The Inevitable
The author of The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly has been termed by some as the most interesting man in the world. He could well be. Kevin Kelly is one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, a co-founder of the Quantified Self Movement and if he says, “Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion.” I would take a close look.The Inevitable takes us on a journey around the way our lives are changing because of what technology is doing to us. There are twelve shifts that he talks about. He uses 12 terms like Becoming, Cognifying, Screening etc to describe behaviors that we are familiar with. I have demystified these terms. So let us look at the twelve shifts that are inevitable.
1. Becoming: Being in perpetual beta
Nothing is finished and complete. Everything is in perpetual beta. Products are becoming services. An automobile is a transportation service that is updated according to usage, feedback, competition and innovation. It has flexibility, customization, upgrades, connections and new benefits. Everyone is constantly on a learning curve. You won’t get time to master something and then upgrade.
2. Cognify: Adding artificial intelligence changes everything
Every major digital company has been using more and more of it. Facebook uses it to recognize faces with almost the same degree of accuracy as a human. Netflix knows everything about your movie viewing habit and can predict the movies (that have not yet been made) that you will like in future.https://youtu.be/pZwq8eMdYrY
3. Flowing: The constant flow of data across devices
Think of the internet as a giant copying machine that copies data, ideas and media as it passes from person to another. Think of the photos you share on social media. Or the jokes that you forward (and often receive the same joke from different friends). That is how we now expect our communication to happen in real time. We are used to streaming all our data (think RSS feeds or Twitter streams or Facebook timelines). Everything must flow.
4. Screening: Digital displays are everywhere
Think of the number of digital displays you view every day. We already have 5 billion digital screens and 3.8 billion more will be added this year. Reading time has tripled since 1980 and growing. 60 trillion pages exist on the web and growing every day. 80 million blog posts are composed daily. 36 million Kindles have been sold. Screening is inevitable.
5. Access: Ownership is getting replaced by access
Things are getting dematerialized. Things move quickly from being products to being services. If you have the app on your phone, you don’t need to own a car. We do not want to own anything as long as we can access it when needed.
6. Sharing: Volunteering our time and skills for others’ benefit
1.8 billion photos are shared every day. When other users share reviews we find it a useful guide with which to navigate our choices. A billion monthly users post videos on YouTube that competes with cinemas with big stars for your attention. People update and curate content on Wikipedia for free. This is what Clay Shirky refered to a “cognitive surplus”, where we donate our time and skills to make the world better.
7. Filtering: Making choices in a time of abundance
We now have a surplus of everything. Between last year and now you have access to 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets and 400,000 new products. We need help from curators, experts, friends and other users to narrow down this ocean to a consumable glass of water. That is called filtering.
8. Remixing: Building on what others have created
Innovators recombine simple earlier media genres with later complex genres to produce and unlimited number of new media genres. Think of all the tweets that are retweeted or modified or mixed and left to fly in the twitterverse. The number of vine video creators who have a million followers. Or the Instagram stars whose legions of followers add, subtract, modify and share these photos with annotations, comments and emoijis in an exponential way.
9. Interacting: We are learning to interact in new ways
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will change many worlds. As people learn to inhabit new worlds, it may be possible for a wheelchair-bound person to experience a safari in a distant land. Wearables are everywhere. We are interacting with our devices in our natural language. We have all learned to pinch our photos when we want to zoom in. We use our fingerprint to unlock our phones. This is the emerging language of interaction.
10. Tracking: You are being tracked all the time
We are tracking our steps with health trackers and apps on our phone. Shops track your buying patterns and movement inside the store. Website track your eyeballs. Your face is recognizable across millions of cameras in homes, offices, streets and public transport and certainly at airports. Machines have learned to recognize your face and correlate it your digital footprints.
11. Questioning: Before we say something is impossible, think again
A hyper connected world is interacting with each other and creating stuff that would be considered impossible. People are creating their own content (think social media) and consuming content created by amateurs. This in turn competes more successfully for our attention than slickly produced movies. Impossibilities are happening every day. People are sharing the most intimate details of their lives with strangers. A few years back we would have said this was impossible.
12. This is just the beginning
The technological shifts that we are seeing is only the beginning. We think we are teaching the net to do what we want by pointing and clicking. Maybe it is the machine that is teaching how to adapt to this massively wired, connected and always on world. We still have unwired parts of the planet. Every object we use is not smart. One thing is for sure, it is only the beginning. You may have known about these forces, even though you may not have used the same terms like "flowing" or "cognifying". When Kevin traces the evolution of technology and the subtle shifts in behavior, it does seem inevitable. Our future is being shaped by these twelve forces - that is for sure. When we know the trajectory of road ahead, we are better prepared, especially when we have a map handy. This book is that map. I loved reading it.----------Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduri