Posted on Technium on July 10, 2009 by Kevin Kelly

This is a wonderful essay, I strongly suggest anybody interested in the cross breed of techno-philosophy. Kevin Kelly is a brilliant scholar, scientist and a writer. I find his articles both insightful, enlightening and technically compelling.

"... So was the picture phone inevitable? There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented.

The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

The picture phone was imagined in sufficient detail a number of times, in different eras and different economic regimes. It really wanted to happen. One artist sketched out a fantasy of it in 1878, only two years after the telephone was patented. A series of working prototypes were demoed by the German post office in 1938. Commercial versions were installed in phone booths in New York City after the 1964 World's Fair, but AT&T canceled the product ten years later due to lack of interest. At its peak the Picturephone had only 500 or so paid subscribers, even though nearly everyone in New York recognized the vision. One could argue that rather than being inevitable progress, this was an invention battling its own inevitable bypass.

Yet today, it is back. Perhaps it is more inevitable over a 50-year span. Maybe it was too early back then, and the necessary supporting technology absent and social dynamics not ripe. In this respect the repeated earlier tries can be taken as evidence of its inevitability, its relentless urge to be born. And perhaps it is still being born. There may be other innovations yet to be invented that could make the videophone more common. Such needed innovations as: ways to direct the gaze of the speaker into your eyes instead of towards the off-center camera, or have the screen switch gazes among multiple parties in the conversation.

We can see both arguments for the picture phone: a) that it had to happen, or b) that it did not have to happen, and it still may not really happen beyond the minor, occasional use on Skype. So does any technology lurch forward on its own inertia as "a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow", in the words of technology critic Langdon Winner, or do we have clear free-will choice in the sequence of technological change, a stance that makes us (individually or corporately) responsible for each step?

I'd like to suggest an analogy:

Who you are is determined in part by your genes. Every single day scientists identify new genes that code for a particular trait in humans, revealing the ways in which inherited "software" drives your body and brain. We now know that behaviors such as addictions, ambition, risk-taking, shyness and many others have strong genetic components. At the same time, "who you are" is clearly determined by your environment and upbringing. Every day science uncovers more evidence of the ways in which our family, peers, and cultural background shape our being. The strength of what others believe about us is enormous. And more recently we have increasing proof that

Lastly, who you are in the richest sense of the word — your character, your spirit, what you do with your life — is determined by what you choose. An awful lot of the shape of your life is given to you and is beyond your control, but your freedom to choose within those givens is huge and significant. The course of your life within the constraints of your genes and environment is up to you. You decide whether to speak the truth at any trial, even if you have a genetic or familial propensity to lie. You decide whether or not to risk befriending a stranger, no matter your genetic or cultural bias. You decide beyond your inherent tendencies or conditioning. Your freedom is far from total. It is not your choice alone whether to be the fastest runner in the world (your genetics and upbringing play a large role) but you can choose to be faster than you have been. Your inheritance and education at home and school set the outer boundaries of how smart, or generous, or sneaky you can be, but you choose whether you will smarter, more generous and sneakier today than yesterday. You may inhabit a body and brain that wants to be lazy, or sloppy, or imaginative, but you choose to what degree those qualities progress (even if you aren't inherently decisive).

Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.

It is the same with technology. The technium is in some part preordained by the inherent nature of technology itself. Just as our genes drive the inevitable unfolding of human development, starting from a fertilized egg, proceeding to an embryo, then fetus, to an infant, a toddler, kid, and teenager, so too the largest trends of technology unroll in developmental stages.

In our lives we have no choice about becoming teenagers. The strange hormones will flow, and our bodies and minds must morph. Civilizations follow a similar developmental pathway as well, although its outlines are less certain because we have witnessed a sample of one. But we can discern a necessary ordering: a society must control fire first, then metalworking before electricity, and electricity before global communications. We might disagree on what exactly is sequenced, but a sequence there is.

At the same time, history matters. Technological systems gain their own momentum, and become so complex and self-aggregating that they form an environment for other technologies. The infrastructure built to support the gasoline automobile is so extensive that over a century of expansion it now affects technologies outside of transportation. For instance, the invention of air-conditioning plus the highway system encouraged sub-tropical suburbs. The invention of cheap refrigerated air altered the landscape of the American south and southwest. If air-conditioning had been implemented in a non-auto society, its pattern of consequences would be different even though air cooling systems contain their own technological momentum and inherencies. So every new development in the technium is contingent upon the historical antecedents of previous technologies. In biology this effect is called co-evolution, and it means that the "environment" for one species is the ecosystem of all the other species it interacts with, all of them in flux. For example prey and predator evolve each other in a never-ending arms race, host and parasite become one duet as they try to outbest each other, and an ecosystem will adapt to the moving target of a new species adapting to it ... "

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