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

by Kevin Kelly

A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.

In this new world, fast-moving code—as in updated versions of computer code—is more important than law, which is fixed. Code displayed on a screen is endlessly tweakable by users, while law embossed into books is not. Yet code can shape behavior as much as, if not more than, law. If you want to change how people act online, on the screen, you simply alter the algorithms that govern the place, which in effect polices the collective behavior or nudges people in preferred directions.

Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

The digital native is free to race ahead and explore the unknown. Accessing rather than owning keeps me agile and fresh, ready for whatever is next.

In the next three decades the greatest wealth—and most interesting cultural innovations—lie in this direction. The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated today. Anything that can be shared—thoughts, emotions, money, health, time—will be shared in the right conditions, with the right benefits. Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize. At this point in our history, sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest way to increase its value.

The remaining scarcity in an abundant society is the type of attention that is not derived or focused on commodities. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.

If you want a glimpse of what we humans do when the robots take our current jobs, look at experiences. That’s where we’ll spend our money (because they won’t be free) and that’s where we’ll make our money. We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.

Ubiquitous surveillance is inevitable. Since we cannot stop the system from tracking, we can only make the relationships more symmetrical. It’s a way of civilizing coveillance. This will take both technological fixes and new social norms. Science fiction author David Brin calls this the “Transparent Society,” which is also the name of his 1999 book summing up the idea. For a hint of how this scenario may be possible, consider Bitcoin, the decentralized open source currency described in Chapter 6 (Sharing).

If knowledge is growing exponentially because of scientific tools, then we should be quickly running out of puzzles. But instead we keep discovering greater unknowns. 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.