IN KEVIN KELLY’S VIEW, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years
of digital progress. Countless artificial smartnesses, for example, will be
added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each
other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become
cyber-centaurs — co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to
perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game.
Every possible surface that can become a display will become a display, and
will study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is
broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next
platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and
shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in
your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. Everything will be tracked,
monitored, sensored, and imaged, and people will go along with it because
“vanity trumps privacy,”as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention
flows, money will follow.”
Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no
cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling
rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now
because we will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a
different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other
people.”
In the Q&A, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no
rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have
to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in
the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.”
Kelly concluded: “We are at the beginning of the beginning — the first hour of
day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the
next 25 years have not been invented yet.
“You‘re not late.“
—Stewart Brand
s...@longnow.org <mailto:s...@longnow.org>
An illustrated, linkable version on Medium:
https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/digital-is-just-getting-started-7939587f343e#.o8orlf6s2
<https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/digital-is-just-getting-started-7939587f343e#.o8orlf6s2>
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