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. These days it takes us a decade after a technology appears to develop a social consensus on what it means and what etiquette we need to tame it.

By its nature, digital network technology rattles international borders because it is borderless. There will be heartbreak, conflict, and confusion in addition to incredible benefits.

Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs. 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.

Change is inevitable. We now appreciate that everything is mutable and undergoing change, even though much of this alteration is imperceptible.

This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.

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

In our new era, processes trump products.

sandals that morph as you walk, treads that shift, or floors that act as shoes. “Shoeing” becomes a service and not a noun.

But the general trends of the products and services in 30 years are currently visible.

epiphany

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

Here’s why: First, most of the important technologies that will dominate life 30 years from now have not yet been invented, so naturally you’ll be a newbie to them. Second, because the new technology requires endless upgrades, you will remain in the newbie state. Third, because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating (the average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days!), you won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced, so you will remain in the newbie mode forever. 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.

dystopia

utopia

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.

The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.

perpetual newbies.

improbable

Not only did we fail to imagine what the web would become, we still don’t see it today. We are oblivious to the miracle it has blossomed into. Twenty years after its birth the immense scope of the web is hard to fathom. The total number of web pages, including those that are dynamically

created upon request, exceeds 60 trillion. That’s almost 10,000 pages per person alive. And this entire cornucopia has been created in less than 8,000 days.

Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 90 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up overturning was also not in anyone’s 20-year vision.

One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured.

Everyone missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip point when women online first outnumbered men. Today, 51 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2014 the average age of a user was roughly a bone-creaking 44 years old.

Presently major portions of the digital world can’t be googled. A lot of what happens in Facebook, or on a phone app, or inside a game world, or even inside a video can’t be searched right now. In 30 years it will be. The tendrils of hyperlinks will keep expanding to connect all the bits.

Cognified marketing—The amount of attention an individual reader or watcher spends on an advertisement can be multiplied by their social influence (how many people followed them and what their influence was) in order to optimize attention and influence per dollar. Done at the scale of millions, this is a job for AI.

Nonhuman intelligence is not a bug; it’s a feature. The most important thing to know about thinking machines is that they will think different.

We are notoriously bad at statistical thinking, so we are making intelligences with very good statistical skills, in order that they don’t think like us.

Looking

out his office window at the former industrial neighborhood, he says, “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.”

Humans can weave cotton cloth with great effort, but automated looms make perfect cloth by the mile for a few cents per pound. The only reason to buy handmade cloth today is because you want the imperfections humans introduce. There’s very little reason to want an imperfect car. We no longer value irregularities while traveling 70 miles per hour on a highway—so we figure that the fewer humans touching our car as it is being made, the better.

Humans have trouble making a single brass screw unassisted, but automation can produce a thousand exact ones per hour. Without automation, we could not make a single computer chip—a job that requires degrees of precision, control, and unwavering attention that our animal bodies don’t possess. Likewise no human—indeed no group of humans, no matter their education—can quickly search through all the web pages in the world to uncover the one page revealing the price of eggs in Kathmandu yesterday. Every time you click on the search button you are employing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to do alone.

This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can today remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us as a message through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1800. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.

Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do. This is not a trivial semantic trick; our desires are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular question.

ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a-kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles—but, of course, over time the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?”

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it.

Here are eight generatives that are “better than free.”

IMMEDIACY

PERSONALIZATION

INTERPRETATION

AUTHENTICITY

ACCESSIBILITY

EMBODIMENT

PATRONAGE

DISCOVERABILITY

Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them.

utilitarian