The Inevitable
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read. It forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years. Whether or not these 12 forces are 12 or 10 or 15, whether or not they are the true ones, do not matter. What make this book a “must read” are its approach and the enlightenment on our world trends you get from its reading.
Here are the 12 forces:
- Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions
- Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud
- Flowing: or flooding: Depending on unstoppable streams in real-time for everything
- Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens. 3.8 billion screens are sold each year.
- Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets, to one where instead we will have access to services at all times.
- Sharing: Collaboration at mass-scale. Kelly writes, “On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10.”
- Filtering: Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires
- Remixing: Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombine in all possible ways
- Interacting: Immersing ourselves inside our computers to maximize their engagement
- Tracking: Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers
- Questioning: Promoting good questions are far more valuable than good answers
- Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix
All of the chapters are not of the same importance and the same metal, and some points can be hardly criticized (such as the fascination for the VR (virtual reality)) but the whole book deserves to be analyzed carefully.
The main points I get from this book are:
- There was never a better time to create a company. Just do it!
- All by AI, AI everywhere , AI for all. This is the most impressive part of the book (Cognifying): Think AI, AI is no more a $ zillions projects led by a bunch of MIT PHD, it is becoming a commodity as electricity was and you can re-think your common practice or software by adding some AI.
- Economy trend is now more on accessing than on possessing. As Kelly says: the biggest taxi company (Uber) owns no taxi.
- Dataflow is our universe (Flowing, Screening, accessing…). During 5 centuries we lived in the booking-age, we are now in the flowing-screening age with marvelous effects and spurious diseases (Wikipedia as the pedants’ empire, fake news…). Mastering this new world for knowledge and information is one of our challenges.
So read this, and Change!