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

by Kevin Kelly

Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid.

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them. These days it takes us a decade after a technology appears to develop a social consensus on what it means and what etiquette we need to tame it.

Our first impulse when we confront extreme technology surging forward in this digital sphere may be to push back. To stop it, prohibit it, deny it, or at least make it hard to use. (As one example, when the internet made it easy to copy music and movies, Hollywood and the music industry did everything they could to stop the copying. To no avail. They succeeded only in making enemies of their customers.) Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive. A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs.

These organizing verbs represent the metachanges in our culture for the foreseeable near future. They are broad strokes already operating in the world today. I make no attempt to predict which specific products will prevail next year or the next decade, let alone which companies will triumph. These specifics are decided by fads, fashion, and commerce, and are wholly unpredictable. But the general trends of the products and services in 30 years are currently visible. Their basic forms are rooted in directions generated by emerging technologies now on their way to ubiquity. 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.

Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades. And the rate of graduations is accelerating. Features shift, defaults disappear, menus morph. I’ll open up a software package I don’t use every day expecting certain choices, and whole menus will have disappeared. No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of “becoming,” everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.

We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled.

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.

Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless. Ruled by fear, their society is hobbled except for the benefit of a few, but, like the sea pirates two centuries ago, there is far more law and order than appears. In fact, in real broken societies, the outrageous outlawry we associate with dystopias is not permitted. The big bandits keep the small bandits and dystopian chaos to a minimum.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress. The “pro” in protopian stems from the notions of process and progress. This subtle progress is not dramatic, not exciting. It is easy to miss because a protopia generates almost as many new problems as new benefits. The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. This circular expansion of both problems and solutions hides a steady accumulation of small net benefits over time.

The disruption ABC could not imagine was that this “internet stuff” enabled the formerly dismissed passive consumers to become active creators.

Today, most major software producers have minimal help desks; their most enthusiastic customers advise and assist other customers on the company’s support forum web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers.

The nutrition of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating free public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the web runs in this mode. One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is fueled by duty or passion.

So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2016 is the best time to start up. There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute. This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh, to have been alive and well back then!”

The arrival of artificial thinking accelerates all the other disruptions I describe in this book; it is the ur-force in our future. We can say with certainty that cognification is inevitable, because it is already here.

One of the early stage AI companies Google purchased is DeepMind, based in London. In 2015 researchers at DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games—a profound difference.

The X of photography has been cognified. Contemporary phone cameras eliminated the layers of heavy glass by adding algorithms, computation, and intelligence to do the work that physical lenses once did.

With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousandfold more data and a hundred times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI.

My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.

Part of the AI breakthrough lies in the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world, which provides the schooling that AIs need. Massive databases, self-tracking, web cookies, online footprints, terabytes of storage, decades of search results, Wikipedia, and the entire digital universe became the teachers making AI smart. Andrew Ng explains it this way: “AI is akin to building a rocket ship. You need a huge engine and a lot of fuel. The rocket engine is the learning algorithms but the fuel is the huge amounts of data we can feed to these algorithms.”

This perfect storm of cheap parallel computation, bigger data, and deeper algorithms generated the 60-years-in-the-making overnight success of AI. And this convergence suggests that as long as these technological trends continue—and there’s no reason to think they won’t—AI will keep improving.

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.

Facebook has the ability to ramp up an AI that can view a photo portrait of any person on earth and correctly identify them out of some 3 billion people online.

In a superconnected world, thinking different is the source of innovation and wealth. Just being smart is not enough. Commercial incentives will make industrial-strength AI ubiquitous, embedding cheap smartness into all that we make. But a bigger payoff will come when we start inventing new kinds of intelligences and entirely new ways of thinking—in the way a calculator is a genius in arithmetic.

But we haven’t just been redefining what we mean by AI—we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

This postindustrial economy will keep expanding because each person’s task (in part) will be to invent new things to do that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots.

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.

The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins the major sectors of a 21st-century economy.

The initial age of computing borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing. The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organizing principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages.” Pages were not organized into folders, but were arranged into a networked web. The web was a billion hyperlinked pages which contained everything, both stored information and active knowledge. The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages. This web of links was flat. Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams.

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). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding. Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

We currently see these two sets of traits—fixity versus fluidity—as opposites, driven by the dominant technology of the era. Paper favors fixity; electrons favor fluidity. But there is nothing to prevent us from inventing a third way—electrons embedded into paper or any other material. Imagine a book of 100 pages, each page a thin flexible digital screen, bound into a spine—that is an ebook too. Almost anything that is solid can be made a little bit fluid, and anything fluid can be embedded into solidness.

These are the Four Stages of Flowing: 1. Fixed. Rare. The starting norm is precious products that take much expertise to create. Each is an artisan work, complete and able to stand alone, sold in high-quality reproductions to compensate the creators. 2. Free. Ubiquitous. The first disruption is promiscuous copying of the product, duplicated so relentlessly that it becomes a commodity. Cheap, perfect copies are spent freely, dispersed anywhere there is demand. This extravagant dissemination of copies shatters the established economics. 3. Flowing. Sharing. The second disruption is an unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new uses and to be remixed into new bundles. The product is now a stream of services issuing from the shared cloud. It becomes a platform for wealth and innovation. 4. Opening. Becoming. The third disruption is enabled by the previous two. Streams of powerful services and ready pieces, conveniently grabbed at little cost, enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted, so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.

Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing. We became People of the Book.

We are now People of the Screen. This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.

But today most of us have become People of the Screen. People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels.

In addition to reading words on a page, we now read words floating nonlinearly in the lyrics of a music video or scrolling up in the closing credits of a movie. We might read dialog balloons spoken by an avatar in a virtual reality, or click through the labels of objects in a video game, or decipher the words on a diagram online. We should properly call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images. This new activity has new characteristics. Screens are always on; we never stop staring at them, unlike with books. This new platform is very visual and it gradually merges words with moving images. On the screen words zip around and float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch or television we read.

Some scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading. It is a conceptual state of imagination that one might call “literature space.”

There is an experimental type of reading called rapid serial visual presentation, which uses a screen only one word wide. As small as a postage stamp. Your eye remains stationary, fixed on one word, which replaces itself with the next word in the text, and then the one after that. So your eye reads a sequence of words “behind” one another rather than in a long string next to one another. A small screen only one word wide can squeeze in almost anywhere, expanding the territory of where we can read.

Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren’t eager to relinquish old-fashioned ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable and reliable long-term storage technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CDs. The unchanging edition that anchors an author’s original vision without the interference of mashups and remixes will often remain the most valuable edition. In this way, the stability and fixity of a bound book is a blessing. It sits constant, true to its original creation. But it sits alone.

As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

An automobile today is really a computer on wheels. Smart silicon enhances a car’s engine performance, braking, safety—and all the more true for electric cars. This rolling computer is about to be connected and become an internet car. It will sport wireless connection for driverless navigation, for maintenance and safety, and for the latest, greatest HD 3-D video entertainment. The connected car will also become the new office. If you are not driving in your private space, you will either work or play in it.

Products encourage ownership, but services discourage ownership because the kind of exclusivity, control, and responsibility that comes with ownership privileges are missing from services.

The downside to the traditional rental business is the “rival” nature of physical goods. Rival means that there is a zero-sum game; only one rival prevails. If I am renting your boat, no one else can. If I rent a bag to you, I cannot rent the same bag to another. In order to grow a rental business of physical things, the owner has to keep buying more boats or bags. But, of course, intangible goods and services don’t work this way. They are “nonrival,” which means you can rent the same movie to as many people who want to rent it this hour. Sharing intangibles scales magnificently. This ability to share on a large scale without diminishing the satisfaction of the individual renter is transformative. The total cost of use drops precipitously (shared by millions instead of one). Suddenly, consumer ownership is not so important. Why own when you get the same real-time utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing?

Bitcoin is a fully decentralized, distributed currency that does not need a central bank for its accuracy, enforcement, or regulation. Since it was launched in 2009, the currency has $3 billion in circulation and 100,000 vendors accepting the coins as payment. Bitcoin may be most famous for its anonymity and the black markets it fueled. But forget the anonymity; it’s a distraction. The most important innovation in Bitcoin is its “blockchain,” the mathematical technology that powers it. The blockchain is a radical invention that can decentralize many other systems beyond money.

A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. A platform, like a department store, offers stuff it did not create.