Kevin Kelly At TED: What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly just published a new book called What Technology Wants. I have been planning to buy it ever since I heard he was writing another book but after Seth Godin called it The Book Of The Year and said that “if there’s justice it will win the Pulitzer prize,” I just couldn’t wait and ordered it online.

In the meantime, I decided to watch and post some of the most interesting TED videos that Kelly did during the last several years. The 3 videos bellow were shot in 2 year intervals (from 2006 to 2010) and represent a chronological progression of Kevin’s quest to answer the titular question of his book. I recommend you watch them in order or, if you really don’t have the time, skip to the very last one.

Kevin Kelly’s Profile on TED:

Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change — bad? good? too slow? too bold? — than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn’t stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.

In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. One such project is the Rosetta Project, which will catalogue more than 1,000 languages on a disks to be placed nearby the 10,000 Year Clock. Kelly’s newest book What Technology Wants asks what appears to be his life’s core question: “How should I think about new technology when it comes along?”

Related articles

• New book Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants (kk.org)
• Kevin Kelly and Steve Johnson on Where Ideas Come From (wired.com)