If technology is a dissipative structure, bring it on deserves a closer look

Pouring forth, faster and faster, from the hi-tech cauldron are products whose powers exceed even the wildest speculation of yesterday´s science fiction. Smartphones, one million apps and counting, 3D printers, GPS to find and be found, chip implants in body and brain, dark pools of high-speed trading algorithms, self-driving cars, self-learning robots, Internet in your glasses, designer crops, livestock, and athletes. While the knee-jerk response to smart and new is to bring it on, how do we know that backstage is an unseen agenda? An agenda whose means are us, whose ends are not. Of particular concern, as it bears on advancing technology, is a proposal by Eric Schneider and the late James Kay that life is a response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating gradients. Evolving life represents, in their words, “order emerging from disorder in the service of causing even more disorder.” Their claim meshes with 1989 IEEE “Technics, Culture, and Consequences” conference contributor Rod Swenson´s view that “the world is in the order production business” because an ordered system can dissipate existing order more efficiently than helter-skelter falling apart. Examples include Bénard Cells self-organizing to escalate temperature gradient destruction, devastation produced by the massive cyclonic order in a hurricane, the chaos, suffering and death producible by the technical order in weapons, or the more subtle dissipations of technology doing more and more of the work for us. If the “accelerating returns”, as Ray Kurzweil puts it, of hell for leather technical advance represents the leading edge of life as a dissipative structure, as order emerging from disorder in the service of causing even more disorder, are we included in the returns of technical order? Or are we among the recipients of more disorder? This paper takes a closer look.