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

by Kevin Kelly

One reviewer speaking of the interacting free will in the game said: “I’m sincerely and pleasantly surprised that I can shoot my own horse in the back of the head while I’m riding him, and even skin him afterward.”

At a recent international Quantified Self conference, I made this challenge: Let’s think of the most unlikely metric we can come up with and see if someone is tracking it. So I asked a group of 500 self-trackers: Is anyone tracking their fingernail growth? That seemed pretty absurd. One person raised their hand.

As Malthus and Darwin showed, every biological population expands right to the limit of its starvation. Today, in a world made abundant by technology, the threat to survival is due to an excess of good stuff. Too much goodness throws our metabolism and psychology out of kilter. But our bodies can’t register these new imbalances very well. We didn’t evolve to sense our blood pressure or glucose levels. But our technology can.

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.

Or I could ask it to determine the kind of rooms that tend to raise my heart rate. Was it the color, the temperature, the height of the ceilings? Although it seems like wizardry now, this will be considered a very mechanical request in a decade, not very different from asking Google to find something—which would have been magical 20 years ago.

Nice. Memory is emotional - we remember that which has emotional significance, so using biometrics sensors (from an Apple watch, say), to record emotional metadata against the digital exhausts of what we do might provide an emotional means to index all that data with emotional significance, and hence be able to retrieve what we'd care about from all the shit we don't. This is akin to one of the functions of sleep - it uses emotional cues to index what is emotionally revelevant from the day into long-term memory, leaving everything else as more-or-less unretrievable binaries in space that is available to be overwritten. In the evolutionary design of sleep is perhaps a ready-made approach for us to master the insane amount of personal data we generate.

Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits. The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone.

There is a one-to-one correspondence between personalization and transparency. Greater personalization requires greater transparency. Absolute personalization (vanity) requires absolute transparency (no privacy). If I prefer to remain private and opaque to potential friends and institutions, then I must accept I will be treated generically, without regard to my specific particulars. I’ll be an average number.

Now imagine these choices pinned on a slider bar. On the left side of the slot is the pair personal/transparent. On the right side is the pair private/generic. The slider can slide to either side or anywhere in between. The slider is an important choice we have. Much to everyone’s surprise, though, when technology gives us a choice (and it is vital that it remain a choice), people tend to push the slider all the way over to the personal/transparent side. They’ll take transparent personalized sharing. No psychologist would have predicted that 20 years ago. If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy. This has surprised the experts. So far, at every juncture that offers a choice, we’ve tilted, on average, toward more sharing, more disclosure, more transparency.

For sure cops will videotape citizens. That’s okay as long as citizens can videotape cops, and can get access to the cops’ videos, and share them to keep the more powerful accountable. That’s not the end of the story, but it’s how a transparent society has to start.

But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. That’s why most of the brutal harassment on Twitter, Yik Yak, Reddit, and other sites is delivered anonymously. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.

Rather, privacy can be gained only by trust, and trust requires persistent identity. In the end, the more trust the better, and the more responsibility the better.

Big general-interest newspapers were unbundled into classifieds (Craigslist), stock quotes (Yahoo!), gossip (BuzzFeed), restaurant reviews (Yelp), and stories (the web) that stood and grew on their own. These new elements can be rearranged—remixed—into new text compounds, such as news updates tweeted by your friend. The next step is to unbundle classifieds, stories, and updates into even more elemental particles that can be rearranged in unexpected and unimaginable ways. Sort of like smashing information into ever smaller subparticles that can be recombined into a new chemistry.

Wikipedia has changed my mind in other ways. I was a fairly steady individualist, an American with libertarian leanings, and the success of Wikipedia led me toward a new appreciation of social power. I am now much more interested in both the power of the collective and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of Wikipedia is still subterranean and that its mind-changing force is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existent proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.

Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.

I’ve noticed a different approach to my thinking now that the hive mind has spread it extremely wide and loose. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately go. I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail—I start off making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the net—the loss of contemplation.

Maybe, but our ability to contemplate in a time of such accessible noise will probably be a distinct strength

We find a similar proportion of ignorance if we probe deeply into the cell, or the brain. We don’t know nothin’ relative to what could be known. Our inventions allow us to spy into our ignorance. If knowledge is growing exponentially because of scientific tools, then we should be quickly running out of puzzles. But instead we keep discovering greater unknowns. 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 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.

Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.