What can we say about terrorism, that tentacled creature, that inscrutable threat, whose ubiquity evades vigilance and even punitive measures?

Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks What does technology want? and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

And there are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, sentience, ubiquity and most important, evolvability Those very same things are also present in technology.

And so the general, long term trends of evolution are roughly these five ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said, OK, what are the long term trends in technology?

Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure.

Ericsson estimates that by 2018, 85 of the world s population will have access to mobile broadband coverage via 3G networks, and 50 will have 4G. In this context, the near ubiquity of mobile networks has created a new paradigm for sustainable development, putting technological advances at the forefront of policymaking.

So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor, you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary type cladistic tree.