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

by Kevin Kelly

When we enter any of the 4 billion screens lit today, we are participating in one open-ended question. We are all trying to answer: What is it?

Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.

Thus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.

We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology or tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of new huge questions—questions we could have never thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.

Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”

A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

How to question?

technologies that help generate questions will be valued more.

Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the holos mind, thereby programming it by using it.

A “singularity” is a term borrowed from physics to describe a frontier beyond which nothing can be known.

There are two versions in pop culture: a hard singularity and a soft singularity. The hard version is a future brought about by the triumph of a superintelligence. When we create an AI that is capable of making an intelligence smarter than itself, it can in theory make generations of ever smarter AIs. In effect, AI would bootstrap itself in an infinite accelerating cascade so that each smarter generation is completed faster than the previous generation until AIs very suddenly get so smart that they solve all existing problems in godlike wisdom and leave us humans behind. It is called a singularity because it is beyond what we can perceive. Some call that our “last invention.” For various reasons, I think that scenario is unlikely.

A soft singularity is more likely. In this future scenario AIs don’t get so smart that they enslave us (like evil versions of smart humans); rather AI and robots and filtering and tracking and all the technologies I outline in this book converge—humans plus machines—and together we move to a complex interdependence. 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 h...

In the next 30 years the holos will continue to lean in the same direction it has for the last 30 years: toward increased flowing, sharing, tracking, accessing, interacting, screening, remixing, filtering, cognifying, questioning, and becoming. We stand at this moment at the Beginning. The Beginning, of course, is just beginning.