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

by Kevin Kelly

If you like the notes, go ahead and buy the book!

• book is about technological forces, which will shape out future
  • becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, interacting, tracking, questioning, becoming
  • is more about finding high-level patterns than describing specific implementations
• AI’s - could be very differeant from what we usually think about - they might be specialized in very narrow domains
• we’ll be moving toward having services on demand and this in turn is biased toward access > ownership models
  • how should ownership work in realm where it is less important?
• platforms - new way to organize human work (apart from firms and marketplaces) - allowed by dematerialization, decentralization, massive communication; platforms could be seen as “factories” for services
• we will need to apply “filters upon filters” to deal with so many information
• how do we search a film the same way we search a “static” content like books?
• we will take life-loging, rewinding, scrolling streams to new level
• makes you think once again about anonymity, in small amount it’s important and “essential” for the system. In more significant quantity it can slowly destroy it. We can’t leave system to itself, it must be designed to some extent and anonymity can’t be seen as none-negotiable right because it always has threadoffs. I guess it’s easy to take anonymity as freedom but those are not the same thing.
• systems like Wikipedia works because they’re designed in such way that it is easier to rapair damaged content than it is to create damaged / invalid content, this results in a system, which slowly gains more and more good enough content
• google search is free, because it earns much more from ads (27 cents) surrounding the answers, than the cost to provide this answer (0.3 cents in 2007)

Quotes

We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special?

Bits want to be shared

Do we want a one-way panopticon, where “they” know about us but we know nothing about them? Or could we construct a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers? The first option is hell, the second tractable ( … ) In the end, the more trust the better, and the more responsibility the better. Like all trace elements, anonymity should never be eliminated completely, but it should be kept as close to zero as possible.

While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some noble truths scattered in the flux, I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief, subjective hunches) and toward fluid media like mashups, twitterese, and search. But as I flow through this slippery web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream

There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer. Answers become cheap and questions become valuable—the inverse of the situation now. Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”