Getting Better All the Time?
A review by David E. Nye
Whether it's intended to be so or not, the title of Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants is a provocation to most historians of technology, who would reply almost unanimously that technology has no wants or desires. Each tool or machine has latent uses, but each is only an inert object until human beings decide whether and how to use it. In contrast, Kelly talks about technology as a composite whole that emerged before human beings existed and that facilitated their rapid domination of the planet. For him, technology has intentions, and it is radically accelerating evolution. Kelly has been thinking about technology for most of his life, first as a backpacker wandering the Third World, later as one of the pioneers of what became the Internet, and finally as one of the founders and editors of Wired magazine. He overcame his early suspicion of Western technology largely as a result of his encounter with interactive computer technologies. He was one of several in the counterculture to...
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Previously Reviewed by American Scientist
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Flatland
by Edwin A. Abbott
The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage
by Jamie Benidickson
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
by Brian Boyd
Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb
by David C. Cassidy
The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor
by Colin Tudge and Josh Young
Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (09 Edition)
by Adrian Desmond
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
by Frans de Waal
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
by Paul N. Edwards
Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (UK Edition)
by Graham Farmelo
A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering in a New Era of Discovery
by Ann K. Finkbeiner
What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect
by James R. Flynn
A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe
by Marcelo Gleiser
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
by Alison Gopnik
Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly
by Michael D. Gordin
Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
by Fredrik (edt) Hiebert
Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction
by Susan Hough
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
What Darwin Got Wrong
by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
by Steven Johnson
The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture
by Evelyn Fox Keller
What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Objectivity
by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison
The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania (Origins of Human Behavior and Culture)
by Frank Marlowe
Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Animals, History, Culture)
by Erika Lorraine Milam
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
by Greg Milner
Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females
by Martin N. Muller
Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture
by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber
When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects
by Adriana Petryna
The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future
by Andrew Pickering
Nurtureshock: New Thinking about Children
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (MacMillan Science)
by Eugenie Samuel Reich
The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought
by Robert J. Richards
Image and Reality: Kekul, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination (Synthesis)
by Alan J. Rocke
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
by Steven Shapin
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years
by Vaclav Smil
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
by Alan Sokal
Structure and Randomness: Pages from Year One of a Mathematical Blog
by Terence Tao
The Art and Politics of Science
by Harold Varmus
Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life
by Warren Allmon and Robert Ross and Patricia Kelley
Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
by Sharon Waxman
Nuclear Family Vacation (08 Edition)
by Weinberger
The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies
by Nicolas Wey-Gomez
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
by Donald Worster
The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
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