The Inevitable Read online

  Praise for The Inevitable

  “Anyone can claim to be a prophet, a fortune teller, or a futurist, and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he’s right. In this book, you’re swept along by his clear prose and unassailable arguments until it finally hits you: the technological, cultural, and societal changes he’s foreseeing really are inevitable. It’s like having a crystal ball, only without the risk of shattering.”

  —David Pogue, Yahoo Tech

  “This book offers profound insight into what happens (soon!) when intelligence flows as easily into objects as electricity.”

  —Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail

  “How will the future be made? Kevin Kelly argues that the sequence of events ensuing from technical innovation has its own momentum . . . and that our best strategy is to understand and embrace it. Whether you find this prospect wonderful or terrifying, you will want to read this extremely thought-provoking book.”

  —Brian Eno, musician and composer

  “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, author of Ready Player One

  “As exhilarating as the most outlandish science fiction novel, but based on very real trends. Kevin Kelly is the perfect tour guide for this life-changing future.”

  —Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing

  “Creating a fictional future is easy; Kevin Kelly makes a habit of doing the difficult by showing us where we’re actually going. The Inevitable is an eye-opening road map for what lies ahead. Science fiction is on its way to becoming science fact.”

  —Hugh Howey, author of Wool

  “Automatic must-read.”

  —Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz

  “Kevin Kelly knows technology can’t be stopped. . . . In his new book, he goes to great pains to make it all seem like a net positive. And maybe that’s healthy, since it’s coming no matter what.”

  —Newsweek.com

  “Kelly has seen trends come and go, and is a good filter for unwarranted hype, as a result. His book is an entertaining foray into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what it will mean for us.”

  —Forbes.com

  “Kelly’s decades-deep experience and straightforward style grounds the book in refreshing reality—it’s clear he’s not about to do backflips over the latest thing just because it’s new. Instead, Kelly breaks down how these technologies have evolved and charts where he thinks they’re heading next.”

  —Discovermagazine.com

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE INEVITABLE

  Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. His previous books include Out of Control, New Rules for the New Economy, Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants. Currently he is senior maverick at Wired and lives in Pacifica, California.

  ALSO BY KEVIN KELLY

  Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

  New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World

  Asia Grace

  What Technology Wants

  Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

  Published in Penguin Books 2017

  Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Kelly

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780698183650

  Cover design: Alex Merto

  Version_6

  CONTENTS

  Praise for The Inevitable

  About the Author

  Also by Kevin Kelly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  1. BECOMING

  2. COGNIFYING

  3. FLOWING

  4. SCREENING

  5. ACCESSING

  6. SHARING

  7. FILTERING

  8. REMIXING

  9. INTERACTING

  10. TRACKING

  11. QUESTIONING

  12. BEGINNING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was 13, my father took me to visit a computer trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was 1965 and he was excited by these room-size machines made by the smartest corporations in America, such as IBM. My father believed in progress, and these very first computers were glimpses of the future he imagined. But I was very unimpressed—a typical teenager. The computers filling the cavernous exhibit hall were boring. There was nothing to see except acres of static rectangular metal cabinets. Not a single flickering screen anywhere. No speech input, or output. The only thing these computers could do was print out rows and rows of gray numbers on folded paper. I knew a lot about computers from my avid reading of science fiction, and these were not real computers.

  In 1981 I got my hands on an Apple II computer in a science lab at the University of Georgia, where I worked. Even though it had a tiny green and black screen that could display text, I was not impressed by this computer either. It could do typing better than a typewriter, and it was a whiz with graphing numbers and keeping track of data, but it was not a real computer. It was not rearranging my life.

  My opinions totally changed a few months later when I plugged the same Apple II into a phone line with a modem. Suddenly everything was different. There was an emerging universe on the other side of the phone jack, and it was huge, almost infinite. There were online bulletin boards, experimental teleconferences, and this place called the internet. The portal through the phone line opened up something both vast and at the same time human scaled. It felt organic and fabulous. It connected people and machines in a personal way. I could feel my life jumping up to another level.

  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 the three decades since then, this technological convergence between communication and computation has spread, sped up, blossomed, and evolved. The internet/web/mobile system has moved from the fringes of society (where it was pretty much ignored in 1981) to the center stage of our modern global society. In the past 30 years the social economy based on this technology has had its ups and downs and seen its heroes come and go, but it is very clear there have been large-scale trends governing what has happened.

  These broad historical trends are crucial because the underlying conditions that birthed them are still active and developing, which strongly suggests that these trends will continue to increase in the next few decades. There is nothing on the hor
izon to decrease them. Even the forces we might think could derail them, like crime, war, or our own excesses, also follow these emerging patterns. In this book I describe a dozen of these inevitable technological forces that will shape the next 30 years.

  “Inevitable” is a strong word. It sends up red flags for some people because they object that nothing is inevitable. They claim that human willpower and purpose can—and should!—deflect, overpower, and control any mechanical trend. In their view, “inevitability” is a free will cop-out we surrender to. When the notion of the inevitable is forged with fancy technology, as I do here, the objections to a preordained destiny are even more fierce and passionate. One definition of “inevitable” is the final outcome in the classic rewinding thought experiment. If we rewound the tape of history back to the beginning of time and reran our civilization from the start again and again, a strong version of inevitability says that, no matter how many times we reran it, every time we end up with teenagers tweeting every five minutes in 2016. That’s not what I mean.

  I mean inevitable in a different way. There is bias in the nature of technology that tilts it in certain directions and not others. All things being equal, the physics and mathematics that rule the dynamics of technology tend to favor certain behaviors. These tendencies exist primarily in the aggregate forces that shape the general contours of technological forms and do not govern specifics or particular instances. For example, the form of an internet—a network of networks spanning the globe—was inevitable, but the specific kind of internet we chose to have was not. 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. Telephony—long-distance electrically transmitted voice messages—was inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The generic form of a four-wheeled vehicle was inevitable, but SUVs were not. Instant messaging was inevitable, but tweeting every five minutes was not.

  Tweeting every five minutes is not inevitable in another way. We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them. These days it takes us a decade after a technology appears to develop a social consensus on what it means and what etiquette we need to tame it. In another five years we’ll find a polite place for twittering, just as we figured out what to do with cell phones ringing everywhere. (Use silent vibrators.) Just like that, this initial response will disappear quickly and we’ll see it was neither essential nor inevitable.

  The kind of inevitability I am speaking of here in the digital realm is the result of momentum. The momentum of an ongoing technological shift. The strong tides that shaped digital technologies for the past 30 years will continue to expand and harden in the next 30 years. These apply to not just North America, but to the entire world. Throughout this book I use examples from the United States because readers will be more familiar with them, but for each I could have easily found a corresponding example in India, Mali, Peru, or Estonia. The true leaders in digital money, for example, are in Africa and Afghanistan, where e-money is sometimes the only functioning currency. China is way ahead of everyone else in developing sharing applications on mobile. But while culture can advance or retard the expression, the underlying forces are universal.

  After living online for the past three decades, first as a pioneer in a rather wild empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. The daily glitter of high-tech novelty rides upon slow currents. The roots of the digital world are anchored in the physical needs and natural tendencies of bits, information, and networks. No matter what geography, no matter what companies, no matter what politics, these fundamental ingredients of bits and networks will hatch similar results again and again. Their inevitability stems from their basic physics. In this book I endeavor to expose these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring trends in the next three decades.

  Not all of this shift will be welcomed. Established industries will topple because their old business models no longer work. Entire occupations will disappear, together with some people’s livelihoods. New occupations will be born and they will prosper unequally, causing envy and inequality. The continuation and extension of the trends I outline will challenge current legal assumptions and tread on the edge of outlaw—a hurdle for law-abiding citizens. By its nature, digital network technology rattles international borders because it is borderless. There will be heartbreak, conflict, and confusion in addition to incredible benefits.

  Our first impulse when we confront extreme technology surging forward in this digital sphere may be to push back. To stop it, prohibit it, deny it, or at least make it hard to use. (As one example, when the internet made it easy to copy music and movies, Hollywood and the music industry did everything they could to stop the copying. To no avail. They succeeded only in making enemies of their customers.) Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive.

  A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better. My intent in this book is to uncover the roots of digital change so that we can embrace them. Once seen, we can work with their nature, rather than struggle against it. Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs. It may be against our initial impulse, but we should embrace the perpetual remixing of these technologies. Only by working with these technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer. I don’t mean to keep our hands off. We need to manage these emerging inventions to prevent actual (versus hypothetical) harms, both by legal and technological means. We need to civilize and tame new inventions in their particulars. But we can do that only with deep engagement, firsthand experience, and a vigilant acceptance. We can and should regulate Uber-like taxi services, as an example, but we can’t and shouldn’t attempt to prohibit the inevitable decentralization of services. These technologies are not going away.

  Change is inevitable. We now appreciate that everything is mutable and undergoing change, even though much of this alteration is imperceptible. The highest mountains are slowly wearing away under our feet, while every animal and plant species on the planet is morphing into something different in ultra slow motion. Even the eternal shining sun is fading on an astronomical schedule, though we will be long gone when it does. Human culture, and biology too, are part of this imperceptible slide toward something new.

  At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.

  Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means 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. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

  This shift toward processes also means ceaseless change is the fate for everything we make. We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs. In the next 30 years we will continue
to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continuously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear. Whether it is a driverless car or one you drive, this transportation service is packed with flexibility, customization, upgrades, connections, and new benefits. A shoe, too, is no longer a finished product, but an endless process of reimagining our extended feet, perhaps with disposable covers, sandals that morph as you walk, treads that shift, or floors that act as shoes. “Shoeing” becomes a service and not a noun. In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming.

  Upon this relentless change all the disruptions of modernity ride. I’ve waded through the myriad technological forces erupting into the present and I’ve sorted their change into 12 verbs, such as accessing, tracking, and sharing. To be more accurate, these are not just verbs, but present participles, the grammatical form that conveys continuous action. These forces are accelerating actions.

  Each of these 12 continuous actions is an ongoing trend that shows all evidence of continuing for at least three more decades. I call these metatrends “inevitable” because they are rooted in the nature of technology, rather than in the nature of society. The character of the verbs follows the biases present in the new technologies, a bias all technologies share. While we creators have much choice and responsibility in steering technologies, there is also much about a technology that is outside of our control. Particular technological processes will inherently favor particular outcomes. For instance, industrial processes (like steam engines, chemical plants, dams) favor temperatures and pressures outside of human comfort zones, and digital technologies (computers, internet, apps) favor cheap ubiquitous duplication. The bias toward high pressure/high temperature for industrial processes steers places of manufacturing away from humans and toward large-scale, centralized factories, regardless of culture, background, or politics. The bias toward cheap ubiquitous copies in digital technologies is independent of nationality, economic momentum, or human desire, and it steers the technology toward social ubiquity; the bias is baked into the nature of digital bits. In both of these examples, we can get the most from the technologies when we “listen” to the direction the technologies lean, and bend our expectations, regulations, and products to these fundamental tendencies within that technology. We’ll find it easier to manage the complexities, optimize the benefits, and reduce the harm of particular technologies when we align our uses with their biased trajectory. The purpose of this book is to gather those tendencies now operating in the newest technologies and to lay their trajectories out before us.