Rohan Roberts | 16 October 2018
“This book offers profound insight into what happens (soon!) when intelligence flows as easily into objects as electricity. – Chris Anderson
“Kevin Kelly has been predicting our technological future with uncanny prescience for years. Now he’s given us a glimpse of how the next three decades will unfold with The Inevitable, a book jam-packed with insight, ideas, and optimism. – Ernest Cline
“A quintessential work of technological futurism.” – James Surowiecki,
Technology is now a ubiquitous part of our lives. It is also developing at an exponential rate. It’s hard to keep up with current and future trends in technology and it’s easy to fall prey to paranoia, trepidation, and dread when contemplating the future. In his latest book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, Kevin Kelly offers an invigorating overview of the trends that will shape current and emerging technologies over the next three decades.
Instead of focusing on specific technologies, Kelly focuses on “forces” that will inevitably shape technology. He is at pains to point out to the reader that the forces shaping our future are not inevitable in the sense that they are preordained or irrefutable. Rather, they are inevitable because there is a bias in the nature of technology that tilts it in certain directions and not others. He points out that “all things being equal, the physics and mathematics that rule the dynamics of technology tend to favour certain tendencies.”
Kelly describes these forces by using verbs that represent the metachanges in our culture for the near future. They are broad strokes, he says, and are not meant to define any specific product. Culture is bent subtly by the fast-moving system of technology in a way that it amplifies each of the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then, Beginning. But he adds that these forces are trajectories not destinies.
By making an effort to understand these technologies it will be easier for us to be ahead of the curve, arrange our daily lives, manage our relationships, take control of how we work, play, and communicate, and thus reap maximum benefits from new technologies.
In perhaps his most riveting chapter, “Cognifying,” Kelly points out that whatever can be imbued with A.I. will be imbued with A.I. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognify. But things get more exciting when he talks about the arrival of the first genuine A.I. He envisions this as a superorganism – planetary in dimension, but thinly embedded and loosely connected. He says, “It will be hard to tell where its thoughts begin and ours end. Any device that touches this networked A.I. will share – and contribute to – its intelligence. When this emerging A.I. arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of all human intelligence past and present, it will difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?”
For those who aren’t aware of Kevin Kelly, he is a digital prophet and techno-fortune teller. He has spent decades analysing the meaning of technology in our lives and predicting its future direction. He helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. In his previous book, What Technology Wants, he speaks of the Technium the seventh kingdom of life or “the ecosystem of all invented things”. He posits that there are two domains on our planet: the domain of humans and the domain of machines. Both are governed by unknown forces but both evolve and both are in a race to survive.
However, in The Inevitable, he reassures the reader that “this is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety per cent of your coworkers will be unseen machines.”
In the book, he coins the word protopia. Our destination in the future is neither utopia nor dystopia. It’s protopia – a process of constant change; a state of becoming, rather than a destination.
Kelly points out that in this rapidly evolving world of new and emerging technology, all of us will be endless newbies simply trying to keep up. Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.
The Inevitable rivals Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in its ability to astound with mind-blowing facts and astounding statistics, and it rivals the intellectual depth of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity in its profundity of thought and clarity of prose.
This is an enlightening, prescient, and optimistic book. It is curated with excellent anecdotes and pertinent examples and is informed by Kelly’s vast experience of over four decades in the world of technology. For those seeking to makes sense of the world of accelerating change we live in, this book is a godsend.
