The Technium: Everything That Doesn’t Work Yet

Alan Kay, a brilliant polymath who has worked at Atari, Xerox, Apple, and Disney, came up with as good a definition of technology as I’ve heard. “Technology,” Kay says, “is anything that was invented after you were born.” By that clever reckoning, automobiles, refrigerators, transistors, and nylon are not technologies in our eyes — just plain old stuff. But they were once technologies for my grandfather. By the same logic, CDs, the web, Mylar, cell phones, and GPS are authentic technologies for me – but not my kids! They’ll have their own technologies, invented in the last five minutes.

Danny Hillis, another polymath who used to work with Alan Kay, refined Kay’s definition a bit further in the 1990s, and a bit more usefully. “Technology,” Hillis says, “is everything that doesn’t work yet.” Buried in this sly definition is the insight that successful inventions disappear from our awareness. Electric motors were once technology – they were new and did not work well. As they evolved, they seem to disappear, even though they proliferated and were embedded by the scores into our homes and offices. They work perfectly, silently, unminded, so they no longer register as “technology.”

The satirist and novelist Douglas Adams further evolved Hillis and Kay’s definitions by suggesting a natural lifecycle for technologies. In a short essay in 1999 he proposed the world works like this:

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