The latest edition of Brockman et. al.’s Edge has an interview with Kevin Kelly about “The Technium,” his work in progress about “what technology wants”:

Specific technologies are like individuals, or species, and the society or ecosystem of these individuals is the technium. I’m especially interested in how the technium works at the system level — how it operates as an ecology of technological species, as a complex web of interacting agents each with their own biases and tendencies.

The emergent system of the technium — what we often mean by “Technology” with a capital T — has its own inherent agenda and urges, as does any large complex system, indeed, as does life itself. That is, an individual technological organism has one kind of response, but in an ecology comprised of co-evolving species of technology we find an elevated entity — the technium — that behaves very differently from an individual species. The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself. That’s the part that is scary and interesting.

I tend to think of the technium like a child of humanity. Our job will be to train the technium, to imbue it with certain principles because, at a certain level and at a certain age, it will basically become much more autonomous than it is now. It will leave us like a teenager who goes on to live alone: although he or she will continue to interact with us and will always be part of us, we have to let it go.

We can’t raise a successful human by remaining in complete control as parents. We have to train our children well — bury within them a strong conscience with deep values that can guide them to do the right thing in situations we had not foreseen or even imagined. We need to do the same with the technium and our technologies. In the same sense we need to embed our values into the technological superorganism so that these heuristics become guiding factors. As more autonomy is given and won by the technium, it will then be able to do the right thing.

In order to do that there are a few of problems that need to be addressed.