Technologist Kevin Kelly asks “What does technology want?” and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

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. Today Kelly is at work on a book that asks what appears to be his life’s core question: “How should I think about new technology when it comes along?”

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• Bill Joy’s “What I’m worried about, what I’m excited about” talk at TED

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This entry was tagged as innovation, Kevin Kelly, New York Times, technologist, technology, TED conference, Wall Street Journal, Wired