Half of the TEDx visitors adores Kevin Kelly, the other half doesn’t know him. Kelly is one of the biggest thinkers in the world. He locked himself up for two years to work on his magnum opus ‘The Technium’, and presented his work for the first time at TEDxAmsterdam.
What does technology means in our lives? That’s the question Kelly explores. What’s its significance? What’s its role in the long history? Technology is a relatively new term. Its first modern use was in 1829, when a professor used it to give a course about ,new stuff” a name. It was only in 1952 when an American president first used the phrase in his State of the Union.
In a world without technology we would be defenseless. We wouldn’t live really long. The wolves would get us, so to speak. Even though the early hunters used tools, people had a short life. They didn’t become older than 30. Yet their 3 to 6 hours a day for food gathering with technology already affected the planet on a global scale. Human beings eliminated animals, like mammoths, controlled the planet and even caused climate change. Mind you, this was all thousands of years ago.
This shows that technology is the most powerful force in the world. It lead to our greatest invention so far: humanity. Just like we’ve domesticated dogs, we’ve domesticated ourselves. So if Kelly had to come up with a working definition, it would be:
Technology is anything useful invented by the mind.
Kelly ended his talk with a great metaphor. A king from Medieval times had all the money in the world, controlled the people, and lived in castles. Yet an Indian riskja rider from modern times has more possibilities than him now. That’s what you call progress.
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