[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: All right. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, the podcast.

ROBERT: The podcast. This week, we're going to ...

JAD: We're going live.

ROBERT: We're going live, sort of, from the New York Library.

JAD: Whoo!

ROBERT: Where they have a program called New York Public Library Live.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So let's just get the introductions done.

JAD: When was it, by the way?

ROBERT: When was it? It was in November.

JAD: Was it on a Monday or a Thursday?

ROBERT: I don't remember the day, but I do remember the people who were on the stage with me. They are wonderful, but irritating.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: They are Steven Johnson, who's got a new book called Where Good Ideas Come From, and then there's Kevin Kelly with a book that he entitles What Technology Wants.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So that's Kevin.

[applause]

ROBERT: That's just a weird question, right? I mean, what does—if I met a spoon, I know what it wants. It wants whatever I want. I take it, put it in the soup, bring it to my mouth, suck on it, put it down. When it's down it's just nothing. It doesn't want anything, so—so at least that's my notion. So when you ask this question—or actually, you don't even ask it. Your book title answers it: what technology wants. What—what does that mean?

KEVIN KELLY: So I think we view technology generally to mean all this new stuff, this gadget stuff, this stuff that's in our pockets and kind of around our household. But I wanted to look at it not as individual objects, because a single object doesn't want really anything, as you're suggesting. I wanted to look at the way in which that object, say that iPhone, that iPhone requires thousands of different technologies to make that one other technology. So there is a web of technologies that are kind of interdependent interweaving and to produce what I think of as sort of a superorganism of technology. That ...

ROBERT: You mean all the spoons, all the forks, all the knives and all the telephones?

KEVIN KELLY: All the telephones, all the factories, all the roads, everything together—and us—together form a new thing that like other superorganisms have an emergent kind of agenda that is beyond just the spoon. So the spoon itself is sort of like the bee or the ant in the colony, it doesn't really mean much. But together, all the spoons and everything else connected together, all the little chips, all the wires, all the roads, it does form something that does begin in a very small way to have the slimmest bit of autonomy, and autonomy that wasn't there in the individual pieces.

ROBERT: Autonomy and some kind of will?

KEVIN KELLY: Well, so "want." That's a strong word, when I use the word "want," because we immediately think of what you want and what I want, and say deliberately thinking about "Hmm, what do I want?" But I mean "want" in the way in which that flower, when it was alive ...

ROBERT: [laughs] It's sort of hanging on.

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs] Wanted life. And so it kind of leans towards the light a little bit. It has a drift, it has a tendency towards the light. It's not intelligent, it's not conscious but the plant itself is—wants light, it leans toward the light. So the technium, which is the word I use to distinguish this whole superorganism or technology, it's leaning in certain directions. It has certain tendencies, so it wants to go in certain directions.

ROBERT: We'll get to the directions where it may want to go. Let me ask you, your—your question is a little more modest than his.

STEVEN JOHNSON: [laughs] I aim a little lower.

ROBERT: This is Steve Johnson.

ROBERT: Where ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: My career path has aimed just a little bit lower than Kevin's. Figure out where Kevin's going and just, yeah, steer right underneath that.

ROBERT: So your question is—is: where do good ideas come from? So for you, let me look at the word "idea." When you use that word, what do you mean?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Everything from, you know, scientific breakthroughs, technological breakthroughs, breakthroughs in the creative arts, and also just kind of ordinary breakthroughs in our lives where we have a good idea that helps us kind of live a little bit better, be a little bit better in our jobs. You know, human innovation.

ROBERT: But when you use the word "innovation" or "idea," so for most people, in the cartoon version that's the light bulb going on.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Right.

ROBERT: So some guy is sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking—bing! And then they think, "Oh! E=MC²," or something like that. So for you, when you look into a brain, you don't see anything coming out of nothing. There's something a little bit more.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah, that's one of the biggest things I think you have to kind of undo when you approach a topic like this, which is this idea that the—the breakthrough idea, the light bulb moment is a single thing happening in a single mind, and that it happens in an instant. For some reason, we want to tell the story that way. There's this kind of innate desire—I mean, as a storyteller, I want to tell the story that way, too. And people do tend to build these elaborate fiction about their kind of moments of epiphany.

STEVEN JOHNSON: But when you go back and look at the historical record and kind of rewind the tape and play it slowly, so many of these breakthrough—allegedly kind of breakthrough epiphanies, what you find is, in fact, that the idea was incubating for a very period of time. It actually builds upon other ideas by other people—it's more of a kind of a remixing of other people's concepts and other people's tools. And it kind of fades into view over a much longer period of time. This is what I call the "slow hunch" in the book. That it's not this kind of gut impression or this sudden, you know, moment of clarity, but this much more evolutionary, more kind of lingering process.

ROBERT: Do you get the sense that there is never a eureka moment? Or do you have, like, you know, one eureka moment and 50 slow, small increments?

STEVEN JOHNSON: I think that are moments where you do kind of advance in some clear fashion, and you suddenly do see things in a new way. A lot of them come in dreams. Actually, the book talks about how many amazing empirical scientific discoveries actually occur to people in dreams. But I guess part of what I'm trying to do with this argument is to kind of correct that—the emphasis we place on those. And the other thing about those eureka moments is that may—and often usually do—occur to at least 10 other people at the same time.

ROBERT: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Which diminishes the eureka-ness of it.

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: Right?

ROBERT: For example?

STEVEN JOHNSON: For example, every single invention that we know about. For example, the telephone. The patents for the telephone were submitted by Alexander Graham Bell and Gray within three hours of each other.

ROBERT: Really?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yes. And the light bulbs were—the light bulb that we associate with Thomas Edison, he was the last of 23 other people.

ROBERT: You mean, they was no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, no light bulb, then—pew!

STEVEN JOHNSON: In the matter of a couple of years, light bulbs. Everybody had the light bulb idea. [laughs] And ...

ROBERT: What would explain the sudden ubiquity of an idea after a long, eternal silence?

KEVIN KELLY: The precursor inventions that are required for that next step have all been done. So you—it's a kind of—it's like a growth where you need to go through a certain stage to get to the next stage. You have to have all the parts. And because no idea is alone. The light bulb required, you know, whatever is a hundred other sub-inventions to sustain it, to even conceive of it. And when they're in place and then it's like the next idea is just there. And so being too early with an idea is really as bad or worse as being too late.

STEVEN JOHNSON: So we both use this—Kevin and I are both kind of fans of this phrase from Stuart Kauffman, this idea of "the adjacent possible."

ROBERT: The adjacent possible.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. I mean, just bear with me. It's a good—it's useful.

ROBERT: [laughs] So many syllables!

STEVEN JOHNSON: And the idea is that at any given time—oh, come on! This is a very literary crowd. They can handle the syllables. So the idea is that at any given time, both in the evolution of life and in the evolution of technology, there is a kind of, given the state of the current system there are a finite set of moves that are possible. So imagine like a chess board, right? You're in the middle of a game, there's a certain number of moves that are possible, a much larger set of moves that are not possible. The same is true of—of, you know, technological history. You cannot invent a microwave oven in 1650 just as you cannot invent an automobile in ancient Egypt.

ROBERT: Just to make sure: you could imagine one.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Right.

ROBERT: But you can't build it.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yes. Although it is—it is remarkably hard to imagine one. That's part of the point here. I mean, when—I saw this in detail in Invention of Air, the book about your friend Joe Priestley. Who I liked that you wrote ...

ROBERT: He killed a lot of mice.

STEVEN JOHNSON: So Priestley is most famous for inventing Oxy—isolating oxygen for the first time, which is another case of a multiple discovery where three other people kind of discovered it right around the same time independently more or less. And the point was that they were able to think about isolating oxygen for the first time partially because there were tools, that there were scales and things that made it easier to kind of realize that this element was there. But the biggest one was a conceptual leap, which is that it only had become possible a couple of years before to even think about the air as being something you wanted to investigate scientifically. Up until that point, they were like, "Well, I want to investigate wood and bodies and hearts and brains and rocks." But ...

ROBERT: The air was pure.

STEVEN JOHNSON: The air was pure. Why would we study that? There's nothing there, right? And it was because of a number of—partially because they discovered vacuums where they were like—not the cleaners but the empty air, the lack of air, that were like, "Okay, this is a vacuum, so there must be something in normal air that we can actually study and understand."

STEVEN JOHNSON: And so conceptually, that became a platform that enabled Priestley to kind of think in a way, and his compatriots to think in a way that it was much harder to think even—even five decades before.

ROBERT: Well, are you—do you think when the environment is—is ready in some sense then it will happen? So it's almost as if the technium, your phrase, is kind of whispering, "Now!"

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs] Yes, it is. It is an environment that we're in, and it is ...

ROBERT: It's creepy to me.

KEVIN KELLY: It is creepy. And it's also—because it's inevitable too, that's also another creepy word that people get spooked by.

ROBERT: Inevitable?

KEVIN KELLY: Inevitable. Right.

ROBERT: But do you believe that? Do you believe that a spoon is an inevitable—an inevitable thing that's bound to happen if you're hungry and you invent soup?

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs] Yes, definitely. So the question is is ...

ROBERT: But then everyone would think of spoon at the same time.

KEVIN KELLY: They probably did.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Robert, let me—let me try this.

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: So one very active evolutionary theory debate is something like the inevitability of evolution, given enough time, evolving eyes, right? Light is the fastest way to transmit information, and so the idea is, given enough evolutionary time, creatures would evolve the ability to kind of process and make sense of—of light, and to somehow kind of act on that information, right?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And it turns out what we find when we go back is that eyes independently evolved multiple times in completely different lines because there was just something about the physics of the world that made that, despite the fact that evolution didn't on some level want to—there was no intelligent designer saying, "Eyes would be good. Light waves move very fast. That would be a good thing to do." But we—but evolution kept stumbling its way towards that innovation on these—on these separate paths.

ROBERT: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And I think that's—that's where I 100 percent ...

ROBERT: But no one says that eyes wanted to be there. No one said that there was a niche called the eye niche ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: Well, the question, the very serious question which I think is real is: then how do you describe that? How do you describe that inevitability of a system not being directed somehow ending up again and again, if you rewound the tape and ran it again, you would have eyes. Eyes would just keep showing up. So Kevin, I think, has picked this provocative but I think useful way of describing it which is that there is this tendency of that system to go towards those attractors. There are kind of magnets that the system will gravitate towards.

ROBERT: [whispers] I don't know what he's talking about. Spoons!

KEVIN KELLY: No, but then spoons are the point! Eventually people will invent as well. Spoons are a attractor. Robert, why does this bother you so much? [laughs]

ROBERT: Because for the obvious reason that you are crossing a line here. You are saying that living systems, which have a logic, which he describes very well, have—that the logic of living systems also belongs to these inanimate things.

KEVIN KELLY: Right.

ROBERT: The history of technology sounds like for both of you—sounds suspiciously like the history of life.

KEVIN KELLY: Right. And I think ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: That's very suspicious of you.

KEVIN KELLY: Yeah, you should be because the Mac does not look like a sunflower. But there—there are tremendous similarities in many ways. And there was a famous evolutionary biologist, Niles Eldredge—or is. He's still alive. And Niles's specialty is studying trilobites, mapping the morphology of them as they change. They can make kind of ...

ROBERT: Trilobites.

KEVIN KELLY: Trilobites. Yeah, he can make trees, genealogical trees showing them. His hobby is collecting cornets from around the world.

ROBERT: Cornets as in [honking]?

KEVIN KELLY: Exactly. Trumpets. And so he uses the same techniques applied to the forms of these, and actually traces out the little heritage trees. And he can show that, to a rough degree, the evolution of these technological forms resemble in many ways the kind of tracing of life as it forks and speciates. And so there is one sense in which the things that we make are really just an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And that really—shouldn't really be a surprise.

ROBERT: So for example, here, let me show you. This is from the book.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: This is a picture, a graph of what happened to underwater animals in the—long time ago called trilobites.

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: This is how they changed.

JAD: Oh!

ROBERT: And here, next to it is a—is a drawing showing what has happened in the history of cornet making.

JAD: So I'm seeing here two branching trees, which look kind of similar, actually.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: So let me ask ...

KEVIN KELLY: I think we're selling you on this.

ROBERT: Well, no. But now let me get a little harder. How far are you willing to push this biology path? Kevin, it seems to me when I read your book, it seems like you almost think that ideas are kind of alive, or almost alive. You even say that if you were to look at the living systems of the world, the kingdoms of animals and plants and all those little guys, of which there are six ...

KEVIN KELLY: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: You then, like, get a little map. You plop this technium thing in—so you call it "the seventh kingdom." No no no no no!

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs]

ROBERT: Because the first six are all—have mommies and daddies. I'm not sure how to explain the seventh.

KEVIN KELLY: Yeah. So I call it the seventh because I think it is—I mean, I place—again, the question I'm asking in a larger context is: what is this stuff that we're making and surrounding ourselves with? It's not just little bunches of gadgets, it's just not wires. We have to see that it's really part of something that's been going on for a long time. And so ...

ROBERT: There's a very big difference between a spoon and a whale. I mean ...

KEVIN KELLY: I'm not talking about the spoon, I'm talking about the whole superorganism of all the technologies.

ROBERT: I know, I know. But it's a lot of spoons.

KEVIN KELLY: It's a lot of spoons. And what that—what connects them is actually the fact that we have this stream of things that are organizing themselves, maintaining order, and in some cases increasing their order in the face of the rest of the universe running down.

ROBERT: But ...

KEVIN KELLY: And the spoons that you're obsessed with ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

KEVIN KELLY: ... have come from that same strand. There is a strand of these galaxies and stars, and here's a little corner of the planet where this self-organizing system has been making more and more order. And it made these animals, and then more and more order and structure and complexity and diversity. And it made minds, and these minds have made another thing that has a high degree of order and complexity and stuff, and may itself be starting to make other things, other minds.

ROBERT: May— it may ...

KEVIN KELLY: Does that scare you, spook you, worry you?

ROBERT: Let me read to you ...

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs]

ROBERT: Let me read to you what some of your reviewers have said.

KEVIN KELLY: Okay.

ROBERT: "Kelly's central thesis is this: technology has its own internal logic and rhythms that are distinct and sometimes adverse to the desires of the humans that create it. Technology creates itself using humans to do its bidding." Or "Humans cannot direct or prevent technology's course—at least not in the long run. Like water contained behind a dam relentlessly seeking escape, technology will eventually find its own way." Now doesn't that creep you out a little bit?

STEVEN JOHNSON: No.

KEVIN KELLY: No. Seriously, it's like if you said the same thing about life, would that bother you?

ROBERT: No. I'm part of life, I'm just worried about the thing ...

KEVIN KELLY: No, you're part of technology, too. Don't you understand that we humans have made—have invented ourselves? That, you know, we have this external stomach—we call it cooking—that has changed our diets, it has changed our teeth, our jaws. We have remade ourselves. When we become literate, we have—our brains are rewired, we think differently. We're not the same people that left Africa. We have domesticated ourselves. We are going to continue doing that. So why does that—you are technology. Does that bother you?

ROBERT: Well, but when you say, "What does technology want?" I'm not sure I'm in that sentence. That's what creeps me out. What would happen if, by your logic—and maybe as a fellow traveler, by your logic—you could imagine a situation where the things that we have created, not only our ideas, but the things we have made will have—by the same processes that describe the evolution of life, will have developed a will of their own. And then there will be either an evolution at our command, or an evolution away from us, or a revolution—an evolution that might somehow compete with us. I don't know ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: To some extent, aren't we already in that kind of imagined future state? I mean, you think about the internet right now. If we wanted to turn it off, it would be extremely difficult to do.

KEVIN KELLY: It's impossible.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And if we did, the catastrophic, non-linear, unpredictable effects of turning this thing off would be unbelievably devastating, right? We would have no idea what would happen.

ROBERT: But at least what we're turning off at that point, would we be turning off something we use, something we need. But at the moment when—I don't know where this gets this far, but at the moment when to turn off the machine is to commit a murder, that is that the machine will have come somehow sentient or full of feeling ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: But Kevin made very clear—also to defend him again, when you say "want"—and this is—I mean, this is the danger of want, right? Because he's not talking about consciousness, he's not talking about ...

ROBERT: Well, not yet. [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: And it's like in the sense that you would say, you know, a little bacterium, you know, "wants" to kind of float up a nutrient stream or something like that, right? The bacterium presumably is not conscious of what it is doing. It's not sitting there saying, like, "Mmm, yummy nutrients here. This is great. If I only had a spoon," you know?

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVEN JOHNSON: It's not thinking like that, right? But nonetheless, you have to look at it and say it is happy going up this little gradient, sucking in all these nutrients. And somehow, that thing is driven towards that. And so maybe—maybe the problem is we don't quite have that "I want" but there's no "I."

KEVIN KELLY: Right. I use "want" provocatively and deliberately, but partly so that we can rehearse this idea as things acquire more autonomy. And right now, the amount of autonomy in the things we make is miniscule. It's about the size of a—of a bacteria or a grasshopper. But it won't be. It will increase, and so we have to—we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that someday we're gonna make something that will have a "want." And how do we deal with that? When we make something that, you know, declares to us, "Oh, I am a child of God," what's our response to it? And so we—I use "want" to help us really prepare ourselves for that eventuality.

ROBERT: Well, let me—let me just end—let me finish with this. You're like one of the happiest people I know.

KEVIN KELLY: [laughs]

ROBERT: You've often said that if—that in contemplating these future problems, you just seem to always look on the—you know, that—from the Life of Brian, "Always look on the bright side of life." In this case, if you were to give the technium a mind of its own, is—is your thought that it will work out great?

KEVIN KELLY: Yes. I think that what evolution moves towards is increasing sentience of all sorts. So we see that, we see throughout life mind being inventing all the time. I think what we are doing is we're kind of—we're kind of evolution's way to invent minds that evolution, biological evolution could not make. So we're gonna invent all kinds of ways of thinking that evolution in a biological sense could not reach. And the reason why we're going to do that is we're gonna invent all kinds of minds, different kinds of thinking because our mind alone is probably not sufficient to completely comprehend the universe. We need other species of thinking, so we're gonna populate the universe as far as we can with other ways of thinking so that collectively we can comprehend the universe. And those other ways of thinking are ways that biological evolution probably couldn't get to itself. So I think that yes, the more kinds of minds there are the better.

STEVEN JOHNSON: I think part of the problem is when you're saying, "Are we gonna be okay?" Kevin is saying, "Absolutely. On the 10,000-year scale, we're gonna be great."

ROBERT: But next year ...

KEVIN KELLY: But what about next Tuesday?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Right. Both are valid concerns.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Life of Brian: Some things in life are bad/They can really make you mad/Other things just make you swear and curse. When you're chewing on life's gristle/Don't grumble, give a whistle/And this'll help things turn out for the best. And always look on the bright side of life/Always look on the light side of life.]

ROBERT: Special thanks to Paul Holdengräber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library in New York City. And of course to Steven Johnson, whose new book is called Where Good Ideas Come From. And Kevin Kelly, his book: What Technology Wants.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thank you for listening.

[LISTENER: Hello. This is Rachel Roukier, a Radiolab listener and supporter in Brooklyn, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks, guys. That just made my week.]

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