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

by Kevin Kelly

de Chardin named it the noosphere, the

This whole equals holos.

This is the new platform that our lives will run on. International in scope. Always on. At current rates of technological adoption I estimate that by the year 2025 every person alive—that is, 100 percent of the planet’s inhabitants—will have access to this platform via some almost-free device. Everyone will be on it. Or in it. Or, simply, everyone will be

Although minimal access will be universal, higher bandwidth will be uneven and clumped around urban areas. The rich will get the premium access. In short, the distribution of resources will resemble the rest of life. But this is critical and transformative,

The level of organization is a step above the largest things we have made till now: cities.

This jump in levels reminds some physicists of a phase transition, the discontinuous break between a molecule’s state—say, between ice and water, or water and steam.

different world with new normals.

Sharing, though excessive to some now, is just beginning. The switch from ownership to access has barely begun. Flows and streams are still trickles. While it seems as if we are tracked too much already, we’ll be tracking a thousand times as much in the coming decades. Each one of these functions will be accelerated by high-quality cognification, just now being born, making the smartest things we do today seem very dumb. None of this is final. These transitions are but the first step in a process, a process of becoming. It is a Beginning.

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.

We are marching inexorably toward firmly connecting all humans and all machines into a global matrix. This matrix is not an artifact, but a process. Our new supernetwork is a standing wave of change that steadily spills forward

new arrangements of our needs ...