THE INEVITABLE
Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Kevin Kelly
Penguin Random House
328 pages; Rs 699
Did you know that since the days of the Sumerian tablets, we humans have published or produced 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles/essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images and 330,000 movies?
Moreover, ordinary citizens now compose 80 million blog posts a day while 60 trillion pages have been added to the internet till date, a number that grows by several billion a day.
As the days pass, and our digital footprint expands, new technological forces are at work that will connect all the content we create or the worlds in which we live and change the very nature of how we interact with it.
Defining and understanding these 12 technological forces and how they will shape our future in the next 30 years is the thrust of The Inevitable, a must-read book written by Kevin Kelly, who helped start Wired magazine and was its editor for seven years.
Mr Kelly describes 12 forces; they range from “becoming”, “accessing” and “flowing” to “sharing”, “filtering”, “cognifying”, “interacting” and “tracking”.
Flowing, for example, refers to our ever-increasing need for real-time information. Think how you can no longer wait for the end of the week or even the day for your bank to update your transaction statements or even how ATMs dispense instant cash.
Similarly, a whole bunch of content we consume, like music, photos and movies, is streaming to us. As the days pass, any other way of consuming it will seem more difficult. Some streams like Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp operate totally in the present, with no past or future. They just flow past, says Mr Kelly.
The next level: Could books be more fluid, from the page where content will flow to fit any available space, from a tiny screen in a pair of glasses to a wall? And could the material be personalised with a student’s edition looking different or the ability to skip a recap of previous books?
As large amounts of information get created, the focus shifts to accessing and sharing, not owning and controlling. To build on the now - a famous quote of Uber not owning cars and Facebook not owning content - the theme is now on owning fewer physical assets and accessing more digital assets that sit on the cloud.
Even collaboration is increasing. There are 650,000 people working on 500,000 projects for free at this time. Collaborations like this result in software like Apache or FedoraLinux9. Crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter raised $34 billion last year for projects that could not have been funded otherwise.
Peer-to-peer lending - where I lend directly to you, as opposed to a bank doing so - is now worth over $10 billion, thanks to the concept of sharing.
The need for filtering these massive volumes of information and content will increase. Every month sees two million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts and 182 billion tweets. So, guiding you to the right digital destination also becomes critical.
Did you know that Netflix has 300 people working just on recommendations? And they have a budget of $150 million!
Addicted to wearable devices? Computer scientist already track 100 health parameters every day, including skin temperature and “galvanic” skin response. In the future, we are going to track ourselves with greater intensity than ever before. In the process, we will be able to diagnose our ills faster and reduce the dependence on medicine.
Mr Kelly says we are already being tracked across 25 parameters, from government databases to highway and street cameras to grocery purchases, online shopping, airline tickets, to, of course, fitness data that we generate from our devices back to our phones and the cloud.
We will add more sensors to our environment as the quest to understand it and our place in it gathers pace. Some 54 billion sensors will be manufactured every year in four years. These will be embedded in our cars, draped over our bodies and watching us at home and on streets.
All this data, 300 zillion bytes in the next decade, will be tracked, parsed and “cognified” by utilitarian Artificial Intelligence. Which brings us back to the power of this network and the challenges of ensuring all this data remains in safe hands.
It goes without saying that artificial intelligence and sophisticated robots will increasingly take over menial jobs. By 2050, says Mr Kelly, speedy bots will take over almost all warehouse movements, including loading goods into trucks which, in turn, will be self-driven.
There are many more examples, none of them too encouraging if you are in a job that could potentially be taken over by a robot or one that a robot can do better.
Virtual and Augmented Reality will become more commonplace in our knowledge and entertainment pursuits. Your laptop has cameras and screens are already beginning to follow your gaze. Smart software will adapt to what you are viewing depending if you are happy or upset.
The iconic sci-fi film Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2002, triggered much discussion on the theme of “pre-crime”, the ability to predict when a crime would happen.
As a precursor the film’s making, Mr Spielberg had convened a meeting of technologists and futurists to brainstorm the features of everyday life in 50 years. Mr Kelly was part of the group and says he once thought the idea of pre-crime detection utterly unrealistic.
He says he does not, anymore.
