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Established industries will topple because their old business models no longer work. Entire occupations will disappear, together with some people’s livelihoods. New occupations will be born and they will prosper unequally, causing envy and inequality.
Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long counterproductive.
Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs.
We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs. In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs.
Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.
Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays.
In three more decades, the rest of the world will overlap my devices.
there’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter. Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level.
cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization.
“At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
Dolls may be the first really popular robots.
That’s even more true for artificial minds. Even the best-programmed computer has to play at least a thousand games of chess before it gets good.
our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.
In the next 10 years, 99 percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly or indirectly, will be nerdly narrow, supersmart specialists.
You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.
It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.
The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud.
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). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding.
Every year I own less of what I use.
Material goods infused with bits increasingly act as if they were intangible services. Nouns morph to verbs. Hardware behaves like software. In Silicon Valley they say it like this: “Software eats everything.”
Sharing intangibles scales magnificently.
Proponents like to say that with bitcoin you trust math instead of governments.
Who would want to own their computer? The answer increasingly is no one. No more than you want to own an electric station, rather than buy electricity from the grid.
it becomes as easy to find a particular niche interest as to find a bestseller.
The idea is to allow fans of a company to purchase shares in the company. This is exactly what you do when you buy shares of stock on the stock market. You are part of a crowdsourced ownership. Each of your shares is some tiny fraction of the whole enterprise, and the collected money raised by public shares is used to grow the business.
Brands filter through the clutter.
The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.
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.
If Hollywood is at the apex of the pyramid, the bottom is where the swampy action is, and where the future of the moving image begins.
Intellectual property is a slippery realm.
In a world running at internet speed, a century-long legal lockup is a serious detriment to innovation and creativity. It’s a vestigial burden from a former era based on atoms.
The more powerful the invention or creation, the more likely and more important it is that it will be transformed by others.
This eye contact is immensely magnetic. It stirs intimacy and radiates a felt presence.
We think different on our feet.
The satin touch of a device’s surface, the liquidity of its flickers, the presence or lack of its warmth, the quality of its build, the temperature of its glow will come to mean a great deal to us.
I tried several lightweight brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) and I was able to control a personal computer simply by thinking about it. The apparatus generally consists of a hat of sensors, akin to a minimal bicycle helmet, with a long cable to the PC. You place it on your head and its many sensor pads sit on your scalp. The pads pick up brain waves, and with some biofeedback training you can generate signals at will.
Implicit in VR is the fact that everything—without exception—that occurs in VR is tracked. The virtual world is defined as a world under total surveillance, since nothing happens in VR without tracking it first.
Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified.
We have lousy mathematical intuitions. Our brains don’t do statistics well. Math is not our natural language. Even extremely visual plots and numerical graphs demand superconcentration.
Those who figure out how to domesticate tracking, to make it civil and productive, will prosper, while those who try only to prohibit and outlaw it will be left behind. Consumers say they don’t want to be tracked, but in fact they keep feeding the machine with their data, because they want to claim their benefits.
One day in the next three decades the entire internet/phone system will blink off for 24 hours, and we’ll be in shock for years afterward.
I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles and turns superficialities into careers. Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, famously complained that the “best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” This waking dream is viewed by some as an addictive squandering. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I
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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
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Future people will envy us, wishing they could have witnessed the birth we saw. It was in these years that humans began animating inert objects with tiny bits of intelligence, weaving them into a cloud of machine intelligences and then linking billions of their own minds into this single supermind.
By holos I include the collective intelligence of all humans combined with the collective behavior of all machines, plus the intelligence of nature, plus whatever behavior emerges from this whole. This whole equals holos.
Sharing, though excessive to some now, is just beginning. The switch from ownership to access has barely begun. Flows and streams are still trickles. While it seems as if we are tracked too much already, we’ll be tracking a thousand times as much in the coming decades.
