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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Kelly
Read between
May 4 - May 5, 2019
Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive.
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.
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.
Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect.
We extend our current perspective to the future, which in fact distorts the new to fit into what we already know.
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.
They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.
If something can be copied—a song, a movie, a book—and it touches the internet, it will be copied.
the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces.
A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts.
So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.
connected. Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Products encourage ownership, but services discourage ownership because the kind of exclusivity, control, and responsibility that comes with ownership privileges are missing from services.
switch from “ownership that you purchase” to “access that you subscribe to”
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).
the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated.
Harnessing the sharing of the crowd will often take you further than you think, and it is almost always the best place to start.
when you share earlier in the process, the learning and successes come earlier as well.
The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment.
Like Facebook, Amazon performs thousands of experiments a day, altering their filters to test A over B, trying to personalize the content in response to actual use by millions of customers.
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. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become.
the challenge and opportunity is to harness filtering technologies to cultivate higher quality attention at scale. Today, the bulk of the internet economy is fueled by trillions of hours of low-grade commodity attention.
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.
“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.”
A constant 24/7/365 monitoring of vital body measurements.
An interactive, extended memory of people you met, conversations you had, places you visited, and events you participated in.
A complete passive archive of everything that you have ever produced, wrote, or said.
Those who embrace the internet’s tendency to copy and seek value that can’t be easily copied (through personalization, embodiment, authentication, etc.) tend to prosper, while those who deny, prohibit, and try to thwart the network’s eagerness to copy are left behind
As long as we are online—which is almost all day many days—we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.
Superlatives were once rare—by definition—but now we see multiple videos of superlatives all day long, and they seem normal.
The good news may be that it cultivates in us an expanded sense of what is possible for humans, and for human life, and so extremism expands us. The bad news may be that this insatiable appetite for super-superlatives leads to dissatisfaction with anything ordinary.
Thus, even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially.
a world of supersmart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question.
