The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations that moving images are undergoing. These two and many other factors of remixing apply to all newly digitized media, such as virtual reality, music, radio, presentations, and so on.

In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

A much more advanced VR experience might be like the world Neo confronts in the movie The Matrix. Even as Neo runs, leaps, and battles a hundred clones in a computerized world, it feels totally real to him. Maybe even hyperreal—realer than real. His vision, hearing, and touch are hijacked by the synthetic world so completely that he cannot detect its artificiality. A yet even more advanced mode of VR is the holodeck on Star Trek. There, holographic projections of objects and people are so real in fiction they are solid to the touch. A simulated environment that you can enter at will is a recurring science fiction dream that is long overdue.

You may have seen this coming, but the only way to get closer than wearables over our skin is to go under our skin. Jack into our heads. Directly connect the computer to the brain. Surgical brain implants really do work for the blind, the deaf, and the paralyzed, enabling the handicapped to interact with technology using only their minds. One experimental brain jack allowed a quadriplegic woman to use her mind to control a robotic arm to pick up a coffee bottle and bring it to her lips so she could drink from it.

In the coming decades we’ll keep expanding what we interact with. The expansion follows three thrusts. 1. More senses We will keep adding new sensors and senses to the things we make. Of course, everything will get eyes (vision is almost free), and hearing, but one by one we can add superhuman senses such as GPS location sensing, heat detection, X-ray vision, diverse molecule sensitivity, or smell. These permit our creations to respond to us, to interact with us, and to adapt themselves to our uses. Interactivity, by definition, is two way, so this sensing elevates our interactions with technology. 2. More intimacy The zone of interaction will continue to march closer to us. Technology will get closer to us than a watch and pocket phone. Interacting will be more intimate. It will always be on, everywhere. Intimate technology is a wide-open frontier. We think technology has saturated our private space, but we will look back in 20 years and realize it was still far away in 2016. 3. More immersion Maximum interaction demands that we leap into the technology itself. That’s what VR allows us to do. Computation so close that we are inside it. From within a technologically created world, we interact with each other in new ways (virtual reality) or interact with the physical world in a new way (augmented reality). Technology becomes a second skin.

The first technological platform to disrupt a society within the lifespan of a human individual was personal computers. Mobile phones were the second platform, and they revolutionized everything in only a few decades. The next disrupting platform—now arriving—is VR. Here is how a day plugged into virtual and augmented realities may unfold in the very near future.

verisimilitude.

Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.

to reveal personal information to it to be treated personally. There is a one-to-one correspondence between personalization and transparency. Greater personalization requires greater transparency. Absolute personalization (vanity) requires absolute transparency (no privacy). If I prefer to remain private and opaque to potential friends and institutions, then I must accept I will be treated generically, without regard to my specific particulars. I’ll be an average number.

For eons and eons humans have lived in tribes and clans where every act was open and visible and there were no secrets. Our minds evolved with constant co-monitoring. Evolutionarily speaking, coveillance is our natural state. I believe that, contrary to our modern suspicions, there won’t be a backlash against a circular world in which we constantly track each other because humans have lived like this for a million years, and—if truly equitable and symmetrical—it can feel comfortable.

For the civilized world, anonymity is like a rare earth metal. In larger doses these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Yet these elements are also a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive. But the amount needed for health is a mere hard-to-measure trace. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good, even essential for the system. Anonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. That’s why most of the brutal harassment on Twitter, Yik Yak, Reddit, and other sites is delivered anonymously. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.

Wikipedia has changed my mind in other ways. I was a fairly steady individualist, an American with libertarian leanings, and the success of Wikipedia led me toward a new appreciation of social power. I am now much more interested in both the power of the collective and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of Wikipedia is still subterranean and that its mind-changing force is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existent proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.

This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary? As far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before.

I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years. I think we’ll be surprised by how many of the things we assumed were “natural” for humans are not really natural at all. It might be fairer to say that what is natural for a tribe of mildly connected humans will not be natural for a planet of intensely connected humans. “Everyone knows” that humans are warlike, but I would guess organized war will become less attractive, or useful, over time as new means of social conflict resolution arise at a global level.

I don’t focus on these expected downsides in this book for several reasons. First, there is no invention that cannot be subverted in some way to cause harm. Even the most angelic technology can be weaponized, and will be. Criminals are some of the most creative innovators in the world. And crap constitutes 80 percent of everything. But importantly, these negative forms follow exactly the same general trends I’ve been outlining for the positive. The negative, too, will become increasingly cognified, remixed, and filtered. Crime, scams, warring, deceit, torture, corruption, spam, pollution, greed, and other hurt will all become more decentralized and data centered. Both virtue and vice are subject to the same great becoming and flowing forces. All the ways that startups and corporations need to adjust to ubiquitous sharing and constant screening apply to crime syndicates and hacker squads as well. Even the bad can’t escape these trends.

While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some noble truths scattered in the flux, I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief, subjective hunches) and toward fluid media like mashups, twitterese, and search. But as I flow through this slippery web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.

This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online.

contemplative.

ruminating

These vast epics, like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, and The Wire, had multiple interweaving plotlines, multiple protagonists, and an incredible depth of characters, and these sophisticated works demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and 90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore.

Knowledge, which is related, but not identical, to information, is exploding at the same rate as information, doubling every two years. The number of scientific articles published each year has been accelerating even faster than this for decades. Over the last century the annual number of patent applications worldwide has risen in an exponential curve.

Thus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge. We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology or tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of new huge questions—questions we could have never thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.

But the chief consequence of reliable instant answers is not a harmony of satisfaction. Abundant answers simply generate more questions! In my experience, the easier it is to ask a question and the more useful the reply, the more questions I have.

Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy toward the fluidity of decentralization. It is moving from nouns to verbs, from tangible products to intangible becomings. From fixed media to messy remixed media. From stores to flows. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions.

This is the new platform that our lives will run on. International in scope. Always on. At current rates of technological adoption I estimate that by the year 2025 every person alive—that is, 100 percent of the planet’s inhabitants—will have access to this platform via some almost-free device. Everyone will be on it. Or in it. Or, simply, everyone will be it.

This big global system will not be utopia. Even three decades from now, regional fences will remain in this cloud. Parts will be firewalled, censored, privatized. Corporate monopolies will control aspects of the infrastructure, though these internet monopolies are fragile and ephemeral, subject to sudden displacement by competitors. Although minimal access will be universal, higher bandwidth will be uneven and clumped around urban areas. The rich will get the premium access. In short, the distribution of resources will resemble the rest of life. But this is critical and transformative, and even the least of us will be part of it.

This picture of an emerging superorganism reminds some scientists of the concept of “the singularity.” A “singularity” is a term borrowed from physics to describe a frontier beyond which nothing can be known. There are two versions in pop culture: a hard singularity and a soft singularity. The hard version is a future brought about by the triumph of a superintelligence. When we create an AI that is capable of making an intelligence smarter than itself, it can in theory make generations of ever smarter AIs. In effect, AI would bootstrap itself in an infinite accelerating cascade so that each smarter generation is completed faster than the previous generation until AIs very suddenly get so smart that they solve all existing problems in godlike wisdom and leave us humans behind. It is called a singularity because it is beyond what we can perceive. Some call that our “last invention.” For various reasons, I think that scenario is unlikely. A soft singularity is more likely. In this future scenario AIs don’t get so smart that they enslave us (like evil versions of smart humans); rather AI and robots and filtering and tracking and all the technologies I outline in this book converge—humans plus machines—and together we move to a complex interdependence. At this level many phenomenon occur at scales greater than our current lives, and greater than we can perceive—which is the mark of a singularity. It’s a new regime wherein our creations makes us better humans, but also one where...