The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
This book was a fascinating read but a bit difficult at the same time. As much as Kevin tried to put some narrative structure around the themes it had no real narrative and as such it was hard to not drift mentally in places.
It was incredibly prescient and dense with insights. Every few pages you’d be stopped in your tracks by an ‘oh crap’ turn of phrase or a deeply interesting thought. I found myself reading it like I would read Walden or some other densely populated philosophy book – one thought at a time. I’d read a bit, ponder those thoughts and come back for more after those had been mentally digested.
What is the book about? At its lowest level it’s a survey of technology and the human relationship with technology projected forward. It’s not about specific technology but about the trends in technology. Even though it deals in trends Kevin finds a way to make those trends very specific, and, dare I say it, “Inevitable”.
On a deeper level because the book is about our human relationship with technology it is an expose of human nature. It delves deeply into what drives us and how we are dealing with this brave new world.
I have heard Kevin interviewed several times about this topic. He is well versed in his domain having been on the forefront of computer and internet revolution. It is a work of pattern matching. He takes all of these technologies and ties a thread between them showing the convergence points.
Kevin’s version of the technological future is a hopeful one. He admits the future where technology is emergent and causes the extinction of humans is a possibility, but a small probability. He sees a future where technology is a partner with humanity. Each doing the parts they are good at for the good of all.
He argues that the only reason we hear about dark, dystopian futures is because they are very entertaining.
“None of us have to worry about utopian paradoxes, because utopias never work. … I have not met a speculative utopia that I would want to live in. I’d be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining. They are also much easier to envision.”
The truth will be some form of struggle that lies unknown to us. What Kevin argues for is a protopia.
“Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress.”
“Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into a permanent and ceaseless present, without past or future. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear.”
Kevin has some useful detail around the rate of change. This is a hot topic currently with the technical intelligencia. If you look at the acceleration of change as it relates to humanity over history it has been exponentially accelerating. If you project that curve into the future the next, big, humanity-changing leap forward is in the next couple decades.
“The rate of change in recent times has been unprecedented, which caught us off guard. But now we know: We are, and will remain, perpetual newbies. We need to believe in improbable things more often.”
His message is essentially be ready for some uncomfortable technology driven change.
Some of the best cogitation in this book is around the emergence of artificial intelligence or AI. Kevin makes the point that we already have AI. My pocket calculator is smarter than I am, but at a very narrow task.
The real inflection point that everyone is talking about is the creation of a general AI that is smart enough to make new AI’s. At that point, which if you believe the change curves is in the next couple decades, you have to ask the question “Why would they need us?”
Kevin thinks that the next generation of AI will be to work with humans to use the strengths of both to solve new problems and answer new questions that neither humans nor AI could find on their own.
“In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.”
In the process he helpfully draws a connection between AI’s, Learning algorithms and big data. We are creating the sea of data that the AI’s need to grow. It’s a startling convergence of forces.
“The rocket engine is the learning algorithms but the fuel is the huge amounts of data.”
Kevin goes out of his way to differentiate between human minds and AI minds. They are both powerful but they are different. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The best use is to work together. “The taxonomy of minds must reflect the different ways in which minds are engineered with these trade-offs.”
AI’s don’t think better or faster per se, but they do think differently. And that will be the challenge; how to understand, appreciate and harness that difference.
Will robots take our jobs? Kevin thinks that yes entire classes of jobs will go away. The next wave of automation will start to nibble away at the white collar jobs that we thought were safe. But, he is characteristically optimistic about this as well stating; “Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.”
In places Kevin waxes almost poetic in his description of the innnevitable. For instance this is how he talks about the inevitable dematerialization of things: “We value not only the atoms in a thing, but their immaterial arrangement and design and, even more, their ability to adapt and flow in response to our needs. Formerly solid products made of steel and leather are now sold as fluid services that keep updating.”
He sees a third age where there are no longer any discrete tasks but everything flows in a jumble like surfing the web with multiple browser windows open – and our children are already starting to evolve to handle it. “Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time.”
“It seems a stretch right now that the most solid and fixed apparatus in our manufactured environment would be transformed into ethereal forces, but the soft will trump the hard.”
“The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.”
“This inevitable shift toward fluidity is now transforming almost every other aspect of society. The saga of music’s upgrade to the realm of fluidity will reveal where we are headed.”
I found particularly interesting his discourse on books. Right now books are a single unit with beginning, middle and end. In the future books will go the same way as music and film and will be recombined endlessly by book DJ’s to create something bigger. “But why bother calling these things books? A networked book, by definition, has no center and is all edges.”
Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” …
Kevin says that it is inevitable that all of our discrete things will migrate into a hyperlinked flow of information.
“More and more of our work and play will leave the isolated realm of individual ownership and migrate to the shared world of the cloud in order to take full advantage of AI and other cloud-based powers.”
To the point where you will start to lose your ‘self’ as you become immersed in the flow.
“I will be not just Me Plus, but We Plus.”
This seems a bit like a watered down group think or hive mind to me. I ask the question “Is this loss of self? Is this the singularity?”
And it will take over how problems are solved in business and society.
“Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.”
“The brute dumbness of the hive mind is the raw food ingredients that smart design can chew on.”
I think there will definitely be a backlash in the near future as people realize this emergence of a group mind is inevitable. The Luddites will start breaking machines with their hammers. “There is no turning the sharing off for long. Even the silence will be shared.”
And is it the death knoll of any real, deep thought?
“Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Maybe not. Kevin takes great pains to tell us that the coming, mind-blowing changes are neither good nor bad, but they are inevitable.
Is there anything that can’e be automated and taken over by robots in Kevin’s inevitable future? Yes. He is optimistic.
“Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it. You can’t simply duplicate someone else’s trust.”
And human experience. “The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied.”
The other thing that humans are very good at is asking questions. Each advance in science does not decrease the number of questions, on the contrary the more we discover the more questions we have. The machines will need us to ask the questions, especially the new questions that will emerge as we march towards the inevitable.
I read this book on Kindle and it is one of those books with a lot of bibliographical information at the end. When you are reading it the kindle tells you that you are 75% done and surprisingly you find yourself at the end of the book.
He wraps it up giving us a mental image of the earth from space at night. You see those almost organics lines of light reaching out from cities like roots or branches. It is easy to imagine the earth as a super organism that combines the powers of nature, of machines and of humans. Sounds a bit utopian to me.
This book is imminently quotable and you should read it with a notepad (digital or otherwise) because some of the mic-drop sentences have to be written down and saved. It is a book ahead of its time. It is a book that may not be read too broadly because of its density of thought. But these types of books tend to draw a bigger following over time as they are recognized for their prescience.
Chris Russell
October 31, 2016