What Technology Doesn't Want

Technology evolves naturally without persuasion. Technologies as tools evolve to make something easier, not necessarily to industrialize a process. If a new idea for a tool is seen as being useful, it will scale naturally. Making small variations of an existing design, only for the sake of doing it, is a function of human creativity, but is less useful compared to the first iteration of a design or tool that was completely useful. If Ape #1 makes a tool to create more edible food to survive, Ape #2's design variations won't necessarily create more food security, even though it might promote it as such. The idea that technologies naturally create 'offspring' isn't necessarily a Universal. Even if it was true, nature might have natural constraints on growth. I like Kevin Kelly's idea of the Technium--that the internet is a big copy machine, but ultimately you have too many copies making more copies when the first tool worked just fine. The counterpoint to this is that if you stanch creativity, even if the product is a copy, it may be a lost opportunity to discover something new along the way. Even then, all the failed experiments create mountains of flotsam and jetsam. Then what you need are tools to start over.