Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

The Inevitable is a 2016 nonfiction book by Kevin Kelly that forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years:

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 recombining 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 is far more valuable than good answers
12. Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix

Though it might sound scary, the book is surprisingly upbeat and optimistic about the future.

Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review.

Amazon