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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Kelly
Read between
June 30 - October 30, 2018
We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.
In our new era, processes trump products.
We’ll find it easier to manage the complexities, optimize the benefits, and reduce the harm of particular technologies when we align our uses with their biased trajectory.
Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades.
When we imagine a better future, we should factor in this constant discomfort.
Shutting down civilization is actually hard.
In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.
“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.”
We don’t know what the full taxonomy of intelligence is right now.
Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.
Every achievement in AI redefines that success as “not AI.”
The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity.
The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated.
To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings.
We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone.
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.
You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.
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.
What counts are not the number of copies but the number of ways a copy can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, and enlivened by other media. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. What counts is how well the work flows.
You might think of this new medium as books we watch or television we read.
Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too.
Overly optimistic (and written before Brexit and Trump).
these are more cheerful and sunny than the ones yesterday.
If smartly connected, a crowd of amateurs can be as good as the average solo professional.
the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.
Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership.
decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.
the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.
“No one is as smart as everyone.”
countless small-scale collectivist groups have tried this decentralized operating mode in which the executive function is not held at the top. The results have not been encouraging; very few communes have lasted longer than a few years.
“Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.”
while top down is needed, not much of it is needed. The brute dumbness of the hive mind is the raw food ingredients that smart design can chew on.
we are unlikely to get the level of expertise we want with no experts at all.
Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think.
it becomes as easy to find a particular niche interest as to find a bestseller.
a magnet for huskers and scams.
hucksters?
It was safer to lend money to the peasants in Bolivia than to the government of Bolivia.
Harnessing the sharing of the crowd will often take you further than you think, and it is almost always the best place to start.
in collaborative work when you share earlier in the process, the learning and successes come earlier as well.
You could, if so inclined, read more Greek texts in the original Greek than the most prestigious Greek nobleman of classical times.
It would consume more than a year’s worth of our attention to merely preview all the new things that have been invented or created in the previous 24 hours.
This is the curse of the postscarcity world: We can connect to only a thin thread of all there is.
From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention.
a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
“There has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.”
The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which
We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.
real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable.
it usually took a person only four minutes to completely rewire the feet/arm circuits in their brain. Our identities are far more fluid than we think.
this is the destiny of many of the constant streams of data flowing from our bodily sensors. They won’t be numbers; they will be new senses.
