This is a cross post from Radar:

Kevin Kelly spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit and I ran this interview with him immediately after.

Kevin is a big thinker – focused on the intersection of technology, biology and culture.   His current line of inquiry is around “What Technology Wants.”   That is,  taking technology’s point of view as a method to get a deeper understanding of what technology means in modern life, our relationship to it, and where it is headed.

To Paraphrase Kevin: We are coming into a new territory where the dimensions and possibilities for collaboration have just begun to be explored.  As far as we have come in the roughly 6.500 days since the advent of the Worldwide Web – we are in the early stages of a Cambrian explosion in terms of how social groups interact and get things done.   eBay (one way that auctions work), Wikipedia (one way we collectivize formal knowledge gathering), Digg (one means of using collaborative filtering to delivers news) etc. are all just  beginning to show the methods and means by which we produce information and meaning in a social context.

This interview covers:

• The impact of the web on our recent elections
• The rich new possibilities for interaction and collaboration afforded by the web
• The Wisdom of the Crowds vs. the Stupidity of the Mob
• Technology is the 7th Kingdom of Life… looking into “what technology wants”

This last section (at around 12 minutes) is the deepest and most provocative. Kevin assumes the point of view of technology to assess its needs and wants and this is line of inquiry that leads to some surprising conclusions.

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