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.

It may be against our initial impulse, but we should embrace the perpetual remixing of these technologies. Only by working with these technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer. I don’t mean to keep our hands off. We need to manage these emerging inventions to prevent actual (versus hypothetical) harms, both by legal and technological means. We need to civilize and tame new inventions in their particulars. But we can do that only with deep engagement, firsthand experience, and a vigilant acceptance. 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. These technologies are not going away.

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. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world. Constant flux means more than simply “things

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.

We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs.

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. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continuously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.

this transportation service is packed with flexibility, customization, upgrades, conn...

While we creators have much choice and responsibility in steering technologies, there is also much about a technology that is outside of our control.

The bias toward cheap ubiquitous copies in digital technologies is independent of nationality, economic momentum, or human desire, and it steers the technology toward social ubiquity; the bias is baked into the nature of digital bits. In both of these examples, we can get the most from the technologies when we “listen” to the direction the technologies lean, and bend our expectations, regulations, and products to these fundamental tendencies within that technology. We’ll find it easier to manage the complexities, optimize the benefits, and reduce the harm of particular technologies when we align our uses with their biased trajectory. The purpose of this book is to gather those tendencies now operating in the newest technologies and to lay their trajectories out before us.

forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself. I knew this in the abstract as the famous second

of thermodynamics, which states that everything is falling apart slowly.

Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

You may not want to upgrade, but you must because everyone else is. It’s an upgrade arms race.

No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of “becoming,” everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.

If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the ceaseless upgrades and eternal becoming of the technium is to make holes in our heart.

Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continual discontentment. I agree that technology is the source. The momentum of technologies pushes us to chase the newest, which are always disappearing beneath the advent of the next newer thing, so satisfaction continues to recede from our grasp. But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment

that technology brings.

ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we’ve never had before. This disc...

We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without makin...

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. 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.

Unlike the last century, nobody wants to move to the distant future. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we’re stuck in the short now, a present without a generational perspective.

In constant motion we no longer notice the motion.

We need to believe in improbable things more often.

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 accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.

Users do most of the work—they photograph, they catalog, they post, and they market their own sales.

What a shock, then, to witness the near instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs in the early 2000s, with two new blogs appearing every second. And then a few years later the explosion of user-created videos—65,000 per day are posted to YouTube, or 300 video hours every minute, in 2015. And in recent years a ceaseless eruption of alerts, tips, and news headlines. Each user doing what ABC, AOL, USA Today—and almost everyone

The audience. The nutrition of participation nudges ordinary folks to

invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating free public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the web runs in this mode. One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially

manufactured. The rest is fueled by du...

“Amish websites?” I asked. “For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our shop.” “Yes, but . . .” “Oh, we use the internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!” I knew then the takeover was complete. We are all becoming something new.

People in the future will look at their holodecks and wearable virtual reality contact lenses and downloadable avatars and AI interfaces and say, “Oh, you didn’t really have the internet”—or whatever they’ll call it—“back then.”

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.

Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify.

“Oh, we’re really making an AI.”

To build a neural network—the primary architecture of AI software—also requires many different processes to take place simultaneously. Each node of a neural network loosely imitates a neuron in the brain—mutually interacting with its neighbors to make sense of the signals it receives. To recognize a spoken word, a program must be able to hear all the phonemes in relation to one another; to identify an image, it needs to see every pixel in the context of the pixels around it—both

deeply parallel tasks. But until recently, the typical computer processor could ping only one thing at

In 2009, Andrew Ng and a team at Stanford realized that GPU chips could run

neural networks in parallel. That discovery unlocked new

possibilities for neural networks, which can include hundreds of millions of connections between their nodes. Traditional processors required several weeks to calculate all the cascading possibilities in a neural net with 100 million parameters. Ng fou...

In 2006, Geoff Hinton, then at the University of Toronto, made a key tweak to this method, which he dubbed “deep learning.” He was able to mathematically optimize results from each layer so that the learning accumulated faster as it proceeded up the stack of layers. Deep-learning algorithms accelerated enormously a few years later when they were ported to GPUs.

Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or you can act as the hand for your supersmart

“centaur,” which is the human/AI cyborg that Kasparov advocated.

I recently uploaded 130,000 of my personal snapshots—my entire archive—to Google Photo, and the new Google AI remembers all the objects in all the images from my life. When I ask it to show me any image

But a bigger payoff will come when we start inventing new kinds of intelligences and entirely new ways of thinking—in the way a calculator is a genius in arithmetic. Calculation is only one type of smartness. We don’t know what the full taxonomy of intelligence is right now. Some traits of human thinking will be common (as common as bilateral symmetry, segmentation, and tubular guts are in biology), but the possibility space of viable minds will likely contain traits far outside what we have evolved. It is not necessary that this type of thinking be faster than humans’, greater, or deeper. In some cases it will be simpler.

A particular species of mind will be better in certain dimensions, but at a cost of lesser abilities in other dimensions.

really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans