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

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

• 
  Mario the lone bookwolf

  We´ll seem to future humans in the 4th, 5th, etc. millennia like the primitive, bigoted, medieval maniacs we are jovially condescending looking down at from our constrained perspective.
  
  Kellys´ main focus lies on the optimistic large scale development, extrapolations, and hypotheses about how all aspects together might develop and not on detailed descriptions of technobabble or one poor, isolated technology standing alone without context to the others. That´s a creative approach, as many others separate the topics and just extrapolate it a bit here and there, but Kellys´work is bursting with interdisciplinarity and meta context, drawing real sceneries, analyzing trends that hopefully will come true.
  He puts the main focus on creating his vision of better options for each, to him most important, aspect of society, described in chapters as:
  
  Becoming: upgrading instead of the usual consumer culture
  Cognifying: Cloud AI
  Flowing: everything, everywhere in real-time
  Accessing: a universal basic income for everyone
  Sharing: and its growing community
  Filtering: Better understanding through personalization
  Remixing: a mixture of DIY, creative commons, reverse engineering, fab labs, citizen scientists
  Interacting: becoming cyborgs, in the beginning stage just in social networks
  Tracking: great for optimization in democracies, true horror in dictatorships
  Questioning: changing the culture of how we learn, research, teach
  Beginning: like the global grit necessary for using the different renewable energy sources everywhere, just with humans. Add some sustainability, distributive justice, and environmental protection to the mix and the future utopia is finished to get served.
  
  Some of the 12 categories are often seen alpha tropes in sci-fi and fantasy likewise so that the book could be used in a creative writing brainstorming session because it gives so many ideas, storylines, and premises and it´s truly a bit of an optimistic manual towards a brighter future. It´s also not avoiding the real-life applications that are essential, but get unfortunately often forgotten in other works that just think about the technical and theoretical aspects but don´t mention that it has to be integrated into the current political and economic systems.
  
  It´s perfectly showing that each aspect is important because they depend on each other and the full vision can´t unfold if one key element is missing.
  
  Kelly is an amazing guy, interested in so many fields, quantify self, his work at Wired magazine, all species foundation, and his other book I want to read, Out of control, seems to follow a similar interdisciplinary path, according to what reviewers say about it.
  
  A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergin...
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
• 
  Marcus

  Part I - The Inspiring Part
  While I have mixed opinions of many of the ideas in The Inevitable, this particular paragraph stuck out as insightful and, for anyone interested in building products, potentially inspirational for some good ideas.
  
  "Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn't need to generate the electricity; they bought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will “cognify.“ There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. 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."
  
  Thinking about this at a surface level is pretty exciting. Kelly also talks about how the general feeling in Silicon Valley in the 90’s was that the gold rush had passed and that everything good had already been done. He believes that we’re again in a lull where it may feel like everything has been done but that in fact we are on the cusp of another flowering of ideas and technology.
  
  Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as he makes it sound. The way he talks about AI as if it were a simple commodity glosses over a lot of really big problems that aren't going to go away easily. Yes, you can rent a lot of powerful machines from Amazon or Google and install TensorFlow on them, but for any AI to work well, you need a LOT of data to train a model. Gathering data specific to a problem, normalizing it and using it in a way that gives results that are good more than 50% of the time for any given problem is very hard. If it was easy, every bit of software we use today would already have AI.
  
  That said, the idea is exciting. A lot of problems that seemed "solved" are now ripe for the taking. If Kelly is right, and I think he is, there will be a lot of people who are either going to have to learn to incorporate AI into their products or watch helplessly as they are disrupted by smaller competitors who have products that are less feature-rich but seem almost magical in comparison.
  
  What if your todo list could tell you what you're forgetting to add to the list based on your other tasks? What if your shopping list could suggest recipes based on your list or ingredients that would go well with what you're buying? Maybe it could even suggest your whole shopping list after it learned what you usually buy and how often you buy it.
  
  Those are maybe the two simplest examples of how adding some IQ to an existing software could drastically change it. Niche market products and software that runs internet of things hardware are already evolving to incorporate AI in surprising ways. Kelly explores some of these in his book but the best ideas are yet to come. The more I think about it, the more exciting it is.
  
  Part II - A General Review of the Book
  
  I felt uncomfortable for large portions of the book. Kelly is, to no one’s surprise, an unabashed technologist. Even thought the title of the book is “Inevitable,” I get the clear impression that he’s not writing about what will happen as much as about what he hopes to happen. In his ideal world screens would be much more prevalent than they are now. Content would flow between them as we move between home, transportation, and work. User created content becomes more widely distributed, remixed and repurposed with micropayments flowing freely between consumers and remixers and eventually compensating original creators. Curators, some human, some AI trained by humans thrive in a world where taste and work drive the majority of humanity’s leisure time. Despite having every book ever written available in the cloud, many people move will move from consuming deeply to flitting from thing to thing to satisfy their every whim. In the physical world, ownership will wane as renting and sharing increases. This means everything from clothing to transportation to gadgets and living spaces. Everything from the food you eat to the number of breaths you take a day can and will be tracked and this information will be available to share at will to those who can process it either to provide insight or to sell you more things.
  
  It’s quite the vision of hyper-pervasive technology in a hyper-connected world.
  
  I appreciate Kelly’s optimism. His excitement is contagious. The problem is, and maybe this is just my resistance to the inevitable, that this all hinges on such an extreme level of consumption that it makes even today’s cell phone obsessed culture seem moderate. It comes at the expense of thoughtfulness, environmental stewardship, mindfulness and tangible, real world connection and creation.
  
  It reminds me of the story of the islander who sits on the beach all day eating coconuts. One day he’s approached by someone who tells him he should stop being so lazy and sell the coconuts. “Why?” He asks. “So you can make some money.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can get rich and build a big house and have servants.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can sit on the beach and eat coconuts all day.”
  
  What are we looking for in this hyper-connected utopia? If all the connectivity only leads to consumption, entertainment and away from creativity and actual human connection, it hardly seems worth it.
• 
  Anders Brabaek

  
  This is not a good book
  
  Summary:
  Kelly introduces the technological forces he believes will shape the future. These are;
  AI/artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, robotics, the scalable cloud, virtual and augmented reality, omnipresent screens, quantified-self technologies, and social media.
  
  Rather than using the headers I have used above, Kelly is taking outset in what impact these technologies will have. For the non-techie, that might provide a look into certain possibilities in the near future. For the techie, there should be nothing new.
  
  It seems that Kelly has taken the above technologies and described their current trajectory. He is thinking that this will be for the next 30 years. I believe that it will be much much faster. Why: because Kelly explores nothing which hasn’t already been invented, even if some of it is still in its infancy. So, putting aside that there will surely be disruptive technologies, the picture Kelly is drawing will likely be possible to some people.
  
  Kelly is very optimistic while at the same time ignoring the real opportunities.
  
  For instance, he describes how machine learning, AI and robots will take over a lot of the jobs we have today. Kelly then imagine that we will move on to the next thing which will be much better, which then again will be replaced, and we will move onto the next which will be much better...
  Now really?
  This will surely sometimes be the case, but is this laissez faire, everything will naturally work out for the best, attitude a healthy attitude. Or are we in the midst of a revolution which requires us to take a lot less mindless attitude for it to spell progress for the general population?
  As an example, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. When self driving cars and robots rapidly slice that requirement in half or more, will these truck drivers rapidly acquire new skills which can be used in other businesses? And what businesses? It will not be radiologist’s, secretaries, translators, system administrators, car salesman etc. because those jobs will dwindle as well. Even for jobs such as composer, actor or musicians there is uncertainty. For many people, the algorithms will not look like progress, but instead, unbeatable competition, much worse than what the competition from e.g. East Asian workers vs western countries workers.
  
  There certainly are reasons to be optimistic. For my part, I wouldn’t focus on the games, toys and entertainment as Kelly does, but the possibilities in medicine, and efficient diagnosis to a much larger part of the world population. Combining machine learning, AI, big data and the quantified self techs will lead to massive innovation in health. Much of it only to the rich but there will also be landslide changes for the general population. Just as in healthcare and in medicine, there are obvious opportunities in education.
  
  Likewise, these technologies can, if we make an effort, help us in dealing with challenges such global warming. They can even be an efficient vehicle for understanding and dealing with social issues – even if - as I suspect, there will be forces working against such potential benefits, because it will require social reforms probably too challenging to most mindsets.
  

  
  Social Media
  If Kelly only for a second he manages to digress to one of the challenges of the technological themes he is discussing, he diverts with solutions which are unlikely because there are few forces promoting them. E.g. he manages to discuss the filter bubble* in an absurdly superficial way, and while explaining the concept without ever really acknowledging the reality of the problem, he closes the issue with something like there need to be put code in place which ensures we aren’t completely filter-bubbled.
  *(A filter bubble: a result of an algorithm which selectively guesses what a user would like to see based on information about the user making users becoming separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.)
  
  Think! What would that entail? Pushing info on fx global warming, and racial inequality to angry (stupid) white men who are seriously contemplating voting for Trump, or pushing the reality these people are encountering on google and facebook to people like me who takes it as a scientific fact that they are driven by fear, bigotry and ignorance?
  
  Kelly argues that technological impact means that there will produced much more individualized entertainment to suit anyone’s personal preferences. Maybe, for my part I am not so convinced that this emphasize on individuality and individual preferences is healthy for the individual or the society.
  
  We are social creatures, and I think there is a real possibility that this “me” focus undermine our need for meaning outside our ‘egoistic self’, and establishes a climate of solitude and social inaptitude.
  
  Obviously there is being produced much more media content today than ever before and this evolution will continue. But with regard to quality, the answer is less obvious. Jaron Lanier in his preface to his book You are not a gadget, writes, “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself”.
  The media produced by people who are sharing to become, appears increasingly overwhelming compared to those who share because they have something to share.
  
  Privacy
  Kelly also acknowledges that we are looking at a future with ever less privacy. He still manages to make a positive spin on this as he believes that this lack of privacy also pertains to public institutions and corporations. As examples, he is point to Snowden and similar cases.
  I believe he is wrong; what we are seeing now I a rapid change in security technologies. (For the technically inclined, we are moving from perimeter security to where the identity is the security perimeter). This will make future “Snowdens”/whistleblowers a lot less likely.
  
  It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but if we are to make any predictions about the future of privacy, it is that the individual will have less privacy, and the largest corporations and organizations more privacy – such is the nature in a world where every single piece of information is individually encrypted and protected by machine learning!
  

  
  In my perspective, Kelly is doing us a disservice with his mindless optimism dulling people into sleep. As individuals and as society, we need to think much deeper about what we want from technology rather than what technology wants – otherwise technology will rule and not to our general comfort.
  

  
  Books which touches the subject matter
  Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future (more nuanced than Kelly)
  Christopher Steiner: Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World The shallows (though dated this book will provide a much better idea about what these technologies entails than Kelly)
  The human perspective forgotten by Kelly:
  - Jaron Lanier: You Are not a Gadget
  - Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
  - Sherry Turkle: Reclaiming conversation
  - Carr: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
  
• 
  Charles Franklin

  This book both freaked me out and intrigued me because it showcased a future that blew my mind unlike any other book has before. Kevin Kelly presents a view of the future that is overly optimistic (despite my secret fear that robots will take all of our jobs and that every move will be tracked by a government agency that wants to control us). Kelly says that we shouldn't fight against the future, rather we should embrace. Yes, there will be more tracking. There will be more upgrades of the stuff we already have. There will be more robots. That doesn't mean we should live in fear, according to Kelly, or try to revert back to the past because of an unknown future. We should interact with it as best we can.
  
  Kelly discusses the different ways that he thinks the world will be different twenty, thirty, or even fifty years from now. For the most part, he steers clear of giving an exact timeline, but he does paint a picture of how he thinks the world will look and provides his rationale for thinking so. This was a particularly novel approach because Kelly focuses on the processes and trends rather than specific things. In short, he doesn't get caught up talking about the robots, he talks about what he thinks robots will be used for based on the trends that appearing today. Using his knowledge of technology and writing, this was an interesting and well-thought out journey.
  
  Overall, I enjoyed the ride, even though I was freaked out by it. I received the eBook by NetGalley, but plan to buy it in print because I think it's that important. If you're a fan of "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink, this book gives me the same vibe, although it's more about how we will use technology (especially IoT) in the future.
• 
  Atila Iamarino

  Depois de ler o
  What Technology Wants, qualquer coisa que o
  Kevin Kelly escrever, é leitura obrigatória para mim. Bastante coisa óbvia entre as tendências inevitáveis, justamente porque são inevitáveis, mas os desdobramentos futuros que ele dá são muito bons. Não mexeu com minha cabeça como o livro anterior mexeu, mas talvez porque eu jé esteja mais interado, mas muito bom de qualquer forma.
  
  As noções de conexões, relacionamentos pessoais facilitados pela tecnologia e principalmente de uso ubíquo de inteligência artificial são muito boas. O Kevin Kelly consegue passar pontos de vista bem atuais de tecnologia e até as questões de privacidade sem relevar pontos sérios e importantes, ao mesmo tempo em que não assume uma postura alarmista. O que é muito raro nessa área. Por exemplo, a maneira como ele coloca a perda de privacidade como inevitável mas voluntária, uma vez que todos queremos acesso aos benefícios como recomendações personalizadas, me deu uma noção muito mais realista e madura de como estamos mudando com a tecnologia.
• 
  Oleksandr Golovatyi

  
  Fast reading! (promo)
  
  Incredibly interesting book about the main directions of development of our civilization:
  1) Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions
  2) Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud
  3) Flowing: Depending on unstoppable streams in real-time for everything
  4) Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens
  5) Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets, to one where instead we will have access to services at all times.
  6) Sharing: Collaboration at mass-scale. Kelly writes, “On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10.”
  7) Filtering: Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires
  8) Remixing: Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombine in all possible ways
  9) Interacting: Immersing ourselves inside our computers to maximize their engagement
  10) Tracking: Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers
  11) Questioning: Promoting good questions are far more valuable than good answers
  12) Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix
  ----------------------
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• 
  Otis Chandler

  Kevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters to be worth reading, and a few not to be. I enjoyed the sections on AI and books. And sometimes just zooming out to get bigger perspective is engaging, which was the case for me in the sections on VR/AR and tracking. Much of the rest of the book seemed geared for people less technically savvy, which was my only complaint as it really drew the book out.
  
  There is a famous saying in software said by Marc Andreeson that "software is eating the world". Kelly predicts, I believe correctly, that the next phase of this will be AI:
  "It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial". Kelly's perspective here that while it might feel like innovation in technology is slowing to some, it is much more likely that we are on the brink of the next renaissance, and we will all be "taking X and adding AI", much as happened with electricity and then the internet.
  
  Kelly correctly identified the three key trends that are making AI an exciting space today: processing power (GPU's), data, and better algorithms. However he didn't dive more into the longest pole: how to get a lot more data than we have today - that seems to me to be the key. But cool to get an overview. He did address one of the big fears about automation that many people have today: will computers take all our jobs? The quick answer is yes, but we'll have new ones. This has already happened multiple times in history. I agree with this, but think the more interesting question is what will happen when we can provide most people the basics (food, water, shelter) for very little cost. This was predicted in Diamond Age, and
  the answer was "parking lots and chaos", and a lot of people with no purpose in life.
  
  I also greatly enjoyed the section on books, mostly because (1)
  Goodreads is mentioned (hey I have paternal pride), and (2) it talks about things we at Goodreads are working on. Such as, the ability to see other peoples notes:
  "Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow, we will be able to link passages." Well,
  here are my notes from this book!
  
  Another big idea that Kelly hits on that I think is big and inevitable is how each book will become networked, much as the WWW has. Once we have ability to have pointers into and out from each sentence of a book, the speed at which ideas will fly out of books will step function.
  
  
  In the goodness of time, as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books. Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book.
• 
  Craig

  I’m growing increasingly skeptical about the utility of William Gibson’s frequently quoted observation (quoted again in The Inevitable itself) that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Distribution speed is technological too. The “leveling” nature of the very technologies we’re discussing means that it’s increasingly difficult for anyone to gain a better vantage than anyone else. A more apt observation of Gibson’s (made also by other commentators) is that science fiction is less about the future than it is about the present. The world’s complexity is erecting a screen between the present and the future. For the better science fiction writers it’s a mirrored screen (they’re sporting their
  mirrorshades but the mirrors face inwards), but I’d say it’s a correlate not of science fiction writing in particular but of prediction more generally. And so Kevin Kelly’s new book, disguised in optimistic language about the future, is where readers can come to learn about…Kickstarter and the Pebble Watch and Kiva and the Netflix $1 million prize awarded in 2009.
  
  In his previous What Technology Wants Kelly made a good case that technological development has tendencies, if not outright direction. While everything in that previous book pointed to the word “inevitable”, from what I remember he was reluctant to use it. His elaboration was that mobile telephony and computation were inevitable while the iPhone in particular was not. My hope was that with a new book called “The Inevitable” he was finally ready to explore the largely implicit conclusion of his previous book and would provide a little more depth to his soft techno-deterministic argument. What is inevitability? But again it was spelled out via the iPhone.
  
  His twelve trends are hybrid sociological-technological—which doesn’t work as well as it sounds like it might. The fuzziness of the categories makes for better moments that rarely surpass wishy-washy philosophizing and harmless optimism. Meanwhile, the point of the proposition that mobile telephony is inevitable while the iPhone is not is to draw out the difference between a preordained kernel and all the contingencies which dress it up and give it shape. With all the attention on the (vaguely defined) inevitable, little attention is paid to the contingent. In a world of inevitability it’s the remainder, the part still up for grabs that’s most interesting; what’s ostensibly a mere aesthetic matter, contingency—the dressing—becomes a political matter. Here The Inevitable does not limit itself to inevitability alone, and despite Kelly being so up on future trends it’s hard to imagine a more unsuitable tour-guide to the aesthetic: Creative merit here equates largely to popularity, novelty, and awesome complexity—especially that arising from the crowd.
  
  While I wouldn’t dare take offense to his excitement over the falling entry barriers for the would-be creator, over the democratization of production, in championing this Kelly frequently conflates technical expertise (which technology is drastically lowering entry barriers to) with aesthetic maturation (which technology is not enhancing—which will diminish if we continue this conflation). “Today anyone with a phone—which is everyone—can instantly take a photo that is a hundred times better in most dimensions than one taken by a professional a century ago.” “It is a thousand times easier today to write and publish a book than it was a thousand years ago.” The physical technological difficulty of publication should not be equated with the honed senses required to write a book worth reading.
  
  Along similar lines, Kelly introduces the thematic word “fungibility” in a peculiar way a number of times throughout the book, claiming that a lot of great output is going to come from easy digital extraction of the increasingly swappable component parts of existing works. “Fungible forms of music encourage amateurs to create their own song and upload it.” As for music, so will it be for books and the rest. I don’t know that fungibility is really the word he wants to use here, but it’s certainly a telling choice. Money is fungible because every dollar is worth the same, and each dollar is interchangeable with any other. Dollars are interchangeable because their identities are interchangeable. I don’t think we’d come to that same verdict where concepts (or their component parts) are concerned; some are more precious than others. With Kelly’s complete absorption with the wonders of networks comes a world of equivalent ideas where no idea escapes the hold of the network, a world of incrementalism, devoid of breathtaking leaps. “The supreme fungibility of bits allows forms to morph easily, to mutate and hybridize.” A marked bill is a bill whose identity is now uniquely tied to a crime—one whose fungibility has been destroyed. Bits are only fungible before we ascribe them with meaning. As soon as we do fungibility is destroyed. An aesthetic world of utter fungibility is at the same time a meaningless one.
  
  And then, to make an argument that we’re witnessing the death of the author (the authority granted to that role) is one thing; to be so blasé about it as to author a statement like “A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire for family viewing (no sex, kid safe)” with no further scrutiny into what is being tossed in the trash and what this change means is something else altogether. Fungibility—arrival at the thermodynamic endpoint—is not something to be celebrated.
  
  “The fears that technology makes us more uniform, more commoditized are incorrect. The more we are personalized, the easier it is for the filters because we become distinct, an actualized distinction they can reckon with.” In the future each of us will be equally unique.
  
  Many dystopian fiction plots share a similar thematic structure wherein the protagonist must rouse a people sedated, mental slaves of one sort or another (through drugs, mind control, an excess of entertainments, entrapment within a computer simulation, etc.), by confronting them with the grim truth about the world they live in. Kelly’s a-day-in-the-future scenarios that complement most of the book’s chapters style him after one of the automaton-like extras in one of these plots. One scenario left him consuming media all day, continually using the phrase “I like…” although never “I think…”. I was somehow reminded of the old SNES RPGs when you’d go into a town and walk into taverns, shops, and homes talking to people in scripted dialogue. What do these people do and what do they say to one another when you exit, shut the door behind you, and let them return to their lives? In a day in Kevin Kelly’s future he’ll be combing websites curated with nothing but “cool ads” (he uses this term). (A couple of quotations from these vignettes: “When I get home, I really look forward to the string of amusing 3-D videos and fun games Albert lines up for me. That’s the name I gave to the avatar from Universal who filters my media for me.” And “Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more!”)
  
  As inevitability became the implicit conclusion of What Technology Wants, when the twelve forces of Kevin Kelly’s follow up are taken as a whole an unarticulated thirteenth force is distilled: deautonomizing. Certainly Kelly’s follow up to The Inevitable will not be grappling with this idea any further than he has in The Inevitable itself—no doubt Kelly would pretty strongly disagree with my assessment of a thirteenth force. The deautonomizing force, though, is not something I’m myself prepared to discount; my concern here has not been to point to flaws in the idea of a core inevitability but to get at how little the book confronts what these “forces” do to us. It’s not the inevitability suppositions that are primarily lacking, it’s the experiential consequences and the wide horizon of open contingency that will shape how it is all experienced. The Inevitable seems to have flipped the classic script: the sedated man is convincing the roused individual to go to bed post haste. Can we at least wait until the sun has set? Similar to focusing more profitably on what’s up for grabs than on what’s inevitable, when peering into the future with logarithmically ballooning distribution speeds the more relevant question becomes not What does the future hold? but What is a future that’s evenly distributed before there’s time to grapple with what’s being distributed?
• 
  Brian Griffith

  Kelly applies his whole experience with the evolving internet since being an editor of Wired magazine in the early ‘90s, and he gives an overview of big trends that raises better questions than its good answers. His writing is action-packed, highly reflective, obsessively number-crunching, and compulsively enthusiastic. He quantitatively and qualitatively assesses how far and fast our global mind has evolved in 40 years, and much of it was so new to my antiquated head that I could hardly relate. But let me give a few quotes that got me going:
  
  “I can no longer tell when I am working and when I am playing online.”
  
  “So far, at every juncture that offers a choice, we’ve tilted, on average, toward more sharing, more disclosure, more transparency. I could sum it up like this: Vanity trumps privacy.”
  
  “The frantic global rush to connect everyone and everyone all the time is quietly giving rise to a revised technological version of socialism.”
  
  “A hundred years ago, H.G. Wells imagined this large thing as the world brain. Teilhard de Chardin named it the noosphere, the sphere of thought. Some call it a global mind, others liken it to a global superorganism since it includes billions of manufactured silicon neurons.”
  
  “… even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster.”
• 
  Nelson Zagalo

  Este livro tem sido vendido como tecnológico-optimista, para mim devia ser catalogado como tecnológico-ridículo. 6 anos depois de ter publicado um dos livros mais interessantes sobre tecnologia, "What Technology Wants" (2010), Kelly conseguiu inverter totalmente o pólo para nos oferecer um mero remendo de textos de blog, feito de múltiplas divagações inconsequentes, distorções da realidade e ainda múltiplos erros. Isto não é ingenuidade, como alguns apontaram, isto é puro desleixo e acima de tudo alheamento do mundo, tanto da sua parte como de quem editou o livro.
  
  O resto da análise está no blog:
  
  https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
• 
  Jason Pettus

  (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
  
  It was a fascinating experience to read Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable right after tackling Nicholas Carr's
  Utopia is Creepy, an experience that teaches a lot about why so many other tech writers come and go with the same blazingly fast trendiness of teenage pop singers, while Kelly has been around since literally the 1970s and continues to be one of the most thought-provoking writers of that entire industry. For while Carr's book is a disappointing series of blog-sized old-man rants about basically any name-brand technology that's crossed his eyes over the last few years ("What's the deal with Wikipedia!? What's the deal with Twitter!? What's the deal with Second Life!?"), The Inevitable takes a holistic and big-picture look at all the larger trends that have been happening in all of human culture over the last twenty years, to deliver a series of predictions not about what specific technologies or webapps will be the next big trendy ones, but the ways that general human behavior and human society is changing based on whatever the newest trendy apps are.
  
  And indeed, Kelly is in a particularly suitable position to do such a thing -- a former editor of the proto-cyberpunk hippie publication The Whole Earth Catalog, a founding member of proto-web online community The WELL, and one of the founders of Wired magazine, he's made a nearly half-century career now out of taking sweeping looks at the way technology has been changing the very nature of human existence and consciousness since the end of World War Two, delivering in this case a book of 12 chapters that each focus not on a specific technology but a general verb like "cognifying," "accessing" and "filtering." Within each of these intriguingly titled chapters, then, Kelly delves into the recent history of these kinds of activities (for example, the history of chess-playing computers in the "cognifying" chapter), which then inevitably leads to a look at the most cutting-edge current research on the subject (an extended examination of IBM's Watson), a discussion of what surprising things we can learn from this latest research (in this case, that artificial intelligence is likely never going to come in a monolithic, human-aping form like HAL from 2001, but rather an endless series of "dumbly focused" intelligent apps that each do only one thing, but do them better than literally any human could even imagine that subject being done), then ending by speculating a bit on what this trend might foretell in a science-fictional near future (here, for example, that perhaps computers will one day soon figure out how quantum mechanics work, a subject that is quite literally too difficult for human brain comprehension but that might not be for a "silicon brain").
  
  As usual with Kelly's writing, it all adds up to some pretty heady stuff, an admirable hallmark from the optimistic, psychedelia-influenced era of cutting-edge technology in the 1970s he comes from, that we are sadly losing more and more in our current age of technology as capitalist commodity. One of the last grand thinkers from that era of the industry, Kelly's writing is still worth gobbling up with both hands whenever you can get ahold of it, with The Inevitable coming wildly more recommended than any of the other "What's the deal with...?" old-man rants of the moment that litter the tech bookshelves these days.
  
  Out of 10: 9.8
• 
  Stephen Heiner

  About halfway through the book I was bored. Not because the issues that Kelly discusses are unimportant to me, but because he delivers it in the one-note cadence implied by his title: The Inevitable. The only true inevitable was that I would finish the book so as to be prepared for the discussion with my fellows at the book club, not because I felt that he had a particularly relevant work, and 300 pages later, I still feel the way I do: Kelly falls far short.
  
  I believe that we as humans are imperfect, though immortal (because of our souls), and that whatever happiness we may possess in this life is fleeting and unimportant.
  
  Kelly presents us in this book a vision of the future that I find horrific: a world of twitch, free from simplicity, bound with complexity, and ending with convergence in a matrix. In one of our late chapters he uses exactly that word and describes something similar, in feel, to what that move so perceptively predicted decades ago: a fake world we may prefer to the real one.
  
  Kelly feels no compulsion whatsoever to ask "should" we accept the "inevitable" but rather keeps beating the drum for what we "can" do. Here are some revelatory quotes:
  
  "We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them." (p. 3).
  
  "We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled." (p. 11)
  
  "We need AIs to tell us who we are." (p. 49)
  
  "Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters." (p. 60)
  
  On page 108 I wrote in the margin "absolutely horrifying" after reading a description of a "day in the life" in the near future in which the only time we won't be seeing digital screens throughout the day will be at night when we sleep.
  
  I'm no Luddite. I'm happily pounding away on this keyboard, sharing my thoughts on this book with my friends and whomever else may be interested in reading, and I do it tied to my social media identity. There are technological changes that I welcome. But what Kelly never does, and what I am constantly asking, is twofold:
  
  1) *Should* we make these changes?
  2) Is it possible our lives will be worse, not better, because of technology?
  
  And given his stature in the tech space, it's pretty irresponsible to write a book like this and not weigh in on these matters. 300 pages of high-fiving ourselves and pointing out some important (and fascinating) trends. Got it. And then? We are made for more than a plugged-in VR/AR future. The problem is Kelly thinks we need to wait for that future to consider the truly important questions. The reality is that the future doesn't matter if you don't answer those important questions now.
• 
  Kiana

  The book is full of examples that are part of our everyday life now. Sure, they have been a surprise at some point in the past but not any more. There's too many ordinary tech examples which bores the reader, especially if you work in tech and familiar with recent developments in technology. The overall idea of the book is interesting but probably could be summarized in one chapter.
• 
  Leo Walsh

  Okay, I've been following Kelly for decades, since the Whole Earth Review and his tenure at Wired. So maybe his optimism has worn thin by now. Or maybe its because I'm older.
  
  But color me skeptical about gee-whiz technology. After seeing some high-profile algorithmic flops -- like the 2008 crash, driven by computer investment portfolio algorithms. Or Facebook showing fake news because people hit "like" a lot, despite knowing that its fake. Or how 'smart' policing using computer algorithms, designe to stop violent crimes, like rapes and murders, ends up sending cops to ghettos to stop petty crimes like jaywalking or smoking dope. Not because there's more petty-crime per person in these areas, but because there's more crime per square foot, and thus maximizes the police departments arrests per man hour. To the abuse of credit reporting, etc.
  
  Needless to say, I'm skeptical of tech... even though I'm extremely tech savvy. And while I'll acknowledge the validity of some of Kelly's points, I am not sure of how "inevitable" anything he discusses is. Afterall, just because we can do something -- because technology and science make it inevitable -- doesn't me can or should. For instance, we can empty our overcrowded prisons by starting a war and making them fight for their freedom. It solves a problem, and we can do it easily... but is the payoff justified by the cost?
  
  Which makes me a little more tolerant of regulation than most Silicon Valley visionaries like Kelly. But powerful technology, like big-data and automated algorithms, does require big oversight. Since a handful of people wielding code have the power to consolidate wealth into unsavory hands.
  
  Does anyone really think that a person creating fake news deserves to outearn a real reporter who actually had to bust thier hump to source an article? Or that a 20-year-old facilities worker at Ohio State, who lives in a nearby ghetto, has a 800% greater chance of being arrested for smoking dope than an upper middle class fraternity boy at Ohio State?
  
  Perhaps there are people who do. I am not one of them. These notions run counter to my Christian values of justice.
  
  That said, Kelly is spot-on about so much. For instance, the tradeoff between anonymity and sharing. You can either not share, and allow the technology to serve you up a generic product that appeals to all -- like, for instance, recommending a Big Mac dinner. Or share information and allow the algorithms to recommend something better -- like, for instance, a nearby restaurant that serves your favorite Thai dish.
  
  Like many tech writers, Kelly remains bubble-bound. For instance, he ignores that our cheap screens today depend on slave labor in mines and cheap labor in factories. He also ignores that Americans today, the nation closest (next to, maybe, Japan) to the wired ideal, consume more power per capita in 2016 than they did in 2006, after consuming more in 2006 than 1996, etc. And that is not sustainable. So some of this technologic gee-wizardry may (or may not) hit an unseen kilowatt/ hour wall.
  
  So while I have reservations, Kelly, as always, provides a fun ride. And, if society and our energy supply can continue its stable trajectory, he does The downside is, the sounds exactly like Bill Gates's 1999 "Business @ the Speed of Thought," and several other techno-utopia tomes I've read over the decades that ignore physical, biological and geo-political forces that can mess things up.
  
  So I'll not hold my breath.
  
  3-stars. Fun read but shallow. And, for an innovator like Kelly, not very original.
• 
  Begum Sacak

  This book is so insightful that I wish this book was compulsory for people pursuing technology & computer science degrees. The book Inevitable is divided into sections and each section is a gerund or force that is shaping us as a result of the technological advances. I want to point out how he is not only talking about technology but also the philosophy behind and how the gradual change is realized through current examples and glimpses of potential future adaptations.
  
  Regarding technology, I realized the book mainly focuses on the knowledge networks and how they are evolving rapidly. What technology enables is weaving a net of relationships from almost every aspect unimaginable and make once impossible connections possible. It was almost like a revelation to me to realize that: technology’s main goal is to make more networks and relationships and as it happens, more complex networks are to follow.
  
  I also like author’s optimistic viewpoint because he is not dystopian and doesn’t believe technology will definitely take over humans. Rather, he thinks there will be an increased interconnectedness between humans and machines. The author is doing a great job evoking curiosity on how this relationship will be and which other possible ways of interactions technology will reveal.
  
  Technology has always been a quest of humanity to know itself but now we are closer than ever to know ourselves. This book is a great one to read about technology and ponder about our new affordances and the future that is waiting for us.
  
• 
  Kathrin Passig

  Ich habe mich oft geärgert und oft gefreut. Die Grundidee ist überzeugend, in den Details war es mir zu religiös-schwärmerisch. Die Zukunftsvisionen "So wird mein Tag in zwanzig Jahren aussehen" fand ich naiv, privilegienblind und überwiegend peinlich, bin aber froh, dass er sich getraut hat, sie aufzuschreiben, damit wir in zwanzig Jahren vergleichen können. Am interessantesten fand ich die Stellen, wo er darüber berichtet, wie sich sein eigenes Arbeitsleben in den letzten dreißig Jahren verändert hat, wie man das Internet in den 90ern betrachtete und welche Prognosen sich als falsch herausgestellt haben ("But in 1994, who knew?"). Ein Buch nur darüber hätte ich noch lieber gelesen.
• 
  慧芳

  凯文.凯利（KK）在《必然》一书中指出，未来三十年中产品和服务的总趋势已清晰可见。下述12种力量将会凸显：
  
  形成(Becoming)、知化(Cognifying)、流动(Flowing)、屏读(Screening)、使用(Accessing)、共享(Sharing)、过滤(Filtering)、重混(Remixing)、互动(Interacting)、追踪(Tracking)、提问(Questioning)、开始(Beginning)。
• 
  Charlene

  Yes!
  
  What does the future look like? It looks more amazing than I could have imagined. Kevin Kelly outlines what AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) will look like in the next 30 years. He wrote this book before Pokemon Go came out. I have been obsessed with catching all the Pokemon and evolving the ones I have. Just having played this one AR game, I can see how AR and VR games will take over the world. So fun! Kelly also looked at the impact of VR in the home.
  
  When talking about jobs and economics, Kelly knocked it out the park. Logical arguments about how each generation worried that their jobs were being taken over by tech, only to see that in the next generation, that tech created more jobs and an easier life. His discussion of using phones to self-track was equally great. Want to change your behavior, your health, your habits? Use your smart phone to help!
  
  But are all advances in tech good? No. Kelly is first in line to share concerns about how government and corporations are tracking us. However, he thinks there is little we can do to stop it. All our fighting might place limitations but will never actually stop the efforts of those with power who want to track the rest of us. Knowing this, Kelly suggests we put all our efforts into ensuring transparency. He likens the government and hackers' attempts to track citizens and corporations to the immune systems of animals (what a treat!). He suggests that while it's too early to tell if Anonymous is good for society, he sees value in small anonymous groups, because if the groups with all the power remain anonymous (e.g. gov keeps everything secret or corporations track you but you can't track them), then there will always be a power imbalance. The only way to ensure equality in any area of society (including dealing with law enforcement) is to have transparency. For this reason he is a fan of responsible whistle blowers and any kind of tech that ensures transparency.
  
  One of the most novel and exciting books I have read in a while.
• 
  Tanner

  Audible. I love this book. Whether or not KK's predictions about the future are on point, the content and story telling of this book stretched my mind. I've never read a book by a 'futurist' before so this book was a real treat for me, as it also applies to the work I do as a product manager.
  
  The book left me feeling in awe about what the future holds--it also left me feeling a bit uneasy, as I scrambled to internalize this vision of the future. It even stressed me out a bit, with the notions that change is going to continue to happen progressively faster and that now is as fertile time as ever to help create the future.
  
  I certainly believe this is the rosy view of the future, where KK focuses on the capabilities of the technologies in the future and how that might play out, but not on the existential meaning for humans. Generally, I read about the past. One reason this book was so helpful for me is to helped me to exercise a new thinking muscle of sorts, one that tries to reason about the past, understand the present, and predict the future.
  
  One theme of the book that I really liked, was about how we, as humans, will continue to seek to understand our identity as we progressively automate aspects of our lives. This continual progression is driven by man's search for meaning and purpose in life--as we continue to progress as people we will be pushed to find what makes us unique.
• 
  Moh. Nasiri

  آینده‌ی نزدیک: درک ۱۲ نیروی فناورانه که سرنوشت دنیا را رقم می‌زنند.آینده چه شکلی می‌شه؟ هرچیزی که امروز داریم پیشرفته‌تر می‌شه یا اصلا با محصول‌های جدیدی مواجه می‌شیم؟
  خلاصه اش را در پادکست بی پلاس گوش دادم
  
  https://soundcloud.com/bplus-podcast/...
• 
  George

  INTERESTING AND INSIGHTFUL. INFORMATIVE AND DELIGHTFUL.
  
  “We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs.” (p. 11)
  
  “In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming.” (p. 12)
  
  Although parts left me puzzling: what the heck was what I just read all about?, Kevin Kelly’s deeply insightful book, THE INEVITABLE: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, is a futurist's delight. Kelly offers cogent and reasonable glimpses into what the impact of technology—Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Streaming, and more—might be over the near future (30 years or so) on each of us, on society, and on humankind. Absolutely fascinating.
  
  The twelve forces? They’re his chapter titles: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking., Questioning, Beginning. Admittedly, my reach often exceeded my grasp as I grappled with some of the concepts presented—but, oh, what a wonderland of ideas to get lost in. My highlighting was going crazy.
  
  Personal frosting on the cake… My, almost ten year old, grandson stood in line at a book talk/signing in San Francisco (See the YouTube video of this author's talk, at:
  https://youtu.be/UqsxejMN5XA) to get me a personally inscribed copy of this book; and my soon-to-be daughter-in-law received a shout-out in the Acknowledgements because she “assisted in research, fact-checking, and formatting help.” She becomes only the second person I’ve personally known whose name appears in a published book. As if I needed something more for which to be proud of her.
  
  Recommendation: Definitely read this book. Extend your reach, expand your world view, and catch a peek at what amazing things might be coming down the silicon ’pike.
  
  “…crap constitutes 80 percent of everything.” (p. 248)
• 
  Radiantflux

  39th book for 2016.
  
  Wow. The Silicon Valley tech-heads live in a happy-happy future world; a world where we are all connected, all the time, in vast Hive Mind; where all our most private thoughts are given up to the corporate cloud; where our most basic consumptive desires are anticipated by ubiquitous AIs.
  
  In Kelly's take on things, there is no point questioning the future. No point in dwelling on critical questions of autonomy or ecological stewardship, as our fluid, connected, constantly distracted hive-like-mind is INEVITABLE.
  
  Except for all his sharp future goggles, Wired Magazine under his editorship saw the promise of the early Internet as simply 500-channels of TV on all the time everywhere (TV done right as he says). I find this anecdote telling as Kelly's vision, then and now, is one of corporate high-tech consumption -- so of course he didn't see the early promise of the Internet as one of connection and joint creation between like-minded souls, something that many other people did -- and his "inevitable" vision is a silicon valley corporate one writ large, full of ubiquitous advertising and consumption and some quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo of us all becoming part of some emergent hive mind in the very near future.
  
  An interesting book if you want to breath in the giddy vapours of techno-optimism for a while, but I for one won't be drinking the Kool Aid just yet.
• 
  Kent Winward

  We are all newbies now. Kelly's approach to technology is an analysis of trends. The greatest benefit of the book is that Kelly's thoughts are a fantastic jumping off point for musing on your own experience with technology. Considering my life span has covered technological advances that are so mind-numbingly rapid, being able to think of them as trends has the added benefit of making me not feel like an overwhelmed, curmudgeonly Luddite. Kelly's section on books was especially thought provoking.
• 
  Zane

  Though reading this book in 2021, it kind-of could have been "old", it isn't - the directions we're going are similar to those mentioned in the book.
  I enjoyed the "view in the future" and predictions on how tech will evolve. The ideas are clear enough, but still have some space for variations. And yes, I 'm looking forward to hopefully experience some of the tech benefits for myself as well :D While I see lots of struggles in other areas where more data sharing and safety is mentioned.
  So overall I enjoyed the book and feel it is still relevant read even 5 years later after publication.
• 
  Andrea

  
  
  Look at all these tabs! I had to revisit them all before being able to write a sensible review. There is just so much good stuff that got absorbed by my brain while reading The Inevitable, I had to digest and compartmentalize.
  
  First of all, I do have to say that Kevin Kelley focuses largely on the positive aspects of every technological advancement, and he addresses that concern very late in the book. I think stating his position earlier would have been helpful to the reader. Otherwise, if you don’t mind dismissing the dystopian connotations, you’ll enjoy the read very much.
  
  The Inevitable logically predicts the near future where a “tendency towards the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated.” I support that statement wholeheartedly. But as I see it, that also means that our current economical model needs to sway towards a more social-oriented, rather than individual, spectrum. Currently I can access original text of The Odyssey with relatively ease. If I want to compare a passage as interpreted by several multiple modern translators, just for fun, I have no way of collecting this information instantly without paying separately to each author for a complete body of work, which is impractical on my end. Kelly predicts that eventually we are going to be able to interlink each and every book to follow references and supporting arguments in a network composed of all books ever written - a metabook. But what about copyrights and geographic restrictions? Under current economic model this kind of tech is out of our reach. But if we provide this kind of access, the benefits are innumerable. Education will be more accessible and affordable; individual’s understanding of any subject could become deeper and more accurate; innovation can be accelerated through such collaboration.
  
  Rather than the end product, the corporations need to start focusing on experiences, which are much more valuable and sustainable long term than any physical object or body of work. In fact it’s already happening. Most of the web content is built by unpaid users like you and me. A lot of software companies are giving away their product for free, rely on user base for betterment of the end result, and profit from supporting user experience by charging for manuals, tutorials, subscriptions, etc. By the way, have you noticed how many companies are switching to subscription-based model? Adobe suite, entertainment providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, numerous monthly box services, etc.
  
  Why does that happen? Kelly argues that possession will no longer be as important as accessibility. And isn’t that true? I can’t remember the last time I purchased a physical music CD or a movie DVD. I’d rather pay a subscription service that would allow me to access desired media at any time without taking up space in my own home, or on my own device. I choose to rent/buy physical book, only because I enjoy the tactile experience of holding one. Experience prevails where product only becomes devalued.
  
  There are many other fascinating subjects covered, which I could discuss forever, but I’d rather you read this book for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
• 
  Jay French

  I really enjoyed Kevin Kelly’s predictions for the future in this book. He has that kind of over-the-top, goofy way to point things out – you can just tell he loves telling how he thinks things will be. I have a nephew that gets that excited talking about drifting, and he comes across about the same as Kelly. The best part of this book is when Kelly decides the way to express his idea of the future is to tell a story. He does this a few times throughout the book (more would have been better), and tells focused stories on the topics he is discussing. I found these quite fun. This felt a little like an Alvin Toffler story, but more to the point and less foreshadowing later topics.
  
  As to what Kelly covers, he approaches topics not from a pure technologists’ perspective but based on impact on society. There are quite a few points he makes throughout that I wrote down or tweeted, and Kelly has been tweeting many of the highlights of this book recently. Review of his twitter feed will give you a good preview of the book’s topics. My favorite idea from the beginning of the book is that since technology changes so rapidly now (think in terms of version updates of cell phone apps that happen weekly or faster), no one has time to learn how to use these new versions before they are replaced. Kelly’s way to phrase this is that we will always be newbies.
  
  The only weakness I see in the book is that Kelly’s “boosterism” for his own concept of the future feels a bit cherry-picked – it doesn’t feel entirely even-handed, it feels too positive. Overall, though, this is the best futurology book I’ve read in many years.
  
  I received a preview release of the ebook version of this book from NetGalley for an early review.
  
• 
  Milan

  This book feels dystopian and sometimes fascinating at the same time. Some of the things that Kevin Kelly predicts will definitely come to pass. His knowledge about tech and future trends is well-known. But my concern is getting too much dependent on technology and lack of privacy. If every move we make is tracked and turned into data so our life is nothing but bits to be fed to the technology beast. For a long time, technology was used to make our life easier and what is happening now is just the opposite. A lot of people don't even realize it and some are even applauding it for the sake of a little convenience. I know which side of the fence I am on. In his previous book he said “Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.” And now he says “While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility.” Don’t agree with these views. But “Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works.”
• 
  Alexandru

  More of 4,5 stars. The book is a glimpse into a possible future and is written in an interesting style, easy to read and with relevant examples. It opened my eyes to what will happen in the next 50 years or at least the direction we are heading. Some of the points are obvious, but still insightful. I disagree with the conclusion of the author because it is overly optimistic, other, grimmer scenarios are possible for human civilization. But some of the simple ideas used by the author are just very insightful and simple at the same time. A good read when you are locked in your house for quarantine.
• 
  Lucas Carlson

  The most important book of 2016
  
  Culturally we used to be much more excited about the future. We watched the Jetsons and Back to the Future with giddy anticipation. But somewhere along the way, we started getting scared. The predominant emotion towards the long term future now is fear. Dystopia. How bad things will get. There are very few thinkers giving us a more realistic and balanced glance into the future. This book does just that. Without the lingering taste of fear and dystopia. And without a giddy utopia. Just... An inevitable look at what will be.
• 
  Shivon Zilis

  Don't be fooled by the ominous title -- this is a delightfully thoughtful and optimistic take on where technology will take us. A brilliant deconstruction of the subtle but ubiquitous forces all around us.