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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Kelly
Read between
May 17 - May 20, 2018
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
“Software eats everything.”
I predict that by 2025 the bandwidth to a high-end driverless car will exceed the bandwidth into your home.
Products encourage ownership, but services discourage ownership because the kind of exclusivity, control, and responsibility that comes with ownership privileges are missing from services.
Access mode brings consumers closer to the producer, and in fact the consumer often acts as the producer, or what futurist Alvin Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer.” If instead of owning software, you access software, then you can share in its improvement. But it also means you have been recruited. You, the new prosumer, are encouraged to identify bugs and report them (replacing a company’s expensive QA department), to seek technical help from other customers in forums (reducing a company’s expensive help desk), and to develop your own add-ons and improvements (replacing a company’s
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If smartly connected, accessing is the default.
In other words, the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.
but on average communication technology is biased toward moving everything to on demand. And on demand is biased toward access over ownership.
The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.
Accessing rather than owning keeps me agile and fresh, ready for whatever is next.
What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing.
Sharing is the mildest form of digital socialism, but this verb serves as the foundation for all the higher levels of communal engagement. It is the elemental ingredient of the entire network world.
“No one is as smart as everyone.”
There is no turning the sharing off for long. Even the silence will be shared.
“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.”
First, it is a low number. The ratio of dollars earned by the industry per hour of attention spent by consumers shows that attention is not worth very much to media businesses. While half a trillion hours are devoted to TV annually (just in the U.S.), it generates for its content owners, on average, only 20 cents per hour. If you were being paid to watch TV at this rate, you would be earning a third-world hourly wage. Television watching is coolie labor. Newspapers occupy a smaller slice of our attention, but generate more revenue per hour spent with them—about 93 cents per hour. The internet,
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Why don’t we charge companies to watch their commercials?
Check out this quote.
Many of the most interesting possible modes—like getting paid for your attention or influence—are still unborn.
The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied.
Check out this quote.
The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are.
Immersive environments and virtual realities in the future will inevitably be able to scroll back to earlier states. In fact, anything digital will have undo and rewindability as well as remixing. Going forward, we are likely to get impatient with experiences that don’t have undo buttons, such as eating a meal. We can’t really replay the taste and smells of a meal. But if we could, that would certainly alter cuisine.
Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations that moving images are undergoing.
The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.
I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?” Did the remixing, the mashup, the sampling, the appropriation, the borrowing—did it transform the original rather than just copy it?
In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.
A person mumbling to herself while her hands dance in front of her will be the signal in the future that she is working on her computer.
Yes, if something is not interactive, it is broken.
They will be sewn into a shirt you interact with. You use fingers of one hand to swipe the sleeve of your other arm the way you’d swipe an iPad, and for the same reason: to bring up something on a screen or in your spectacles. A smart shirt like the Squid, a prototype from Northeastern University, can feel—in fact measure—your posture, recording it in a quantified way, and then actuating “muscles” in the shirt that contract precisely to hold you in the proper posture, much as a coach would.
You might go through your day racking up points for brushing your teeth properly, walking 10,000 steps, or driving safely, since these will all be tracked. Instead of getting A-pluses on daily quizzes, you level up. You get points for picking up litter or recycling. Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified.
Degrees of interaction are rising, and will continue to increase.
In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.
Math is not our natural language.
In the long term this is the destiny of many of the constant streams of data flowing from our bodily sensors. They won’t be numbers; they will be new senses.
Too much goodness throws our metabolism and psychology out of kilter.
More than one startup in Silicon Valley is developing a noninvasive, prickless blood monitor to analyze your blood factors daily. You’ll eventually wear these. By taking this information and feeding it back not in numbers but in a form we can feel, such as a vibration on our wrist or a squeeze on our hip, the device will equip us with a new sense about our bodies that we didn’t evolve but desperately need.
We naturally slide along a timeline to home in on an event. “It happened after the Christmas trip but before my birthday.”
We’ll evolve the same kind of social conventions and technical fixes that will make lifelogging acceptable.
Data about customers is the new gold in business, so one thing is certain: Companies (and indirectly governments) will collect more of it.
An increasing percentage of the information gathered each year is due to the information that we generate about that information.
Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits.
Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.
Every person has a human right to access, and a right to benefit from, the data about themselves. But every right requires a duty, so every person has a human duty to respect the integrity of information, to share it responsibly, and to be watched by the watched.
Vanity trumps privacy.
Gigabytes are on your phone. Terabytes were once unimaginably enormous, yet today I have three terabytes sitting on my desk. The next level up is peta. Petabytes are the new normal for companies. Exabytes are the current planetary scale. We’ll probably reach zetta in a few years. Yotta is the last scientific term
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.
Out of this new chemistry of information will arise thousands of new compounds and informational building materials. Ceaseless tracking is inevitable, but it is only the start.
It has always been clear that collectives amplify power—that
The majority of the most amazing communication inventions that are possible have not been invented yet.
Hundreds of miracles that seem impossible today will be possible with this shared human connectivity.
When the improbable dominates our field of vision to the point that it seems as if the world contains only the impossible, then these improbabilities don’t feel as improbable. The impossible will feel inevitable.
