The Inevitable Quotes

“We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia—highlights, notes, questions, musings. The”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“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.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness. As AIs develop, we might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them. Our most premium AI services will likely be advertised as consciousness-free. Nonhuman”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” So”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook’s remarkable success.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified. The”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The problem with constant becoming (especially in a protopian crawl) is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion. Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect. More”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “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.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“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. We’ll”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We can’t save it up or hoard it. We have to spend it second by second, in real time.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“I have not met a speculative utopia I would want to live in. I’d be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Imagine that seven out of ten working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined. It”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We are constantly surprised by things that have been happening for 20 years or longer. I”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of—stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper—won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“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. In”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Around 2002 I attended a private party for Google—before its IPO, when it was a small company focused only on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“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. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Yet most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by nonhuman-like programs. The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains that can, for example, translate any language into any other language, but do little else. Drive a car, but not converse. Or recall every pixel of every video on YouTube, but not anticipate your work routines. 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.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big so fast that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“etc.” My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future