LLM Book Knowledgebase

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

6 min read

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

Metadata

Highlights & Notes

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.

Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long counterproductive.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continuously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.

  • @gabrielhdm

we can get the most from the technologies when we “listen” to the direction the technologies lean, and bend our expectations, regulations, and products to these fundamental tendencies within that technology.

Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

Brand-new computers will ossify. Apps weaken with use. Code corrodes. Fresh software just released will immediately begin to fray. On their own—nothing you did. The more complex the gear, the more (not less) attention it will require. The natural inclination toward change is inescapable, even for the most abstract entities we know of: bits.

Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.

A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress.

The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.

In constant motion we no longer notice the motion.

Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level.

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.

As a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

Simultaneity trumps quality.

So in order to run in real time, our technological infrastructure needed to liquefy. Nouns needed to be verbs. Fixed solid things became services. Data couldn’t remain still. Everything had to flow into the stream of now.

Deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators.

Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication.

A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new.

Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership.

The proper dosage of hierarchy is just barely enough to vitalize a very large collective.

Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think.

We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make

If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.

Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified.

That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook’s remarkable success.

Consumers say they don’t want to be tracked, but in fact they keep feeding the machine with their data, because they want to claim their benefits.

Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.

If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.

While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility.

A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.

This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness.

Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.

Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

Backlinks