The book “Inevitable. Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future”is dedicated to the development of technology. Its author, journalist and cyberculture expert Kevin Kelly, believes that very soon huge changes will take place in our daily life.
Kelly showed interest in cybernetics as a child and followed its development since the first computers. At the age of 13, his father took him to an exhibition of the first IBM computers, which occupied an entire room. They seemed boring to the boy: they only knew how to print rows of gray numbers on sheets of paper. In science fiction novels, they were described in a very different way.
Then, in the early 1980s, Kelly worked in a science lab with an Apple II computer with a tiny screen that ran rows of green numbers. The computer ran faster than a typewriter, did a good job of counting and tracking data, but there was nothing in it to rebuild people's lives. It wasn't until the Apple II connected to the phone line using a modem and went online that Kelly appreciated its capabilities.
Since then, 30 years later, Internet technologies have spread and accelerated. Large-scale trends have pushed their development, and it will continue, no matter what happens. Not everyone will like it. Many industries and professions will become a thing of the past, while others, on the contrary, will develop rapidly. But the inevitable cannot be prohibited or stopped. You can only accept it and learn to work with the nature of new technologies.
How will life change in the next 30 years? What technologies will affect it? Kelly has some important ideas on this
1. New desires continuously generate new things and new technologies
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Today, most people cannot live without smartphones and are often unhappy with a particular model or its software, which is quickly becoming outdated. This discontent leads to the emergence of new technologies, new devices, and better software. Constant dissatisfaction serves as a trigger for human ingenuity.
Kelly was often accused of being fond of utopias. But he writes that it is not utopia or dystopia that awaits us, but protopia - not the final destination, but a continuous process of renewal. This process is almost invisible and therefore easy to miss.
As an example, Kelly cites an excerpt from Time magazine from 1994 - that the Internet is not at all designed for trading. Newsweek magazine published an article by astrophysicist Cliff Stoll, who argued that online shopping and online communities are nothing more than empty fantasies, and a paper newspaper or book will never replace an online database. He considered the appearance of electronic libraries nonsense.
But online commerce is thriving, as are digital libraries. Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Facebook open up parts of their databases to users, and they participate in the updating and development of technology.
Kelly advises IT entrepreneurs to consider the wishes of users and try to constantly create something new based on them. Holography, virtual reality and many other technologies will surely develop.
2. Artificial intelligence, consisting of many individual chips, will take the development of technology to a new level
True artificial superintelligence, according to Kelly, will consist of many individual chips combined into one whole. Thus, its efficiency will reach a new level, and the artificial intelligence itself will be continuously trained. Created by the human mind, it will be its complement and continuation.
The capabilities of such artificial intelligence can hardly be overestimated. In 2011, a prototype named Watson was already created. It once, according to Kelly, looked like a refrigerator with a bunch of wires inside. Now, thanks to "cloud" technologies, you can access Watson through your phone or computer. Instead of several programs, it employs many engines: logic, deduction, and the ability to analyze are successfully integrated into a single stream of intelligence.
Watson was conceived at IBM as a medical diagnostic tool. And he successfully coped with the task: Kelly tells how he introduced Watson to the symptoms of an incomprehensible disease that he contracted in India, and he gave him a list of diagnoses from most probable to less probable, noting that it was most likely giardiasis. Subsequently, this was confirmed by medical tests.
Watson helps develop medicines and makes personalized recommendations for patients based on the data collected. In the process of work, his intellect is trained and improved.
Google, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter are investing in the development of artificial intelligence. In the future, Kelly believes, artificial intelligence will be used in a variety of fields - from composing music to designing and building buildings. Once Garry Kasparov fought with artificial intelligence in chess and lost. Since then, there have been applications that teach the game of chess, making it accessible.
Artificial intelligence can train the best doctors, pilots, drivers. Kelly believes that he should not be afraid. Artificial intelligence in the coming centuries will be designed to perform specialized tasks that go beyond what humans can do. Machines will do what humans cannot do. They will think in a way that we do not know how, and continuously learn.
Together with artificial intelligence, robotics will begin to develop rapidly, and in these promising areas, Kelly believes, is the best investment. Robots will perform much better human work. Many professions will become a thing of the past, but new ones will appear. Let robots take over our jobs and help people come up with new jobs in a new environment, writes Kelly.
3. Technologies of the future are streams of continuous copying of information, access to which will be free
All our actions on the Internet, transmitted in encrypted form from one network protocol to another, are continuously copied. What gets on the net is doomed to be copied. Instant duplication of data, ideas and media is at the heart of the digital economy of the 21st century. Products such as software, music, movies, and games are copied randomly and continuously.
It is impossible to stop this process: this contradicts the very nature of the Internet as a global communication system. Now these streams of copies are still being tried to be contained through copyright, but in the future, according to Kelly, access to them will be completely free.
Once upon a time, computer screens reflected only the desktop, folders and files. Then web pages appeared on the net. The pages were filled with hyperlinks, each containing information. The desktop interface has been replaced by a browser.
Already, instead of pages and browsers, we are surrounded by streams of information. We watch these streams on Twitter and Facebook, YouTube channels and RSS feeds from blogs, and we bathe in notifications, apps, and updates. We see a continuous stream of videos, photos, events. There is no past or future in it - only the present.
The perception of time has also changed. We used to pay our bills once a month when we got a receipt and went to the bank. Now, just a click of a mouse is enough for the money from the account to go to pay bills or buy things you like on the Internet. When we send a message to someone, we expect an instant response. The latest news for us means the events that are happening right now.
Access to data streams is not always free. To legally read a book or use an electronic library, download this or that information, you need to pay. According to Kelly, in the future, streams will become free, and instead of money, other forms of mutually beneficial cooperation will come.
If any information becomes free - what will they buy then, because content producers will go broke? According to Kelly, what cannot be copied, such as trust, will become a commodity. It is not downloaded or sold in bulk. For example, companies with a good reputation will recommend similar products and services from little-known manufacturers and receive a percentage of sales for this.
How can creative people make money from the stream of endless free copies? Kelly believes that such people will be supported by fans of the talent. People love patronage: it allows them to be closer to those whom they admire. The main thing is that such support should be easy to implement, the amounts should be reasonable, the benefits should be obvious, and the money will go directly to the artist (actor, musician, writer). In return, he will provide free access to his creations.
In an endless stream, it is important to choose the right information. People are willing to pay to find decent work in huge numbers of copies. Kelly says that recently the management of the TV channel with a million subscribers released a magazine about the best free TV shows. Viewers paid for the magazine, and the channel earned more money from this than from broadcasting its programs in a month.
The Amazon and Kindle companies make money not only from selling books, but also from accessing book reviews. Readers willingly buy these reviews and summaries to better navigate the sea of book production, looking for pearls in it. In the future, access to books will become free, only recommendations will be paid.
Kelly suggests thinking about the fact that in the future, not only information on the Internet, but also many other things will be able to continuously change, move away from static. Note to developers: their projects should have a lot of additional options that can be easily changed.
4. In the future, we will perceive information mainly from screens
Kelly thinks that someday his day will be like this. In the morning he is woken up by a small screen on his wrist. On the same screen, he checks the weather and the latest news. A small panel hanging next to the bed reflects messages from friends. While he takes a shower, beautiful photographs taken by friends are displayed on the wall monitor in the bathroom. The monitor on the closet shows which socks will look best with a shirt. While he is having breakfast, the display on the kitchen table shows the news - it is easy to turn it off or toggle with a touch of the screen.
The display in the car shows the best route taking into account traffic jams. At work, interaction with screens and monitors continues. The same goes for a run, where the user, wearing special glasses, sees the virtual notes of his friend who has already run this route, notes about the places along which he is paved, and even the names of birds living in the park.
Books in paper form, Kelly believes, will gradually fade into the background. They developed a contemplative mind - screens foster utilitarian thinking. They must be touched, reduced or enlarged with finger movements. The book strengthens analytical skills, and the screen stimulates the rapid creation of models, associates one idea with another, with thousands of new thoughts every day, fosters thinking in real time. The screens are connected into a coherent whole by interaction with the network, and people with them.
Tiny screens built into glasses, according to Kelly, will in the near future show a person walking down the street where the nearest toilet is, in which stores he will find what he was going to buy, if his friends are nearby. The screen will become part of our identity. This will be a mirror in which we can observe ourselves.
Kelly believes that computer chips are getting so small and screens so thin and cheap that in the next 30 years, translucent glasses can be covered with an information layer in the form of an overlay of text.
5. In the world of the future, access to products will be more important than owning them
Kelly quotes a TechCrunch reporter recently:
Uber, the world's largest taxi company, does not own vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular social network, does not create content itself. The Alibaba marketplace does not have any inventory. Airbnb, the world's largest booking service provider, does not own real estate. There is a transition to new forms of business.
Netflix allows you to watch movies online without buying them. Spotify, the world's largest music streaming company, lets you listen to any kind of music - so buying or downloading a recording doesn't make sense. Every year, Kelly notes, we use more of what we don't buy. Ownership faded into the background, giving first place to access. And in the future, this will cause more and more decentralization and dematerialization.
Access is somewhat similar to rent. Now literally everything is rented. If a fancy bag costs $ 500, then renting it for the occasion is about $ 50 a week. Hire and exchange will become more and more popular. A thing dematerializes if it is used but not possessed.
Kelly believes that everything is already being decentralized, including money. As an example, he cites the creation of the bitcoin system - a currency that works outside of corrupt or dictatorial governments.
The development of digital technologies is increasing decentralization. Through continuous copying, they become shared, and therefore no one. And this trend will intensify, eroding the concept of ownership.
Kelly's advice for future-oriented entrepreneurs is to come up with lease, rental, and access to different types of goods and services.
6. People will collectively pay for inventions, participate in projects and works of art
The spread of the Internet put an end to the dominance of the mass audience. Creative people find niches in the form of all kinds of Internet communities of interest. Each of these niches is very small, but the total number of them is huge. The audience consumes the content, but what about the authors? They exchange their works with fans and like-minded people, but who will fund them in a world of constant sharing and copying?
Kelly believes crowdfunding is the future. Kelly himself participated in 2013 and was one of about 20 thousand people who raised money from fans on Kickstarter. Together with friends, he came up with a full-color graphic novel, or comic strip for adults. They released the first part on their own, and to pay the writers and artists for the sequel, they needed another $ 40,000.
They explained what the money was for in a short video presentation, posted it on Kickstarter and put it together. The principle of Kickstarter is that if even a dollar is not enough to reach the required amount, the money is returned to donors. This protects the fans: it means that the project is underfunded and doomed to failure. The fans of the project also become its marketers, attracting their friends and acquaintances to it.
In the future, Kelly believes, such co-financing of philanthropists will apply to all forms of activity - from creating a car to releasing a music album. People will participate in the process, not just consume the final product. The whole process will be open to make it easy to see even the mistakes made.
The Internet is creating new forms of collaboration that need to be prepared for, Kelly said. Those who come up with bright ideas need to correctly formulate them and ask for help on the Internet: it unites us, and it will teach us new principles of interaction.
7. The line between reality and virtual reality will almost disappear
Kevin Kelly recalls the movie "The Matrix", in which the main character Neo runs, jumps and fights against hundreds of clones in the virtual world. Neo perceives this world as real or even hyperreal. Already now, wearing a virtual reality helmet, which is at the disposal of advanced real estate agencies, you can "walk" through the rooms of a house on the other side of the world.
In the future, all devices, including the keyboard, will become virtual, and communication with the computer will resemble sign language. Future office workers, Kelly believes, will use their voice, move their hands, pointing in the right direction, or simply select the desired image with their eyes and, holding their gaze, send it this or that signal.
Kelly believes that all devices in the future should interact with humans. He talks about a friend's little daughter who has been playing with his iPad since she was two. When the father brought the girl a high-resolution photograph printed on photographic paper, she tried several times to enlarge it and finally said with a sigh: "It is broken." Kelly believes that in the future anything that is not virtual or interactive will be considered broken.
8. People will become ready for constant openness. Internet anonymity will become a thing of the past
The very nature of the Internet is such that any activity can be tracked in it. According to Kelly, this is the fastest tracking car. We cannot stop this system, but we can make the relationship more symmetrical. Everything must become transparent and based on mutual vigilance.
Anonymity is needed by police informers and some political refugees, but in large quantities it will poison the system as a way to evade responsibility.
Lack of responsibility, Kelly believes, reveals the worst in us. Privacy is based on public trust, and trust requires constant identification. Anonymity will not be completely ruled out, but it should tend to zero. Kelly believes that the time of full openness and transparency is just around the corner.
9. People and machines will unite in a single matrix
Our society is gradually moving away from a rigid hierarchy and moving towards fluidity and decentralization, says Kelly. The possession of material products is replaced by access to them, information flows in a continuous stream of copies, which will soon be freely available. Questions have become more important than answers, because they move knowledge forward. The network brings people closer and closer together, everything old dies in it and new things are continuously born. The moment will inevitably come when all people and machines will connect in a global matrix.
It's impossible to reliably predict the future, Kelly said. We do not know what the new mechanisms of our needs and desires will be, what companies will enter the scene in the next 30 years. But you can clearly see the general direction: everything will move towards continuous transformation, exchange, control, access, interaction with virtual reality, information filtering, transparency and openness. Now we, according to Kelly, are at the very beginning of the road.
Author: Konstantin Smygin