Technological determinism

Technium, amistics, the robo-omega-point etc

2018-12-17 — 2025-02-17

Wherein technological change is presented as steered by tools already forged, and energy flows and urban-scaling data are adduced as concrete measures, while a personal notebook is reported lost.

adaptive
collective knowledge
economics
evolution
game theory
innovation
intellectual property
making things
networks
policy
sociology
spatial
technology
the rather superior sort of city
Figure 1

Big history with particular reference to technological innovations determining stuff. Marxists have materialist dialectic, energetics folks think the course of history is determined by energy flows, and technological determinists think it’s about the tools we make.

See also singularity, AI without computers.

I used to have a notebook about the Technium (Kelly 2010). But I accidentally deleted it. Then I heard this excellent podcast: Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway

1 Purely data driven

Extrapolate a curve and see technological singularities:

2 Incoming

3 References

Best, and Kellner. 1999. “Kevin Kelly’s Complexity Theory: The Politics and Ideology of Self-Organizing Systems.” Organization & Environment.
Bettencourt, and West. 2010. “A Unified Theory of Urban Living.” Nature.
Chalmers. 2016. “The Singularity.” In Science Fiction and Philosophy.
Dafoe. 2015. “On Technological Determinism: A Typology, Scope Conditions, and a Mechanism.” Science, Technology, & Human Values.
Douglas, and Verstyuk. 2025. “Progress in Artificial Intelligence and Its Determinants.”
Ellul. 2021. The Technological Society.
Harari. 2018. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Johansen, and Sornette. 2001. “Finite-Time Singularity in the Dynamics of the World Population, Economic and Financial Indices.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications.
Kelly. 2010. What Technology Wants.
Lee. 2020a. “Coevolution.” In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines.
———. 2020b. The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines.
Morris. 2015. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Edited by Stephen Macedo.
Mumford. 1967. The myth of the machine.
———. 1970. The myth of the machine: Technics and human development.
Omohundro. 2008. “The Basic AI Drives.” In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference.
Scott. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
Winner. 2001. Autonomous technology: technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought.
Wong, and Bartlett. 2022. “Asymptotic Burnout and Homeostatic Awakening: A Possible Solution to the Fermi Paradox?” Journal of The Royal Society Interface.
Wright. 2001. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.