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

by Kevin Kelly

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. It is incremental improvement or mild progress. The “pro” in protopian stems from the notions of process and progress.

Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays.

Cognified music—Music can be created in real time from algorithms, employed as the soundtrack for a video game or a virtual world. Depending on your actions, the music changes. Hundreds of hours of new personal music can be written by the AI for every player.

Perhaps because music itself is so flowing—a stream of notes whose beauty lasts only as long as the stream continues—it was the first to undergo liquidity.