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

by Kevin Kelly

The web will more and more resemble a presence that you relate to rather than a place—the famous cyberspace of the 1980s—that you journey to.

Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different—to create alien intelligences. We should really call AIs “AAs,” for “artificial aliens.”

You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines.

The game world’s policies and budget are decided by electronic votes, line by line, facilitated with lots of explaining, tutorials, and even AI. Now over 250 million people want to know why they can’t vote on their national budgets that way too.

It is 10 times easier today to make a simple video than 10 years ago. It is a hundred times easier to create a small mechanical part and make it real than a century ago. It is a thousand times easier today to write and publish a book than a thousand years ago.

The principle of paying people directly for their attention can be extended to advertising as well. We spend our attention on ads for free. Why don’t we charge companies to watch their commercials?

Not coincidentally, humans excel at creating and consuming experiences. This is no place for robots. If you want a glimpse of what we humans do when the robots take our current jobs, look at experiences. That’s where we’ll spend our money (because they won’t be free) and that’s where we’ll make our money. We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Thomas Jefferson

We can use the same gameifications to create incentives, to nudge participants in preferred directions in real life. 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.

The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone. A bit uncopied, unshared, unlinked with other bits will be a short-lived bit. The worst future for a bit is to be parked in some dark isolated data vault. What bits really want is to hang out with other related bits, be replicated widely, and maybe become a metabit, or an action bit in a piece of durable code.

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.

These vast epics, like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, and The Wire, had multiple interweaving plotlines, multiple protagonists, and an incredible depth of characters, and these sophisticated works demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and 90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore.

Knowledge, which is related, but not identical, to information, is exploding at the same rate as information, doubling every two years. The number of scientific articles published each year has been accelerating even faster than this for decades. Over the last century the annual number of patent applications worldwide has risen in an exponential curve.

Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.