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

Kevin Kelly has struck the technology world again with his new book, “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future”, a nonfiction New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Published in 2016, it focuses on a dozen technological forces that will affect the way we live our lives in the future. Kelly’s diction allows for a beautiful flow of well-written prose that draws in the reader.
The editor of “Wired” warns against assuming the future will resemble the present and describes a dozen factors that will shape the next thirty years. Becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening… are the first few forces Kelly describes, ending with Beginning, which is almost a paradox. Becoming relates to an improvement of performance of products, which is what is happening even today. Says Kelly, in regards to this, “Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level.” He writes of remixing, where he alludes that nothing is new, only an improved version of a previously existing one that was reassembled into something new for the moment until it happens all over again. Ownership will not be a priority as technology will allow people to own virtually, as is already happening with companies like Uber and Alibaba. This book
helps paint a picture of what trends are especially important for businesses to follow.
“The Inevitable” clearly depicts an almost robotic future, where we will have clothes that instruct washing machines on how to wash them.
With rapid changes in transformations of the digital age, Kelly says, “We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.” In this light, businesses and organizations are forced to act quickly and adapt fast to technology changes taking place. There is unlimited information available on the internet for literally anybody with access to it, and here Kelly describes the forced filtering, where information has to be carefully selected when determining
authenticity.
Kelly writes, “If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to overshare overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.” Of the twelve forces described by Kelly, sharing is more apt to happen globally. It is already happening with millions of people sharing their personal information on the internet. By the end of March 2017, Facebook had over 2.07 billion monthly active users, Instagram had 800 million, and Twitter had 330 million. This translates to billions of photos being shared every day, as well as information exchanged. This trend changes how we interact with others in the virtual space, and gives us access to information that cannot be exhausted. New information is becoming available faster than we can consume, and this has an impact on filtering, where people will not read anymore due to being overwhelmed with information and will be forced to select only that which is valuable to them.
Kelly’s undeniable talent in writing makes The Inevitable a powerful technological encounter for a reader, perhaps new to the subject. His claims are sufficiently backed up with evidence gathered from current technological experiences and from the future that he describes. Kelly gives an excellent example by writing that, “At the rate A1 technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult,” showing that technological advancement is inevitable. It is possible to see that he understands the digital world, making it easier for the reader to enjoy this book and believe in the forces described. He stresses the importance to understand and embrace these changes because they are unavoidable and will certainly have a great impact on how we conduct businesses, interact with others and