Kevin Kelley's work in progress, The Technium, is getting more interesting.

I claim that technology has its own agenda. What is the evidence that technology as a whole, or the technium as I call it, is autonomous? Because without autonomy, one could argue, how can something have its own agenda? I have three parts to my answer. . .

First, I believe that a system can have an agenda even when it depends upon another system to remain viable. . .

Second, technology is still young. The concept of “technology” was not invented until 1829, and most of what we call technology just arrived on earth this century. We consider a two-year old baby to be alive and “autonomous” even though it is dependent on its parents to remain alive. . .

Thirdly, eventually technology will far more autonomous than it is today. Right now not only are we the parents of the technium, we are also the sex organs of technology. From technology’s view, we are the mysterious walking-around glands that reproduce them. . .

Technology cannot reproduce itself without our help at the moment, but it is expanding, growing more complex, and smarter. Most importantly, the technium is evolving faster every day. While it depends on us, we are increasingly dependent on it. Like any child, it has its demands. So far, humanity as a whole is in denial that it even has a child.

Kelly expands on each of the three parts to his answer to his own question, giving examples and supportive detail.

Biology begat culture and culture begat technology. It's true in a way that technological development is accelerating and that there is a feedback loop - the more tech we have the more we are able to have - though I find the begat analogy less than useful. And I'm not clear that this isn't just an aspect of culture. Humans are hosts for cultural ideas that may or may not be beneficial to the hosts, which has been likened to the way that genes can be seen as using humans to replicate themselves. Genes and ideas in this view have their own agendas that are not identical to those of their hosts, and those hosts are in some ways unwitting dupes in thrall to them.

Rather than a Technium as Kelley calls it, it may be more useful to stick with culture as the description, especially if you question his assertion that "The concept of “technology” was not invented until 1829, and most of what we call technology just arrived on earth this century." An argument that technology is much older - and pre-human as well as non-human too - encompasses tools and agriculture from millennia ago. Pre-industrial bio-engineers had some powerful technologies and made great changes to the planet. Consider the vast tracts of Amazonian Terra Preta as an example.

But, the book isn't finished, and I haven't read all the parts that are up already, so I'll try to stay open to his arguments for a while.

Update:

More technium.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke made his living sketching out the plausible consequences of future inventions. He once said that imagining the automobile was very easy because everyone could imagine a horseless carriage. What was hard – and what he saw as the job of science fiction writers – was to imagine the consequences of everyone having a car – the vast parking lots and drive-thru services that were birthed by an auto-centered life.

This is silly. The consequences of everyone having a car are the same as everyone having a horse - with or without a cart or carriage. You have to park them (hitching posts and stables), fuel them up (oats & hay), deal with their exhaust (road apples) and deal with maintenance and break downs (horse shoes, broken legs, sick and tired, old etc.).

Atomic fission was another unexpected invention. Imagine telling someone, even a scientist up to 1939, that you could unleash the energy stored in a ten thousand tons of coal by banging two pieces of special metal together.

H.G. Wells did just that in his novel The World Set Free which was published in 1914. In fact, it inspired Leo Szilard "to seriously examine the science behind the creation of nuclear weapons. As a scientist, he was the first person to conceive of a device that, using a nuclear chain reaction as fuel, could be used as a bomb." He patented the concept of the chain reaction in 1934, two years after reading Wells' book

I think what makes an invention “expected” is if it has a good analogy to some commonplace activity or fantasy that we can visualize right now. Danny Hillis, the inventor of the hard-to-imagine parallel super-computer, first brought to my attention how important it was to be able to visualize – with a picture in our mind – a future innovation. Radar, black holes, atomic power, quantum computers all operated with invisible forces that make seeing them hard.

If true, this insight would point to a prediction: that the most unexpected inventions in the future will be based on forces that are still invisible now (quantum, atomic, radio), or wholly new forces that are invisible to the common person. On the other hand inventions that rely on functions we can visualize – like swallowing a pill – won’t surprise us. There’s almost nothing that a pill can do, including making us invisible, that would surprise us. Conversely, there is probably nothing that quantum computation will do that won’t perplex us.

I don't buy it. Parallel computing is a direct analog of pack behavior. Humans have always done this. A ready example was available to any worker or visitor to large offices - or even a phone company - that had many clerks or operators, each doing a portion of a larger task. Other examples abound.

I think Kelley speaks only for a certain type of rigid minded and uncreative person. They may well be in the majority - having had the free-thinking beat out of them as children - and so in that sense he may be correct about the expectations of main-stream humanity. But there are still many other less rigid humans, and as population grows their numbers increase even though their percentage of the whole remains the same or even decreases.

Maybe KK wasn't properly dosed when he wrote this, but it isn't clear if it was not enough or too much.