Business books

"Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation"

By Steven Johnson. Riverhead; $26.95.

"What Technology Wants"

By Kevin Kelly. Viking; $27.95.

Where do good ideas come from? That is the question posed by Steven Johnson, a writer known for the agility with which he makes interdisciplinary analogies, in his latest book. His "natural history of innovation" provides a taxonomy of seven ways in which new ideas can sprout from old ones.

But this is no management text. For each of his seven patterns of innovation, Johnson provides wide-ranging examples from technology, the natural world and culture.

The first of the patterns is "the adjacent possible": the innovations that build logically on previous breakthroughs. In technology, this results in the common phenomenon of several people inventing the same thing at the same time, because it seemed the obvious next step. Similarly, life itself emerged as a cascade of increasing complexity, and the forking paths of evolution allow one innovation to lead to another, such as the semi-lunate carpal bone that made velociraptors more dexterous predators, but subsequently led to the evolution of winged, flying birds. Cultural and social life is also an exploration of the adjacent possible, as one unexpected door opens and then leads to others.

Patterns of innovation, Johnson suggests, are fractal: "they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk."

Kevin Kelly's book is even more ambitious. It is a sweeping theory of technology that presents it not as a series of inventions by humans, but as a living force with its own needs and tendencies. It might sound facile to ask what technology "wants," but Kelly, who was founding editor of Wired magazine, makes a case for the desire of the "technium," as he dubs the ecosystem of technologies, to grow in complexity and colonize new areas, just like life itself.

He argues that just as water "wants" to flow downhill and life tends to fill available ecological niches, technology similarly "wants" to expand and evolve. We have no choice but to embrace it, he says, because we are already symbiotic with it; technology underpins civilization.

Kelly is not alone in his belief that technology is an unstoppable force of nature. A similar position was taken by Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. In a chapter titled "The Unabomber Was Right," Kelly looks in detail at Kaczynski's writings to explain how they start from very similar views about the nature of technology, but arrive at very different conclusions.

The Unabomber was a terrorist who targeted scientists in an effort to derail runaway technological development. Kelly, by contrast, is optimistic that by understanding the nature of technology, mankind is in a better position to benefit from its development and to make sensible choices about which technologies to adopt.

Though some parts of his argument are more convincing than others, and he veers toward New Age-speak at times, his book is consistently provocative and intriguing.