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Exploring the Technium
Contributors: 
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.
Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work). Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc. and the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc.
Part 1: Technology, Evolution, and God
Wired magazine’s own “Senior Maverick” talks with Ken Wilber about some of the ideas behind Kevin’s blog The Technium, exploring the various ways humanity has defined and redefined itself through the interface of science, technology, culture, and consciousness. Kevin shares some of his own thoughts about the role of spirituality in the 21st century, going into considerable depth around his own spiritual awakening several decades ago.
In the second installation of the dialogue, Kevin and Ken discuss the nature of evolutionary emergence—the mysterious process by which new wholes manifest in the universe, each greater than the sum of their parts. They speak about humanity’s role in this evolutionary process, especially in the creation of new types of intelligences: living, breathing, thinking machines.
Part 3: The Great Google in the Sky
In part three they discuss the impact the inevitable rise of spiritual machines will have upon humanity in the decades to come. Ken reads aloud from Kevin Kelly’s blog, titled “Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by the Year 2100?” They then break the question down into three pieces, taking a closer look at some of the presuppositions that lie at the core of the inquiry: what is the definition of “humanity”? What is the definition of “robots”? And what is the definition of “spiritual”?
In the final installation, Kevin and Ken continue to explore the mystery of “up-creation”—the natural evolutionary tilt of the universe toward greater and greater wholeness, by which new forms and new complexities emerge from the old. They discuss a chapter from Kevin's groundbreaking book Out of Control, titled "The Nine Laws of God," taking a closer look at some of the basic rules needed to get a universe going.