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

W hen I was 13, my father took me to visit a computer trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was 1965 and he was excited by these room-size machines made by the smartest corporations in America, such as IBM. My father believed in progress, and these very first computers were glimpses of the future he imagined. But I was very unimpresseda typical teenager. The computers filling the cavernous exhibit hall were boring. There was nothing to see except acres of static rectangular metal cabinets. Not a single flickering screen anywhere. No speech input, or output. The only thing these computers could do was print out rows and rows of gray numbers on folded paper. I knew a lot about computers from my avid reading of science fiction, and these were not real computers.

In 1981 I got my hands on an Apple II computer in a science lab at the University of Georgia, where I worked. Even though it had a tiny green and black screen that could display text, I was not impressed by this computer either. It could do typing better than a typewriter, and it was a whiz with graphing numbers and keeping track of data, but it was not a real computer. It was not rearranging my life.

My opinions totally changed a few months later when I plugged the same Apple II into a phone line with a modem. Suddenly everything was different. There was an emerging universe on the other side of the phone jack, and it was huge, almost infinite. There were online bulletin boards, experimental teleconferences, and this place called the internet. The portal through the phone line opened up something both vast and at the same time human scaled. It felt organic and fabulous. It connected people and machines in a personal way. I could feel my life jumping up to another level.

Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid.

In the three decades since then, this technological convergence between communication and computation has spread, sped up, blossomed, and evolved. The internet/web/mobile system has moved from the fringes of society (where it was pretty much ignored in 1981) to the center stage of our modern global society. In the past 30 years the social economy based on this technology has had its ups and downs and seen its heroes come and go, but it is very clear there have been large-scale trends governing what has happened.

These broad historical trends are crucial because the underlying conditions that birthed them are still active and developing, which strongly suggests that these trends will continue to increase in the next few decades. There is nothing on the horizon to decrease them. Even the forces we might think could derail them, like crime, war, or our own excesses, also follow these emerging patterns. In this book I describe a dozen of these inevitable technological forces that will shape the next 30 years.

Inevitable is a strong word. It sends up red flags for some people because they object that nothing is inevitable. They claim that human willpower and purpose canand should!deflect, overpower, and control any mechanical trend. In their view, inevitability is a free will cop-out we surrender to. When the notion of the inevitable is forged with fancy technology, as I do here, the objections to a preordained destiny are even more fierce and passionate. One definition of inevitable is the final outcome in the classic rewinding thought experiment. If we rewound the tape of history back to the beginning of time and reran our civilization from the start again and again, a strong version of inevitability says that, no matter how many times we reran it, every time we end up with teenagers tweeting every five minutes in 2016. Thats not what I mean.

I mean inevitable in a different way. There is bias in the nature of technology that tilts it in certain directions and not others. All things being equal, the physics and mathematics that rule the dynamics of technology tend to favor certain behaviors. These tendencies exist primarily in the aggregate forces that shape the general contours of technological forms and do not govern specifics or particular instances. For example, the form of an interneta network of networks spanning the globewas inevitable, but the specific kind of internet we chose to have was not. The internet could have been commercial rather than nonprofit, or a national system instead of international, or it could have been secret instead of public. Telephonylong-distance electrically transmitted voice messageswas inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The generic form of a four-wheeled vehicle was inevitable, but SUVs were not. Instant messaging was inevitable, but tweeting every five minutes was not.

Tweeting every five minutes is not inevitable in another way. We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them. These days it takes us a decade after a technology appears to develop a social consensus on what it means and what etiquette we need to tame it. In another five years well find a polite place for twittering, just as we figured out what to do with cell phones ringing everywhere. (Use silent vibrators.) Just like that, this initial response will disappear quickly and well see it was neither essential nor inevitable.

The kind of inevitability I am speaking of here in the digital realm is the result of momentum. The momentum of an ongoing technological shift. The strong tides that shaped digital technologies for the past 30 years will continue to expand and harden in the next 30 years. These apply to not just North America, but to the entire world. Throughout this book I use examples from the United States because readers will be more familiar with them, but for each I could have easily found a corresponding example in India, Mali, Peru, or Estonia. The true leaders in digital money, for example, are in Africa and Afghanistan, where e-money is sometimes the only functioning currency. China is way ahead of everyone else in developing sharing applications on mobile. But while culture can advance or retard the expression, the underlying forces are universal.

After living online for the past three decades, first as a pioneer in a rather wild empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. The daily glitter of high-tech novelty rides upon slow currents. The roots of the digital world are anchored in the physical needs and natural tendencies of bits, information, and networks. No matter what geography, no matter what companies, no matter what politics, these fundamental ingredients of bits and networks will hatch similar results again and again. Their inevitability stems from their basic physics. In this book I endeavor to expose these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring trends in the next three decades.