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

by Kevin Kelly

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.

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

I call these metatrends “inevitable” because they are rooted in the nature of technology, rather than in

the nature of society.

Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.

The momentum of technologies pushes us to chase the newest, which are always disappearing beneath the advent of the next newer thing, so satisfaction continues to recede from our grasp.

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.

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.

The “pro” in protopian stems from the notions of proc...

But if we have learned anything in the past three decades, it is that the impossible is more plausible than it appears.

What we all failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions.

so the web of 2050 will be informed by the context of the past.

It will be a low-level constant presence like electricity: always around us, always on, and subterranean. By 2050 we’ll come to think of the web as an ever-present type of conversation.

Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an innovator in 2016? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud.

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 last 30

To begin with, there’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter.

This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need.

Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn’t need to generate the electricity; they bought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that AI was going to be “a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing. . . . We are applying it across all our products, be it search, be it YouTube and Play, etc.” My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.

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.

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.

We need AIs to tell us who we are.

To understand how robot replacement will happen, it’s useful to break down our relationship with robots into four categories. 1. Jobs Humans Can Do but Robots Can Do Even Better

2. Jobs Humans Can’t Do but Robots Can

3. Jobs We Didn’t Know We Wanted Done

4. Jobs Only Humans Can Do—at First

Here are the Seven Stages of Robot Replacement: 1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do. 2. [Later.] OK, it can do a lot of those tasks, but it can’t do everything I do. 3. [Later.] OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often. 4. [Later.] OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks. 5. [Later.] OK, OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do. 6. [Later.] Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more! 7. [Later.] I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now. [Repeat.]

This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.

Today the prime units are flows and streams. We constantly monitor Twitter streams and the flows of posts on our Facebook wall. We stream photos, movies, and music. News banners stream across the bottom of TVs. We subscribe to YouTube streams, called channels. And RSS feeds from blogs.

Unless it occurs in real time, it does not exist. The corollary—and this is important—is that in order to operate in real time, everything has to flow.

The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud.

A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.

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.

A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated at the time of the transaction. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, and warehoused. A generative cannot be faked or replicated. It is generated uniquely, for that particular exchange, in real time.

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

IMMEDIACY

PERSONALIZATION

INTERPRETATION

AUTHENTICITY

ACCESSIBILITY

EMBODIMENT

PATRONAGE

DISCOVERABILITY

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.

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.