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

by Kevin Kelly

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

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.

To really solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need other intelligences beside human. And the extremely complex harder questions that will come after those hard questions may require even more distant and complex intelligences.

Today, many scientific discoveries require hundreds of human minds to solve, but in the near future there may be classes of problems so deep that they require hundreds of different species of minds to solve. This will take us to a cultural edge because it won’t be easy to accept the answers from an alien intelligence.

Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, science will have to know, and progress, according to the criteria of new minds. At that point everything changes.

Google’s translation AI turns a phone into a personal translator. Speak English into the microphone and it immediately repeats what you said in understandable Chinese, or Russian, or Arabic, or dozens of other languages.

Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans. Baxter does not look impressive. Sure, it’s got big strong arms and a flat-screen display like many industrial bots. And Baxter’s hands perform repetitive manual tasks, just as factory robots do. But it’s different in three significant ways. First, it can look around and indicate where it is looking by shifting the cartoon eyes on its head. It can perceive humans working near it and avoid injuring them. And workers can see whether it sees them.

Jobs We Didn’t Know We Wanted Done

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. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants. We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? 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. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long).

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

PERSONALIZATION A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room—as if it were being performed in your room—you may be willing to pay a lot. You are then not paying for the copy of the concert; you are paying for the generative personalization.

The steady titanic tilt toward dematerialization and decentralization means that further flows are inevitable. It seems a stretch right now that the most solid and fixed apparatus in our manufactured environment would be transformed into ethereal forces, but the soft will trump the hard. Knowledge will rule atoms. Generative intangibles will rise above the free. Think of the world flowing.

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact uncovered while screening will provoke our reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screening encourages rapid pattern making, associating one idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. Screening nurtures thinking in real time.

Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. 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. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it by critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world. A person, artifact, or fact does not “exist” until it is linked.

Decentralization We are at the midpoint in a hundred-year scramble toward greater decentralization. The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication. Without the ability to remain connected as things spread wide into networks, firms would collapse. That’s true, but also slightly backward. It’s truer to say that the technological means of instant long-distance communications enabled this era of decentralization. That is, once we wrapped the globe in endless circles of wires crossing the deserts and beneath the oceans, decentralization was not only possible, but inevitable.

The consequence of moving away from centralized organization to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything—both tangible and intangible—must flow faster to keep the whole going together.

Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation.

Let’s say you were streaming a long movie and suddenly an asteroid smashed one tenth of the machines that made up the cloud. You might not notice any interruption in the movie because the movie file did not reside in any particular machine but was distributed in a redundant pattern across many processors in such a way that the cloud can reconfigure itself if any of those units fail. It’s almost like organic healing.

For instance, you could filter your selection of books by reading only the greatest ones. Just focus on the books chosen by experts who have read a lot of them and let them guide you to the 60 volumes considered the best of the very best in Western civilization—the canonical collection known as the Great Books of the Western World. It would take you, or the average reader, some 2,000 hours to completely read all 29 million words. And that’s just the Western world. Most of us are going to need further filtering.

The danger of being rewarded with only what you already like, however, is that you can spin into an egotistical spiral, becoming blind to anything slightly different, even if you’d love it. This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment.

Second in the ideal approach, I’d like to know what my friends like that I don’t know about. In many ways, Twitter and Facebook serve up this filter. By following your friends, you get effortless updates on the things they find cool enough to share. The ease of shouting out a recommendation via a text or photo is so easy from a phone that we are surprised when someone loves something new but doesn’t share it. But friends can also act like a filter bubble if they are too much like you. Close friends can make an echo chamber, amplifying the same choices. Studies show that going to the next circle, to friends of friends, is sometimes enough to enlarge the range of options away from the expected.

Google is the foremost filterer in the world, making all kinds of sophisticated judgments about what search results you see. In addition to filtering the web, it processes 35 billion emails a day, filtering out spam very effectively, assigning labels and priorities. Google is the world’s largest collaborative filter, with thousands of interdependent dynamic sieves. If you opt in, it personalizes search results for you and will customize them for your exact location at the time you ask.

It uses the now proven principles of collaborative filtering: People who found this answer valuable also found this next one good too (although they don’t label it that way). Google filters the content of 60 trillion pages about 2 million times every minute, but we don’t often question how it recommends. When I ask it a query, should it show me the most popular, or the most trusted, or the most unique, or the options most likely to please me? I don’t know. I say to myself I’d probably like to have the choice to rank results each of those four different ways, but Google knows that all I’d do is look at the first few results and then click. So they say, “Here’s the top few we think are the best based on our deep experience in answering 3 billion questions a day.” So I click. Google is trying to optimize the chance I’ll return to ask it again.

Police will be required by law to record all activity from their wearables while they are on duty. Rewinding police logs will shift public opinion, just as often vindicating police as not.

For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important. How does one “own” a melody? When you give me a melody, you still have it. Yet in what way is it even yours to begin with if it is one note different from a similar melody a thousand years old? Can one own a note? If you sell me a copy of it, what counts as a copy? What about a backup, or one that streams by?

Two benefits propel VR’s current rapid progress: presence and interaction. “Presence” is what sells VR. All the historical trends in cinema technology bend toward increased realism, starting from sound, to color, to 3-D, to faster, smoother frame rates. Those trends are now being accelerated inside VR.

Physics didn’t matter, materials were free, anything was possible. But it took many hours to master the arcane 3-D tools. In 2009 a game company in Sweden, Minecraft, launched a similar construction world in quasi-3-D, but employed idiot-easy building blocks stacked like giant Legos. No learning was necessary. Many would-be builders migrated to Minecraft. Second Life’s success had risen

This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication. Car movements—Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car. Highway traffic—Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highways record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Seventy million plates are recorded each month. Ride-share taxis—Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips. Long-distance travel—Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded. Drone surveillance—Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities. Postal mail—The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized. Utilities—Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.) Cell phone location and call logs—Where, when, and who you call (metadata) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years. Civic cameras—Cameras record your activities 24/7 in most city downtowns in the U.S. Commercial and private spaces—Today 68 percent of public employers, 59 percent of private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or work under cameras. Smart home—Smart thermostats (like Nest) det...

The movie Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, featured a not too distant future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. Dick called that intervention “pre-crime” detection. I once thought Dick’s idea of “pre-crime” to be utterly unrealistic. I don’t anymore.

If you look at the above list of routine tracking today, it is not difficult to extrapolate another 50 years. All that was previously unmeasurable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable. We’ll keep tracking ourselves, we’ll keep tracking our friends, and our friends will track us. Companies and governments will track us more. Fifty years from now ubiquitous tracking will be the norm.

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 for which we have an official measure of magnitude. Bigger