The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Kelly co-founded and was the executive editor at Wired magazine where he now holds the title of Senior Maverick. He is widely known and respected for his acute perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and society.Because we are so immersed in the technologies that surround us, grasping the effects that they produce is not easy. We need someone like Kelly to highlight these effects to be able to understand their relevance.Pause and consider for a moment that most of the important technologies that will dominate our lives 30 years from now, have not been invented. (Pause.) Add to this the effect of the ongoing development of the technologies we use all the time.Not too long ago, all of us decided that we could not live another day without a smartphone. Only a decade ago this need would have dumbfounded us. Today, as I write this column, I am frustrated because the network is slow: but not too long ago we never had a network. Few imagined the miracle the web would become. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous,” Kelly observes.Add to this, that new technologies require endless upgrades. Even if you don’t actively choose to upgrade and so change the app you have become so used to using, continual upgrades are so essential to technology systems that they are now automatic. In the background, the machines we use upgrade themselves, slowly changing their features over time. This change happens gradually, so we don’t notice the evolution.But the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating continuously, as we can see from the latest new cell phone, computer or app. Soon we won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced. “No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless,” say KellyEvery technology we use is in a state “becoming”: it is never complete. We will remain in the newbie state for the rest of our lives.From any window onto the internet, your phone, tablet or computer, you can get an overwhelming variety of music and video, a constantly evolving encyclopaedia, weather forecasts, satellite images of any place on earth, up-to-the-minute news from anywhere in the world, road maps with driving directions, real-time share quotes, and the list goes on.Not too long ago, no one would have been silly enough to suggest this vision of the near future. After all, there simply wasn’t and still isn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a development.What has transpired one study found, is that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is a function of duty or passion. All the content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter was not created by their staff, but by their audience.“If we have learned anything in the past three decades,” Kelly reminds us, “it is that the impossible is more plausible than it appears.”It is hard to imagine anything that could change our lives as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI). This is a computer programmed not only to host and catalogue information, but more importantly to constantly learn from the information and arrive at new conclusions.In 2015, researchers at DeepMind published a report describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They didn’t teach the computer how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games. This is the profound difference AI offers.After half an hour, the computer missed only once every four times. By the 300th game it played, an hour later, it never missed. AIs like this one become smarter all the time, unlike human players.This is not a trend we might see in the future, it is here already. Consider IBM’s Watson, a computer built on AI that can continuously absorb bodies of information far too large for any human to absorb, let alone gather. This collection of ongoing knowledge is being put to medical use as a medical diagnostic tool. “Most of the previous attempts to make a diagnostic AI have been pathetic failures, but Watson really works,” says Kelly. Soon Watson will be the world’s best diagnostician.And the race for AI has only just begun in earnest. AI has attracted more than $18 billion in investments since 2009. Yahoo!, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since 2014. In 2014 alone more than $2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology.The business opportunities flowing from AI will take this form: find something that can be made better by adding AI to it.In the legal field, it could be used to uncover evidence from mountains of documents to discern inconsistencies between cases, and then have it suggest legal arguments. In the field of investment this is already happening. Companies such as Betterment or Wealthfront optimize tax strategies and balance holdings between portfolios. These are the sorts of things a professional money manager might do once a year, but the AI will do it every day, or every hour.AI can be added to laundry so that clothes “tell” the washing machines how they want to be washed and the wash cycle would adjust itself to the contents of each load.Rather than using AI to improve its search capacity, Google is using search to make its AI better. Each of the 3 billion queries that Google conducts each day is “teaching” the AI process. Consider what another 10 years of improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand times more data and a hundred times more computing resources, will do to Google’s unrivalled AI. “My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI,” Kelly suggests.There are twelve trends technological forces identified by Kelly in this very important book. Anyone who wishes to have a profound insight into the trends that will significantly impact our future, would do well to read ‘The Inevitable’ carefully.Readability Light ---+ SeriousInsights High +---- LowPractical High ---+- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of the soon to be released ‘Executive Update’.

This is a very exciting book to read, with all the possibilities of our future technology all laid out by Kevin Kelly, the co-founding editor of Wired magazine, whom sees the future with a glass half full approach.While many smart people from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have expressed their concerns over the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can overtake humans as the dominant force on Earth, Kelly argues that AI can actually help us become better at we do, whether it’s to become a better doctor, better pilots, better judges, even better teachers. Because the most crucial thing about thinking machines is that they will think differently,  just like AI will drive a car differently than our easily distracted minds or sees the mystery of the Dark Matter from completely different angles.Moreover, Kelly then elaborates that “In the real world—even in the space of powerful minds—trade-offs rule. One mind cannot do all mindful things perfectly well. A particular species of mind will be better in certain dimensions, but at a cost of lesser abilities in other dimensions.” This limitation also applies in AI, thus would then prevent them to become our dark overlords.For example, the AI that diagnose our illness will have completely different capabilities than the ones that guide a self-driving truck, the one that can evaluate our mortgages aren’t capable of safeguarding our houses, while the AI that can predict our weather pattern will have a different intelligence than the ones that can manufacture clothings.Kelly then list 25 possible types of AI’s “new minds” that are superior than ours but would be very beneficial for us humans without the risk of overpowering us. And these variations are just so powerful, an absolute goldmine.And that, in essence, is the bedrock argument of this book, which he then proceeded to discuss every possible technicalities in many areas of industries, covering every single future possibilities in every aspects of life, including the extend of the technology that could make the movie Minority Report a possibility, where the movie describe a not-so-distant future where surveillance are used to arrest criminals before they commit a crime.The book also explains the progress that are already happening in the world, such as the technology and concept behind the likes of Uber, AirBnb, Spotify, Netflix, Kindle, Wikipedia, Tesla, WeChat, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, among many others, to Torrent, Second Life, Nest smart thermostat, wearables such as Apple Watch, Bell’s bodycam, until cloud services, Bitcoin, “Big Data”, and Virtual Reality.All in all, the book state that this is just the beginning of the internet era, and that we need to create AIs that can think differently for specific tasks which would immensely help us in progressing as a society. And it has so far proven right, as the book was written in 2016 and today in 2021 a lot of what Kelly had said are already happening, for better and for worse.Immensely enlightening book, easily becomes one of my top favourites, very highly recommended.

Yes, the book has goods insights inside, but thoughts and guesses only. Has few and superficial data. It's like a speech or something quite like that. Worths the time? Yes, it worths the time if what you are looking for is a good conversation with someone with experience in the following matter: machine, human, internet, and the future of all that.

If you want to understand a world that’s being relentlessly digitised, you need to read this ASAP. The best tech book I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a few).

時間をインターネットが誕生した30年前に戻してやり直したら、Google、YoutubeやAmazonといった個別の起業が成功するとは限らないが、情報を検索したり、公開したりレビューしたりといった行為は、必然的に誰かがやる事になるだろう。この必然的な内容を理解すれば、30年後も予測出来るに違いない。本書のコンセプトはこのような感じで、なるほど面白いと思いました。ただいかんせん、たとえ話が長く、似た（同じ？）話の繰り返しが多く、途中から読むのが辛かったです（実際斜め読みした）着眼点は面白いのに、次は何かと頑張って読んで行くと「なんだ同じ話じゃん」というのが繰り返される感じです。もったいない。データをフリーで公開してくれたら、みんなが面白いところだけ抜粋して読みやすい本を作れるんでしょうけどね　←こんな未来が書いてあります。

This book contains some interesting ideas for how the future will be shaped and how current technological trends are shaping society. Some of the ideas seem quite possible, while I feel others may only be mere speculation.I did find the book hard going at times. While I can understand the lengthy descriptions of the future I did tire of them. I actually thought the book would be more technical than it was.Overall, not too bad a read if you are interested in how technology is shaping the future.

Um livro cheio de ideias que realmente fazem pensar.Surprendente, emocionante, profundamente provocador.Kevin Kelly sabe conectar as ideias que transformaram o futuro!