This episode of "Shots of Awe" is brought you
Kevin Kelly used to say humans are the sex organs
And what he meant by that was that technology was a living
organism that was using us to extend
its reproductive capacity, similar to the way
those pollen flowers use bees in order to spread their seeds.
The history of technology highlights
what's known as bootstrapping.
Essentially, we use one technology
And then we use the next technology
to build the next technology, and so on and so forth,
until what we have is a telescoping
nature of evolutionary change in which the nature of change
And so what we have really to define the human story
is what's known as transforming and transcending.
We use these technological scaffolding
to build new capabilities, bring them
into our cognitive arsenal, and then create
new possibility spaces for ourselves.
Probing the adjacent possible, we remix what is.
And we create virtual models, and we
actualize those new virtual models into existence.
Essentially, our mastery of technology
has given us new construction kits for our reality.