that the tendencies are not found in the individual components.
It’s a little bit like a beehive, which, I was a beekeeper. So the bees live only six weeks, but the hive can have a memory of years. So there are attributes of the hive that you can’t find in individual bees no matter how hard you look. That’s because systems have behaviors themselves. All systems have certain antics and biases and tendencies.
And so I’m saying we have a system of technologies called the technium that’s not just a culture, it’s not as a herd. It’s actually active. It’s an agent, it’s doing things, and it has certain tendencies and urges and recurring patterns that are not found in the individual technologies that make up. And all the technologies together make up this technium.
And so the question that I asked is, what are some of those behaviors of the technium at large? And that’s what I get the question: what does technology want?
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the technium is an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. How so?
Kevin Kelly:
I would say in my definition of things that are created by mines, which is what technology is, that that would include the dams that beaver make, the nests that birds make, the homes that termites make, because they are being created from their neurons. Their neurons are measuring the honeycomb, their brains are assembling the nest.
This way of looking at technology is something that behaves in the same way as evolution does. So you could map the genealogy of different inventions and showing how they mutate. There’s a little mutation which is picked up and it becomes more common. And that is then the origin of the next one. There’s like offspring in children.
So it’s behaving almost identical to biological evolution with one big caveat, which is that unlike biology, it’s very, very, very rare for anything to go extinct in the technium. But otherwise, the behavior of this as it progresses through time is very, very similar to biology.
And we see bits of the technium in the sense of things being made from the mind already occurring in the animal kingdom. And so for me, we can view technology as origins is not human-made. Actually, the origins are actually the big bang, the same origins of the beginning of our universe and life of these self-organizing systems.
And so the mathematics of the energy component of technology follows the same kind of laws that evolution does. So whatever we can measure about evolution, we can apply to the technium and see that it’s also very similar.
Debbie Millman:
So if you think about birds making nests or beavers creating their dams, there isn’t a manual that they get when they are creating them. It’s very much instinctual. So they have an ability to be instinctively creative.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. There actually is a little bit more leeway. While a lot of it is imperative, instinctive, but we know from birdsong and stuff they actually can learn and change. So it’s not 100% reflexive.
There are elements of individual creativity even in those acts.
Debbie Millman:
And so it makes me wonder, and I’m just formulating this as we speak, so it might not be quite as eloquent as I want it to be, but if we as humans have an ability to be creative, and that’s something that many people think that all humans are born with, the whole notion of folks like Rick Rubin or Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity coming through us, the best creativity coming through us, not by us, I’m wondering if there’s some correlation there with this innate instinctiveness in creating the best possible art or invention.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I think there is. And I think one of the things that AI has shown us is that creativity, rather than being a high-order, rarefied quality, is actually very primitive. It’s actually elemental.
It’s so elemental that we can actually make machines do it. Rather than it being something that gets layered on top of consciousness and awareness, it actually precedes all those. And that it’s actually so elemental and fundamental that we’re capable of programming it into machines so that machines can be creative, certainly with lowercase creativity of doing something novel. Maybe not through the breakthroughs yet, but certainly at the lowercase.
And I think animals have shown that they are capable of having a lowercase creativity in certain cases. So that, to me, says that yes, this elemental, foundational level of creativity is something that’s very fundamental to all living systems. And that’s what living systems that try to learn and adapt, you could say that that’s one variety of creativity.
And I think what we’re seeing is that that is something that’s portable, that’s something that we can move. And it’s not just the province of… Humans don’t own it.
Debbie Millman:
That was the great Kevin Kelly from 2023.
You can hear the full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with some of the most creative people on the planet on our website, designmattersmedia.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
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