What does technology want?

What should progress look like? Is it around GDP? Equality? Ending poverty? Justice?

It's clear that the compass points toward technology. At least in this moment, AI could be the thing that solves difficult, interesting problems.

The natural bias is to ask, "What do we get out of this technology?" And we ask it constantly: in boardrooms, in policy hearings, in the endless coverage of every new version release. We measure AI by what it produces, what it replaces, and what it returns. The question seems obvious because we've never been taught to ask anything else.

But that framing has a cost. When we only ask what we get, we stop noticing what technology is doing—on its own terms, in its own direction, whether we're paying attention or not. How is it making life both complex and efficient, both diverse and specialized, and how it is ubiquitous.

(One only needs to look at social media, email, and pdfs/spreadsheets to see.)

Rarely do we stop to ask: "What does technology want?"

Kevin Kelly was the first, I’m aware of, to put it that way, back in 2010. It is more urgent now.

KK argues that technology does not possess conscious desire but rather structural biases. Like how a plant instinctively grows toward light.

As that drift becomes more apparent (tomorrow is today), it can give us a clue on what could happen next as these big questions begin to shake out.

It makes me wonder if this is the moment we look back on and see the biases of technology and humans finally collide. Technology wants complexity. We want meaning. These are not the same thing. So, who is going to mediate the gap?