The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
A cloud that serves AI will obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on. Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big so fast that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. 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. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
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.
Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.
The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.
"A cloud that serves AI will obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on. Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big so fast that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. 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."
"Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever."
"These eight qualities require a new skill set for creators. Success no longer derives from mastering distribution. Distribution is nearly automatic; it’s all streams. The Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. The technical skills of copy protection are no longer useful because you can’t stop copying. Trying to prohibit copying, either by legal threats or technical tricks, just doesn’t work. Nor do the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these eight new generatives demand nurturing qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse."
"What we all failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions. The entirety of the content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter is not created by their staff, but by their audience. Amazon’s rise was a surprise not because it became an “everything store” (not hard to imagine), but because Amazon’s customers (me and you) rushed to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable."
"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."
"Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning."
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