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

by Kevin Kelly

ACCESSIBILITY

With a paid service I have access to free material anywhere, channeled to any of my many devices, with a super user interface. In part, this is what you get with iTunes on the cloud. You pay for conveniently accessible music you could download for free somewhere else. You are not paying for the material; you are paying for the convenience of easy accessibility, without the obligations of maintaining it.

EMBODIMENT

There will always be insanely great new display technology that consumers won’t have in their home, so they need to move their bodies somewhere else, like to a theater or auditorium.

Indeed, many bands today earn their living through concerts, not music sales. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive. Live concert tours, live TED talks, live radio shows, pop-up food tours all speak to the power and value of a paid ephemeral embodiment of something you could download for free.

PATRONAGE Deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators.

DISCOVERABILITY

No matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable.

Readers will pay for Amazon’s all-you-can-read ebook service, Kindle Unlimited, even though they will be able to find ebooks for free elsewhere, because Amazon’s reviews will guide them to books they want to read. Ditto for Netflix. Movie fans will pay Netflix because their recommendation engine finds gems they would not otherwise discover. They may be free somewhere else, but they are essentially lost and buried. In these examples, you are not paying for the copies, you are paying for the findability.

Naturally, this streaming service is free. If I don’t want to see or hear the visual and audio ads Spotify displays to pay the artists, I can pay a monthly premium. In the paid version, I can download the digital files to my computer and I can start to remix tracks if I want to. Since it is the age of flowing, I can reach my playlists and personal radio stations from any device, including my phone, or direct the stream into my living room or kitchen speakers. A bunch of other streaming services, such as SoundCloud, operate more like an audio YouTube, encouraging its 250 million fans to upload their own music en masse.

What has happened to music, books, and movies is now happening to games, newspapers, and education. The pattern will spread to transportation, agriculture, health care. Fixities such as vehicles, land, and medicines will become flows. Tractors will become fast computers outfitted with treads, land will become a substrate for a network of sensors, and medicines will become molecular information capsules flowing from patient to doctor and back.

These are the Four Stages of Flowing: 1. Fixed. Rare. The starting norm is precious products that take much expertise to create. Each is an artisan work, complete and able to stand alone, sold in high-quality reproductions to compensate the creators. 2. Free. Ubiquitous. The first disruption is promiscuous copying of the product, duplicated so relentlessly that it becomes a commodity. Cheap, perfect copies are spent freely, dispersed anywhere there is demand. This extravagant dissemination of copies shatters the established economics. 3. Flowing. Sharing. The second disruption is an unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new uses and to be remixed into new bundles. The product is now a stream of services issuing from the shared cloud. It becomes a platform for wealth and innovation. 4. Opening. Becoming. The third disruption is enabled by the previous two. Streams of powerful services and ready pieces, conveniently grabbed at little cost, enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted, so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.

In ancient times culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate, and the subjective. We were People of the Word. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture.

Mass-produced books changed the way people thought. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available, from about 50,000 words in Old English to a million today.

Painting, music, architecture, dance were all important, but the heartbeat of Western culture was the turning pages of a book.

But there is no reason an ebook has to be a plank. E-ink paper can be manufactured in inexpensive flexible sheets as thin and supple and cheap as paper. A hundred or so sheets can be bound into a sheaf, given a spine, and wrapped between two handsome covers. Now the ebook looks very much like a paper book of old, thick with pages, but it can change its content. One minute the page has a poem on it; the next it has a recipe.

The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 BC, was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 percent and 70 percent of all books in existence back then.

From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50-petabyte hard disks. Ten years ago you needed a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. Today the universal library would fill your bedroom. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your phone. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet—if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long.

Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too. Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click, making it easier to eliminate a falsehood than to post a falsehood in the first place. In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own myths from pieces. On networked screens everything is linked to everything else.

A reporter for TechCrunch recently observed, “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

Indeed, digital media exhibits a similar absence. Netflix, the world’s largest video hub, allows me to watch a movie without owning it. Spotify, the largest music streaming company, lets me listen to whatever music I want without owning any of it. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited enables me to read any book in its 800,000-volume library without owning books, and PlayStation Now lets me play games without purchasing them. Every year I own less of what I use.

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

Five deep technological trends accelerate this long-term move toward accessing and away from ownership.

Dematerialization The trend in the past 30 years has been to make better stuff using fewer materials. A classic example is the beer can, whose basic shape, size, and function have been unchanged for 80 years. In 1950 a beer can was made of tin-coated steel and it weighed 73 grams. In 1972 lighter, thinner, cleverly shaped aluminum reduced the weight to 21 grams. Further ingenious folds and curves introduced yet more reductions in the raw materials such that today the can weighs only 13 grams, or one fifth of its original weight. And the new cans don’t need a beer can opener. More benefits for just 20 percent of the material. That’s called dematerialization.

On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. Since the 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent. Appliances tend to weigh less per function. Of course, communication technology shows the clearest dematerialization. Huge PC monitors shrunk to thin flat screens (but the width of our TVs expanded!), while clunky phones on the table become pocketable. Sometimes our products gain many new benefits without losing mass, but the general trend is toward products that use fewer atoms. We might not notice...

However, the total amount of material we use per GDP dollar is going down, which means we use less material for greater value. The ratio of mass needed to generate a unit of GDP has been falling for 15...

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos first introduced the Kindle ebook reader in 2007, he claimed it was not a product. He said it was a service selling access to reading material. That shift became more visible seven years later when Amazon introduced an all-you-can-read subscription library of almost a million ebooks. Book fans no longer had to purchase individual books, but could buy access to most books currently published with the purchase of one Kindle. (The price of the basic entry Kindle has been dropping steadily and is headed to be almost free soon.) Products encourage ownership, but services discourage ownership because the kind of exclusivity, control, and responsibility that comes with ownership privileges are missing from services.

The switch from “ownership that you purchase” to “access that you subscribe to” overturns many conventions. Ownership is casual, fickle. If something better comes along, grab it. A subscription, on the other hand, gushes a never-ending stream of updates, issues, and versions that force a constant interaction between the producer and the consumer. It is not a onetime event; it’s an ongoing relationship.

Of course, in all these you still pay; the difference is the deeper relationship that services encourage and require between the customer and the provider.

Turns out you can decentralize money, and the technology to do this may be instrumental in decentralizing many other centralized institutions. The story of how the most centralized aspect of modern life is being decentralized holds lessons for many other unrelated industries.

In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. As long as the costs of communications and computation drop due to advances in technology, these trends are inevitable. They are the result of networks of communication expanding till they are global and ubiquitous, and as the networks deepen they gradually displace matter with intelligence. This grand shift will be true no matter where in the world (whether the United States, China, or Timbuktu) they take place.

I have never owned any music, movies, games, books, art, or realie worlds. I just subscribe to Universal Stuff. The arty pictures on my wall keep changing so I don’t take them for granted.

Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.

According to the most recent count I could find, the total number of songs that have been recorded on the planet is 180 million. Using standard MP3 compression, the total volume of recorded music for humans would fit into 720 terabytes. Today 720 terabytes sells for $72,000 and fills a closet. In ten years it will sell for $700 and fit into your pocket. Very soon you’ll be able to carry around all the music of humankind in your pants.

It knows that I like to book inexpensive hostels when I travel on vacation, but with a private bath, maximum bandwidth, and always in the oldest part of

Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

Not only computers. All devices need to interact. If a thing does not interact, it will be considered broken. Over the past few years I’ve been collecting stories of what it is like to grow up in the digital age. As an example, one of my friends had a young daughter under five years old. Like many other families these days, they didn’t have a TV, just computing screens. On a visit to another family who happened to have a TV, his daughter gravitated to the large screen. She went up to the TV, hunted around below it, and then looked behind it. “Where’s the mouse?” she asked. There had to be a way to interact with it. Another acquaintance’s son had access to a computer starting at the age of two. Once, when she and her son were shopping in a grocery store, she paused to decipher the label on a product. “Just click on it,” her son suggested. Of course cereal boxes should be interactive! Another young friend worked at a theme park. Once, a little girl took her picture, and after she did, she told the park worker, “But it’s not a real camera—it doesn’t have the picture on the back.” Another friend had a barely speaking toddler take over his iPad. She could paint and easily handle complicated tasks on apps almost before she could walk. One day her dad printed out a high-resolution image on photo paper and left it on the coffee table. He noticed his toddler came up and tried to unpinch the photo to make it larger. She tried unpinching it a few times, without success, and looked at...

In the coming decades we’ll keep expanding what we interact with. The expansion follows three thrusts. 1. More senses We will keep adding new sensors and senses to the things we make. Of course, everything will get eyes (vision is almost free), and hearing, but one by one we can add superhuman senses such as GPS location sensing, heat detection, X-ray vision, diverse molecule sensitivity, or smell. These permit our creations to respond to us, to interact with us, and to adapt themselves to our uses. Interactivity, by definition, is two way, so this sensing elevates our interactions with technology. 2. More intimacy The zone of interaction will continue to march closer to us. Technology will get closer to us than a watch and pocket phone. Interacting will be more intimate. It will always be on, everywhere. Intimate technology is a wide-open frontier. We think technology has saturated our private space, but we will look back in 20 years and realize it was still far away in 2016. 3. More immersion Maximum interaction demands that we leap into the technology itself. That’s what VR allows us to do. Computation so close that we are inside it. From within a technologically created world, we interact with each other in new ways (virtual reality) or interact with the physical world in a new way (augmented reality). Technology becomes a second skin.

It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated. A few strands may be coupled (credit cards and media usage, say), but by and large there is not a massive Big Brother–ish aggregate stream. Because they are slow, governments lag far behind what they could do technically. (Their own security is irresponsibly lax and decades behind the times.) Also, the U.S. government has not unified these streams because a thin wall of hard-won privacy laws holds them back. Few laws hold corporations back from integrating as much data as they can; therefore companies have become the proxy data gatherers for governments. Data about customers is the new gold in business, so one thing is certain: Companies (and indirectly governments) will collect more of it.

Over the next 30 years, the great work will be parsing all the information we track and create—all the information of business, education, entertainment, science, sport, and social relations—into their most primeval elements. The scale of this undertaking requires massive cycles of cognition. Data scientists call this stage “machine readable” information, because it is AIs and not humans who will do this work in the zillions. When you hear a term like “big data,” this is what it is about.

In 2007, I calculated the cost to Google to answer one query to be approximately 0.3 cents, which has probably decreased a bit since then. By my calculations Google earns about 27 cents per search/answer from the ads placed around its answers, so it can easily afford to give its answers away for free.