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

When I saw that Mr. Kelly was a founder of the magazine Wired, I knew that I wanted to read this book. I admire Wired because I think it looks carefully at technology and thinks for itself, which I find admirable. So, what does the book say?The author looks back over the 30 years that he's had his ringside seat, considers what he's seen and predicted over that 30 years and then he projects forward over the next 30 years to see where he thinks technology will take us. He clearly states that he considers the positive aspects of future change, not the negative aspects. The author predicts that certain technological trends or impulses are inevitable, not specific outcomes. So, don't expect to see predictions of a world free of war or cures for all cancers, that's not what he views as the what he terms "bias" of technological change. He identifies 12 of these biases and discusses how they have played out over the 30 years that he's been observing them and how he thinks they'll evolve over the next 30 years. For instance, he views telephony as inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The internet was inevitable, but the specific form of internet that we presently have was not.I'll touch on a few of the 12 and encourage you to read the book for the full observations. Flowing - the book describes the internet as the world's largest copying machine. Information in many forms is copied and distributed. usually for free. The industrial revolution brought analog copies of information such as music. These copies were exact and cheap. The internet brings digital music - exact and free. This affects value propositions and law, which causes change. He considers how this change and looks for responses to this change. Trust may become even more valuable.Screening - where once we may have been people who read books and did things "by the book," the author argues that we are now people of the screen (the computer screen). People of the Screen live "in a world of constant flux." Paperback at pg. 88. As he says, "truth is not delivered by authors and authorities, but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves." Pg. 88. I'll let you decide how this may be playing out in society today.Questioning - Wikipedia was a great shock to the author. When Wikipedia began, Mr. Kelly could not believe that it would be anything other than an abject failure. As he says, "I knew from my own 20-year experience that you could not rely upon what you read from a random stranger.... I believed that an aggregation of random contributions would be a total mess" Pg. 269. The ability to many people to self-organize through the internet a reasonably coherent body of information was eye opening. "I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years." Pg. 274.The author describes "becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing,interacting, tracking, questioning, and beginning" as areas in which change is inevitable. In all of these I find the "tracking" most troubling. But, like the author, with the passage of time, I may find my mind changed a lot.I encourage you to read the book and see if it challenges your mind.

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’.