Because Kelly’s theory lacks a solid foundation, his predictions and prescriptions for technology are inevitably somewhat of a letdown. We learn, for instance, that our products will get “faster, cheaper, better,” but we hardly need either biology or sophisticated theory to tell us that. Nor, according to Kelly, need we worry too much about overpopulation, pollution or the depletion of fossil fuels: Kelly assures us that technology will deal with those problems just, I suppose, as biological evolution helped the dinosaurs deal with that meteorite. Indeed, Kelly sees it as our moral duty to promulgate technology, since it increases the choices of our fellow humans. Standing in its way is futile: Kelly gives many instances of ultimately failed attempts to ban technologies like the crossbow (the assault rifle of its time), printing and silk-spinning.

Last week, my computer crashed. Without it, I felt helpless — and foolish. How could I have gotten so dependent on a machine? Why did I feel like I'd just lost a body part?

Because, according to Kevin Kelly, I had.

His provocative new book, What Technology Wants, claims that technology is an extension of the human body — not "of our genes, but of our minds." Everything that humans have thought of and produced over time — which Kelly dubs "the technium" — has followed, shaped and become integrated into human evolution — so much so, in fact, that it's now a part of evolution itself.

As such, Kelly argues, the goal of the technium — its "want," if you will — is to foster progress ... human betterment ... and even a portrait of God.

While Kelly stops short of arguing that a MacBook, an opera or Hammurabi's Code are the equivalent of, say, a live chicken, he comes close. "However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue or flesh," he writes, "but in the intangible organization of energy and information contained in those material forms." Because the technium is all about organizing energy and information, it, too, is an evolving form of life — beholden to the forces of the cosmos. . . .