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

by Kevin Kelly

The wealthiest and most disruptive organizations today are almost all multisided platforms—Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation.

Maintaining the idea of ownership within a platform becomes problematic, because it rests on notions of “private property”; but neither “private” nor “property” has great meaning in an ecosystem. As more is shared, less will act like property. It is not a coincidence that less privacy (constant sharing of intimate lives) and more piracy (disregard of intellectual property) are both breeding on platforms.

The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data.

I am larger than before, but thinner too. I am faster, but at times shallower. I think more like a cloud with fewer boundaries, open to change and full of contradiction. I contain multitudes!

Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

AHAA- creating a design space

Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all top down.

This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment. There’s a lot of evidence this occurs in the political realm as well: Readers of one political stripe who depend only on a simple filter of “more like this” rarely if ever read books outside their stripe. This overfitting tends to harden their minds.

Studies show that going to the next circle, to friends of friends, is sometimes enough to enlarge the range of options away from the expected.

Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

Pf constraint theory

The maximum potential attention is therefore fixed. Its production is inherently limited while everything else is becoming abundant. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.

In the coming two decades the challenge and opportunity is to harness filtering technologies to cultivate higher quality attention at scale.

Their AIs seek the optimal ad at the optimal time in the optimal place and the optimal frequency with the optimal way to respond. While this is sometimes termed personalized advertising, it is in fact far more complex than just targeting ads to individuals. It represents an ecosystem of filterings, which have consequences beyond just advertising.

This period is analogous to the Cambrian era of evolution, when life was newly multicellular. In a very brief period (geologically speaking), life incarnated many previously untried possibilities.

Cambrian explosion.

Technology may be able to support a peer-to-peer ad creation network.

fully decentralized peer-to-peer user-generated crowdsourced ad network

The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied.

We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.

Chief among the new things we will make are new ways to filter and personalize, to make us more like ourselves.

But is there a way to reduce the contents of a movie into imagery that could be grasped quickly, as we might see in a table of contents for a book?

The holy grail of visuality is findability—the ability to search the library of all movies the same way Google can search the web, and find a particular focus deep within.

As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth.

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

Think of our sensor-filled real world as a nonvirtual virtual reality that we spend most of our day in. As we are tracked by our surroundings and indeed as we track our quantified selves, we can use the same interaction techniques that we use in VR.

You get points for picking up litter or recycling. Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified.

Cf china social credit score

Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford professor who devised this experiment and uses VR as the ultimate sociological lab, discovered that it usually took a person only four minutes to completely rewire the feet/arm circuits in their brain. Our identities are far more fluid than we think.

The achievable dream in the near future is to use this very personal database of your body’s record (including your full sequence of genes) to construct personal treatments and personalized medicines.

If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.

Vanity trumps privacy.

the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale.

The “revert log” button on Wikipedia, which made it easier to restore a vandalized passage than to vandalize it, unleashed a new higher organization of trust, emphasizing one facet of human behavior not enabled at a large scale before.

Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased.

This new mode of being—surfing the waves, diving down, rushing up, flitting from bit to bit, tweeting and twittering, ceaselessly dipping into newness with ease, daydreaming, questioning each and every fact—is not a bug. It is a feature. It is a proper response to the ocean of data, news, and facts flooding us.

In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

But the technologies that help generate questions will be valued more. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

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 we can’t live without what we’ve made. If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid—a new phase state.