What Technology Wants (19 page)

Viewed from afar, from the distance of billions of years, it seems as if evolution wanted to create certain designs, in the way Richard Dawkins suggests that life wants to produce eyeballs, since it keeps repeating this invention. There is a tilt to evolution's seemingly chaotic churning that rediscovers the same forms and keeps arriving at the same solutions. It is almost as if life has an imperative. It “wants” to materialize certain patterns. Even the physical world seems biased in that direction.

There are many indications that our neighborhood of the universe is biased toward the appearance of life. Our planet is just close enough to the sun to be warm but far enough away to not burn. Earth has a large nearby moon that slows down its rotation to lengthen the day and to stabilize it over the long term. Earth shares the sun with Jupiter, which acts as a comet magnet. The ice of those captured comets may also have given Earth its oceans. Earth has a magnetic core, which generates a cosmic ray shield. It has the appropriate level of gravity to retain water and oxygen. It has a thin crust, which enables the churn of plate tectonics. Each of these variables seems to sit in a Goldilocks zone of not too little and not too much. Recent research suggests that there's a Goldilocks zone in the galaxy as well. Too close to the center of the galaxy and a planet is bombarded by constant, lethal cosmic radiation; too far from the center and when the planetary mass condenses from star dust it will be lacking the heavy elements that are needed for life. Our solar system is smack in the middle of this just-right zone. Such a list can quickly get out of hand to include every aspect of life on Earth. It's all perfect! The catalog soon resembles one of those phony “Help Wanted” ads engineered to stealthily fit only one favored predetermined person.

Some of these Goldilocks factors will turn out to be simply coincidental, but their number and deep-rootness, hint, in Paul Davies's phrase, that “the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life.” In this view, “life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution, with its final from predetermined by the interatomic forces.” Cyril Ponnamperuma, an early pioneer in biogenesis (the study of the origin of life), believed “there are inherent properties in the atoms and molecules which seem to direct the synthesis” toward life. Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman believes his exhaustive computer simulations of prebiotic networks demonstrate that when conditions are right, the emergence of life is inevitable. Our existence here, he says, is a case of “not we the accidental but we the expected.” Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, “The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.”

Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in biochemistry, goes even further. He believes life is a cosmic imperative. He writes in his book
Vital Dust:
“Life is the product of deterministic forces. Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. . . . Life and mind emerge not as the result of freakish accidents, but as natural manifestations of matter, written into the fabric of the universe.”

If life is inevitable, why not fishes? If fishes are inevitable, why not mind? If mind, why not the internet? Simon Conway Morris speculates that “what was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable.”

One way to test the cosmic imperative is to simply rerun the tape of life. Gould called rewinding the tape of life the great “undoable” experiment, but he was wrong: It turns out you can rewind life.

The new tools of sequencing and genetic cloning make replaying evolution possible. You take a simple bacteria (
E. coli
), select an individual, and make dozens of identical clones of that one particular bug. Genetically sequence the genotype of one. Put each remaining clone into an identical incubation chamber, with identical settings and inputs. Let the cloned bacteria multiply freely in parallel pots. Let them breed for 40,000 generations. At each 1,000-generation milestone, take a few out, freeze them for a snapshot, and sequence their evolved genomes. Compare the parallel evolved genotypes across all the pots. You can rerun the tape of evolution at any time along the way by retrieving a frozen snapshot specimen and redeploying the bug in another identical chamber.

Richard Lenski, at Michigan State University, has been performing this very experiment in his lab. What he has found is that, in general, multiple runs of evolution produced similar traits in the phenotype—the outward body of the bacteria. Changes in the genotype occurred in roughly the same places, though the exact coding was often different. This suggests a convergence of broad form with details left to chance. Lenski is not the only scientist doing experiments like this. Others' experiments show similar results from parallel evolution: Instead of getting novelty each time, you get what one scientific paper calls “the convergence of multiple evolving lines on similar phenotypes.” As geneticist Sean Carroll concludes, “Evolution can and does repeat itself at the levels of structures and patterns, as well as of individual genes. . . . This repetition overthrows the notion that if we rewound and replayed this history of life, all outcomes would be different.” We can rewind the tape of life, and when we do in a constant environment, it often turns out roughly the same.

These experiments suggest that a trajectory shoots through evolution and this long path makes some improbable forms inevitable. That paradox of improbable inevitabilities needs a bit of explanation.

The incredible complexity of life disguises its singularity. There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. Despite life's magnificent diversity, it is chiefly repeating, billions of billions of times, solutions that worked before. Compared to all possible arrangements of matter and energy in the universe, life's solutions are few. Because field biologists discover another organism on Earth every day that is new to us, we have reason to marvel at the inventiveness and exuberance of nature. Yet compared to what our brains could imagine, the diversity of life on Earth occupies a very small corner. Our alternative imaginary universes are full of creatures far more diverse, creative, and “out there” than the life here. But most of our imaginary creatures would never work because they would be full of physical contradictions. The world of the actual-possible is much smaller than it first appears.

The particular physical arrangements of matter, energy, and information that produce the ingenious molecules of rhodopsin or chlorophyll or DNA or the human mind are so scarce in the space of all possible “could be” things that they are statistically improbable almost to the point of being impossible. Every organism (and artifact) is a wholly improbable arrangement of its constituent atoms. Yet within the long chain of reproducing self-organization and restless evolution, these forms become highly probable, and even inevitable, because there are only a few ways such open-ended ingenuity can actually work in the real world; therefore, evolution must work through them. In this way, life is an inevitable improbability. And most of life's archetypal forms and stages are also inevitable improbabilities, or, we might say, improbable inevitabilities.

This means that something like a human mind is also the improbable inevitability of evolution. Rewind the tape of life and it would (on another planet or in a parallel time) produce a mind again. When Stephen Jay Gould claimed that “
Homo sapiens
is an entity, not a tendency,” he got it precisely, but elegantly, backward. If we rerun his sentence again, but this time from back to front, I can't think of a more succinct phrase that sums up evolution's message better than this:

Humanity is a process. Always was, always will be. Every living organism is on its way to becoming. And the human organism even more so, because among all living beings (that we know about) we are the most open-ended. We have just started our evolution as
Homo sapiens
. As both parent and child of the technium—evolution accelerated—we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said.

We can likewise say: The technium is a tendency, not an entity. The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand process than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. So if the technium has a direction, where is it pointed? If the greater forms of technologies are inevitable, what is next?

In the following chapters I show how innate tendencies in the technium converge upon recurring forms, just like biological evolution. This leads to inevitable inventions. And further, these self-generated biases also create a degree of autonomy, much like the autonomy earned by living creatures. And finally, this naturally emergent autonomy in technological systems also creates a suite of “wants.” By following the long-term trends in evolution we can show what technology wants.

7

In 2009, the world celebrated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and honored his theory's impact upon our science and culture. Overlooked in the celebrations was Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the same theory of evolution, at approximately the same time, 150 years ago. Weirdly, both Wallace and Darwin found the theory of natural selection after reading the same book on population growth by Thomas Malthus. Darwin did not publish his revelation until provoked by Wallace's parallel discovery. Had Darwin died at sea on his famous voyage (a not uncommon fate at that time) or been killed by one of his many ailments during his studious years in London, we would be celebrating the birthday of Wallace as the sole genius behind the theory. Wallace was a naturalist living in Southeast Asia, and he endured many serious illnesses as well. Indeed, he was suffering a debilitating jungle fever during the time he was reading Malthus. If poor Wallace, too, had succumbed to his Indonesian infection, and Darwin had died, it is clear from other naturalists' notebooks that someone else would have arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection, even if they never read Malthus. Some think Malthus himself was close to recognizing the idea. None of them would have written up the theory in the same way, or used the same arguments, or cited the same evidence, but one way or another today we would be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the mechanics of natural evolution.

What seems to be an odd coincidence is repeated many times in technical invention as well as scientific discovery. Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray both applied to patent the telephone on the same day, February 14, 1876. This improbable simultaneity (Gray applied three hours before Bell) led to mutual accusations of espionage, plagiarism, bribery, and fraud. Gray was ill advised by his patent attorney to drop his claim for priority because the telephone “was not worth serious attention.” But whether the winning inventor's dynasty became Ma Bell or Ma Gray, either way we would have telephone lines strung across our countryside, because while Bell got the master patent, at least three other tinkerers besides Gray had made working models of phones years earlier. In fact, Antonio Meucci had patented his “teletrofono” more than a decade earlier, in 1860, using the same principles as Bell and Gray, but because of his poor English, poverty, and lack of business acumen, he was unable to renew his patent in 1874. And not far behind them all was the inimitable Thomas Edison, who inexplicably didn't win the telephone race but did invent the microphone for it the next year.

Park Benjamin, author of
The Age of Electricity,
observed in 1901 that “not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honor of its origin has been claimed by more than one person.” Dig deep enough in the history of any type of discovery in any field and you'll find more than one claimant for the first priority. In fact, you are likely to find
many
parents for each novelty. Sunspots were first discovered not by two but by four separate observers, including Galileo, in the same year, 1611. We know of six different inventors of the thermometer, and three of the hypodermic needle. Edward Jenner was preceded by four other scientists who all independently discovered the efficacy of vaccinations. Adrenaline was “first” isolated four times. Three different geniuses discovered (or invented) decimal fractions. The electric telegraph was reinvented by Joseph Henry, Samuel Morse, William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Karl Steinheil. The Frenchman Louis Daguerre is famous for inventing photography, but three others (Nicephore Niepce, Hercules Florence, and William Henry Fox Talbot) also independently came upon the same process. The invention of logarithms is usually credited to two mathematicians, John Napier and Henry Briggs, but actually a third one, Joost Burgi, invented them three years earlier. Several inventors in both England and America simultaneously came up with the typewriter. The existence of the eighth planet, Neptune, was independently predicted by two scientists in the same year, 1846. The liquefaction of oxygen, the electrolysis of aluminum, and the stereochemistry of carbon, for just three examples in chemistry, were each independently discovered by more than one person, and in each case the simultaneous discoveries occurred within a month or so.

Columbia University sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas combed through scientists' biographies, correspondence, and notebooks to collect all the parallel discoveries and inventions they could find between 1420 and 1901. They write, “The steamboat is claimed as the ‘exclusive' discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington. At least six different men, Davidson, Jacobi, Lilly, Davenport, Page and Hall, claim to have made independently the application of electricity to the railroad. Given the railroad and electric motors, is not the electric railroad inevitable?”