The Inevitable Quotes

“processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

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

“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. They simply turned their cloud-based AI loose on an Atari game such as Breakout, a variant of Pong, and it learned on its own how to keep increasing its score. A video of the AI’s progress is stunning. At first, the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After a half hour it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into it, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human players had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the game’s creators had never imagined. At the end of several hours of first playing a game, with no coaching from the DeepMind creators, the algorithms, called deep reinforcement machine learning, could beat humans in half of the 49 Atari video games they mastered.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“At my “office” I wear an AR visor on my forehead. The visor is a curved band about hand width wide that is held a few inches away from my eyes for extra comfort during daylong use. The powerful visor throws up virtual screens all around me. I have about 12 virtual screens of all sizes and large data sets I can wrestle with my hands. The visor provides enough resolution and speed that most of my day I am communicating with virtual colleagues. But I see them in a real room, so I am fully present in reality as well. Their photorealistic 3-D avatar captures their life-size likeness accurately. My coworkers and I usually sit at a virtual table in a real room while we work independently, but we can walk around each other’s avatar. We converse and overhear each other just as if we are in the same room. It is so convenient to pop up an avatar that even if my real coworker is on the other side of the real room, we’ll just meet in the AR rather than walk across the gap.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“the value of our attention has been remarkably stable over 20 years.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“So much more of our routines and infrastructure remains to be liquefied,”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“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

“The more unlikely the field, the more powerful adding AI will be.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“It’s an upgrade arms race.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too. Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click, making it easier to eliminate a falsehood than to post a falsehood in the first place.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

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

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

“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

“The internet could have been commercial rather than nonprofit, or a national system instead of international, or it could have been secret instead of public.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Greater personalization requires greater transparency. Absolute personalization (vanity) requires absolute transparency (no privacy). If I prefer to remain private and opaque to potential friends and institutions, then I must accept I will be treated generically, without regard to my specific particulars. I’ll be an average number.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we’ve never had before. This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

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

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

“More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future