What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired, argues that technology as a whole behaves less like a pile of wires and metal than like a living, evolving organism with unconscious needs and tendencies of its own. He calls this global, interconnected system the technium and tries to look at the world through its eyes to learn what it wants. Kelly traces technology's long course through examples from the past, then follows a dozen trajectories into the near future, and draws practical lessons about preparing for coming technologies and steering them toward their best roles. Critics faulted the 2010 book for a teleological view of evolution, and Jerry Coyne called its outlook neo-mystical progressivism.

Seth Godin, in his winter 2024 book list, said it reads as more prescient now than it did a decade earlier and urged people to read it.