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Kevin Kelly says technology is alive. And he knows what it wants.

You can think of technology as gadgets, computers, the internet. Kevin Kelly says the most helpful and accurate way to see it is as a living force with a mind of its own. Like any living creature, technology has desires. Understanding those desires is the key to living in harmony with technology. We talk to Kevin Kelly about the ideas in his new book, What Technology Wants.

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Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, the former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was written about technology and the issues surrounding it for numerous publications and written several books. He even consulted on the making of The Matrix. He’s one of the sages of the digital age.

Kelly says that technology behaves like any species in that it seeks greater diversity, greater specification, greater range. It seeks to expand itself and propagate. Think of it as an entirely new kingdom of life form. It’s not going away so we best learn to live in harmony.

And we’ve done it before. We’ve been doing it for centuries. The technology of cooking functions as a de facto external stomach, to prepare foods outside the body without having to swallow them whole and do the sorting on the inside.

Also in this show (and speaking of adapting to technology), there’s a new Star Wars augmented reality game for the iPhone. It’s called Falcon Gunner. To play, you hold up your phone and it’s as if you’re looking through a window, the camera shows you what’s really there. But then the Imperial TIE Fighters come swooping in, across your bed, through your bus, in any environment you’d otherwise be seeing.

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