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The inevitable : understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future
Kelly K., Viking Press, New York, NY, 2016. 336 pp. Type: Book (978-0-525428-08-4)
Date Reviewed: Aug 31 2016

Kevin Kelly’s entire career has been focused on making sense of the future. From his intense personal pilgrimage as a young man, through his work at the Whole Earth Catalog and Review and his leadership of Wired magazine, he has cultivated a fusion of humanistic sensitivity, technical insight, and expository skill. This volume exploits these skills to provide a clear, nontechnical explanation of 12 consequences of the information technologies on which we increasingly depend. These technologies (such as ubiquitous cellphones, the Internet, and online resources such as Wikipedia) are so close to us that we have a hard time seeing the bigger picture. Kelly provides a compelling and optimistic vision of the forest as a whole and where it is growing.

The book is built around 12 verbs, expressed as present participles to convey a sense of continuous action. The book’s subtitle suggests that all 12 are “technological forces,” but the eleventh is almost entirely human in nature, the twelfth is a summary vision, and the others all manifest a deep interaction between human and machine information processing. Kelly argues that these processes build on one another to lead inevitably to a particular kind of future, one that he elaborates at the end of each chapter.

The first chapter, “Becoming,” describes the increasingly rapid change that characterizes the “technium” (Kelly’s term for the modern system of culture and technology), with a number of interesting anecdotes documenting how unobvious change is before it happens. “Cognifying” tracks the rapid growth of the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular the growing tendency to embed it in a wide range of products (such as clothes) that we do not usually associate with information technology. “Flowing” describes the revolution (both functional and economic) resulting from the shift from physical goods, which can belong to only one person at a time, to information, which can be copied quickly and inexpensively. “Screening” compares the impact of widely available visual displays with the effect of printing. Just as Gutenberg stimulated a shift from orality to literacy, we are now moving from literacy to more visual modes of understanding. “Accessing” documents the shift from possessing things (cars, books, software) to paying a periodic fee to have access to them on-demand, a shift made possible by the increasingly digital nature of goods (described in “Flowing”) and a ubiquitous computational fabric. “Sharing” engages the growth of the open-source movement, a process that starts with sharing material that once would have been considered proprietary, but grows into cooperating on a common goal, collaborating under a common organization, and a broader vision of emergent collectivism as a “third way” beyond free market individualism and centralized authority.

Some of these trends (flowing, accessing, and sharing) can overwhelm the individual with too much information. “Filtering” reviews technologies for finding the needle in this haystack. “Remixing” discusses the creative use of what filtering finds for us, as we move from invention to recombination as the model of authorship. (Students of the creative arts will insist that creativity has always drawn on antecedents, but not at the scale now common in digital media.) “Interacting” diminishes the distinction between author and audience, as various forms of virtual reality engage the participant in the creative process. “Tracking” moves beyond deliberate interaction to a world in which our systems monitor us continually and adjust to what they observe, and reviews the lifestream movement as an example of the potential and challenges of this capability.

So far, Kelly’s trends are firmly rooted in technology, as his subtitle promises. The eleventh trend, “Questioning,” has more to do with the human attitude with which we confront these changes. As accurate answers become less expensive and more abundant, the real value lies in asking the right questions, by people who are comfortable surfing on the uncertain crest of a wave of information that is constantly breaking beneath our feet. Kelly himself summarizes, “A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do; a good question is what humans are for.”

The final trend, “Beginning,” is an optimistic proposal that the technical trends the book has expounded are the beginning of a radical new mode of human existence that blends human and artificial cognition in a seamless intelligent organism. Unlike commentators who fear an AI takeover of humans, Kelly anticipates a “soft singularity” in which humans and machines evolve in complex and happy interdependence on one another.

In 1995, I reviewed Kelly’s first major book, Out of control, for Computing Reviews [1]. That volume anticipated the rise of decentralized mechanisms and distributed autonomy in man-made systems. A quarter of a century later, The inevitable documents the fulfillment of that prediction, and spells out in more detail where these trends are taking us.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  H. Van Dyke Parunak Review #: CR144718 (1611-0800)
1) Kelly, K. Out of control. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1994. CR Rev. No. 118577 (9502-0070).
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