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

by Kevin Kelly

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself.

Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades.

Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.

A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.

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.

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. Right now, this minute. This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh, to have been alive and well back then!”

What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness.

This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them.

Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.

In fact, our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. This is what it means when something goes viral. The copies are recopied, and those duplications ripple outward launching new copies, in an endless contagious wave. Once a copy has touched the internet, it never leaves.

Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic. We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. This gives a larger audience access to the precious marginalia of another author’s close reading of a book (with their permission), a boon that previously only rare-book collectors witnessed.

First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near zero audience they usually have now.

Indeed, the only way for the essence of books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

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

We employ all manner of filtering to winnow the bewildering spread of options.

First I’d like to be delivered more of what I know I like.

Second in the ideal approach, I’d like to know what my friends like that I don’t know about.

Close friends can make an echo chamber, amplifying the same choices. 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.

A third component in the ideal filter would be a stream that suggested stuff that I don’t like but would like to like.

In somewhat the same vein I also, occasionally, want a bit of stuff I dislike but should learn to like.

“In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable.

Growth comes from remixing.

For instance, behind every bestselling book are legions of fans who write their own sequels using their favorite author’s characters in slightly altered worlds. These extremely imaginative extended narratives are called fan fiction, or fanfic.