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The kind of inevitability I am speaking of here in the digital realm is the result of momentum. The momentum of an ongoing technological shift.
In this book I endeavor to expose these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring trends in the next three decades.
Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive.
My intent in this book is to uncover the roots of digital change so that we can embrace them.
We can and should regulate Uber-like taxi services, as an example, but we can’t and shouldn’t attempt to prohibit the inevitable decentralization of services.
At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming.
Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.
In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes.
I’ve waded through the myriad technological forces erupting into the present and I’ve sorted their change into 12 verbs, such as accessing, tracking, and sharing.
Each of these 12 continuous actions is an ongoing trend that shows all evidence of continuing for at least three more decades.
This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.
These forces are trajectories, not destinies. They offer no predictions of where we end up. They tell us simply that in the near future we are headed inevitably in these directions.
Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself.
Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.
So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy. Continual upgrades are so critical for technological systems that they are now automatic for the major personal computer operating systems and some software apps.
Behind the scenes, the machines will upgrade themselves, slowly changing their features over time. This happens gradually, so we don’t notice they are “becoming.”
Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades. And the rate of graduations is accelerating. Features shift, defaults disappear, menus morph. I’ll open up a software package I don’t use every day expec...
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That bears repeating. All of us—every one of us—will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up.
Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.
However, neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.
Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.
We all missed the big story. Neither old ABC nor startup Yahoo! created the content for 5,000 web channels. Instead billions of users created the content for all the other users. There weren’t 5,000 channels but 500 million channels, all customer generated. The disruption ABC could not imagine was that this “internet stuff” enabled the formerly dismissed passive consumers to become active creators.
At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.
The web has unleashed a new becoming.
and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone’s 20-year plan.
But if we have learned anything in the past three decades, it is that the impossible is more plausible than it appears.
What we all failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions. The entirety of the content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter is not created by their staff, but by their audience.
These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from? The audience.
One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is fueled by duty or passion.
But the web in 2050 won’t be a better web, just as the first version of the web was not better TV with more channels. It will have become something new, as different from the web today as the first web was from TV.
In three more decades, the rest of the world will overlap my devices. Unsurprisingly, the web will expand to the dimensions of the physical planet.
It will also expand in time. Today’s web is remarkably ignorant of the past.
the web of 2050 will be informed by the context of the past. And the web will slide into the future as well.
From the moment you wake up, the web is trying to anticipate your intentions. Since your routines are noted, the web is attempting to get ahead of your actions, to deliver an answer almost before you ask a question.
By 2050 we’ll come to think of the web as an ever-present type of conversation.
here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. It is only becoming.
Right now, today, in 2016 is the best time to start up. There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now.
The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.
Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin. You are not late.
The advantages gained from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization.
However, the first genuine AI will not be birthed in a stand-alone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the net.
When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, but it will be faceless, unseen.
The arrival of artificial thinking accelerates all the other disruptions I describe in this book; it is the ur-force in our future.
Consumers can tap into that always-on intelligence directly, but also through third-party apps that harness the power of this AI cloud.
“At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off.
In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.
The list of Xs is endless. The more unlikely the field, the more powerful adding AI will be.
Three recent breakthroughs have unleashed the long-awaited arrival of artificial intelligence:
Cheap Parallel Computation
