"A typical supermarket now offers more than 48,000 different items."

Jerry A. Coyne essentially hammers Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Techonology Wants, in today’s Sunday Times Book Review. Coyne is particularly peeved by what he perceives as Kelly tying technological progress to evolutionary determinism and the author’s personal religious beliefs. I’ve always like Kelly a lot, so I’ll make up my own mind when I read the book. But the numbers in this paragraph of the review caught my eye. An excerpt:

“In What Technology Wants, Kelly provides an engaging journey through the history of ‘the technium,’ a term he uses to describe the ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us,’ extending ‘beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions and intellectual creations of all types.’ We learn, for instance, that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, despite their technological limitations, may have worked as little as three to four hours a day. Since then, the technium has grown exponentially: while colonial American households boasted fewer than 100 objects, Kelly’s own home contains, by his reckoning, more than 10,000. As Kelly is a gadget-phile by trade (and an affluent American to boot), this index probably inflates the current predominance of technology and its products, but a thoroughly mundane statistic makes the same point: a typical supermarket now offers more than 48,000 different items.”