People will collectively pay for inventions, participate in projects and artworks. New desires continuously give birth to new things and new technologies.

One of the leading thinkers of our time talks about the main technological trends that will shape the world in the next 30 years and change our lives.

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable and will be determined by the technological trends that are already emerging. In his gripping book, Kevin Kelly paints an optimistic outlook for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives will virtual reality right at home and economy "on demand" (on request) and artificial intelligence, which is built into most things produced - are the result of several long-term and accelerating trends.

Kelly describes 12 of these trends and shows how they complement and intersect. These significant forces will change the way we work, learn, buy and communicate with each other. You can ride the tide of change and use technology to your advantage if you better understand these trends.

Kevin Kelly's book will be useful to anyone who wants to find right direction- for business, study, life in general - and understand where to invest, what to study and how to work in the new world.

about the author

Kevin Kelly is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, visionary, author of New Rules for new economy"(New Rules for the New Economy) and" Out of control "(Out of Control).

Quotes from the book

new environment

Our lives are already much more complicated than just five years ago. We need to use many more sources to work, raise children and even have fun. That is why the fact that we seem to be constantly distracted and jumping from one to another is not a sign of disaster, but a necessary adaptation to this current environment.

Personal data

A dream that will become achievable in the near future: to use a personal database of your body to create a personalized treatment plan and make customized medicines.

Books

Mass printing has changed the way people think. Thanks to technology, our active vocabulary has grown from around 50,000 words in Old English to almost a million in Modern English.

Creativity time

There are more artists, writers, and musicians in our society today than ever before. Books have never been so accessible and cheap as they are today. The same goes for music, movies, games, and any other creative content that can be digitally copied.

Analysis of new data

When automatic tracking of absolutely all human actions will become everyday occurrence, there will be analysts of a new formation that will help people work with the data received.

Photo

A hundred years ago, only those who had the technical ability to take photographs constituted a small group of enthusiastic experimenters in this field. Today, any person with a camera can take a picture in a second that will be a hundred times better in every respect than that taken by an average specialist a hundred years ago. We have all become photographers.

Confidence

In an environment where copies are free, you need to sell something that cannot be copied. What could it be? For example, trust. It cannot be reproduced en masse. Can't buy in bulk. You cannot download a trust, save it in a database or in a warehouse. You can't just copy someone else's trust. It can only be earned, and then over time. It cannot be faked or imitated (at least for a long time). Since we prefer to do business with those we trust, we are often willing to overpay for this privilege. We call this phenomenon branding. Branded companies may charge higher prices for the same products and services offered by unknown competitors because the consumer gives them credibility.

Konstantin Smygin, founder of the business literature service in summary MakeRight.ru, told the site about the key ideas of the popular science bestseller “Inevitable. Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future”, not yet published in Russian.

Audio version of the article

The book "The 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 huge changes will take place in our daily lives very soon.

Kelly showed an interest in cybernetics as a child and followed its development from the advent of 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 pieces of paper. In science fiction novels, they were described quite differently.

Then, in the early 1980s, Kelly was in a science lab working on an Apple II computer with a tiny screen running rows of green numbers. The computer was faster than a typewriter, good at counting and tracking data, but there was nothing about it that would reshape people's lives. It wasn't until the Apple II connected to a phone line with a modem and went online that Kelly appreciated its capabilities.

Since then, 30 years have passed, 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 prevented 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 give birth to new things and new technologies.

Today, most people cannot live without smartphones and are often dissatisfied with this or that model or its software, which quickly becomes outdated. This dissatisfaction leads to the emergence of new technologies, new devices, better software. Constant dissatisfaction serves as a trigger for human ingenuity.

Kelly was often reproached for being fond of utopias. But he writes that what awaits us is not a utopia and not a dystopia, but a protopia - not the final destination, but continuous process updates. This process is almost imperceptible, and therefore it is easy to miss.

As an example, Kelly cites an excerpt from Time magazine from 1994 - that the Internet is completely not designed for trading. Newsweek magazine published an article by astrophysicist Cliff Stoll, who argued that online stores and online communities are nothing more than empty fantasies, and a paper newspaper or book will never be replaced by an online database. He considered the emergence of electronic libraries nonsense.

But online commerce is booming, as are digital libraries. Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, eBay, and Facebook open some of their databases to users, and they participate in updating and becoming technology.

Kelly advises IT entrepreneurs to consider the wishes of users and try to constantly create something new from them. Holography, virtual reality and many other technologies will certainly develop.

2. Artificial intelligence, consisting of many individual chips, will take the development of technology to a new level

Real artificial superintelligence, according to Kelly, will consist of many individual chips combined into one. Thus, its effectiveness will be new level, and the artificial intelligence itself will continuously learn. Created by the human mind, it will be its complement and continuation.

The possibilities of such artificial intelligence cannot be overestimated. In 2011, a prototype named Watson was already created. Once it, 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 uses 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 the most likely to the least likely, noting that it was most likely giardiasis. Subsequently, this was confirmed by medical tests.

Watson helps develop drugs and makes individual 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 everything from composing music to designing and constructing buildings. Once upon a time, Garry Kasparov fought against artificial intelligence in chess and lost. Since then, there have been applications that teach the game of chess, making it accessible.

Artificial intelligence can prepare 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 are beyond what humans can do. Machines will do what humans can't. They will think in a way that we cannot, and learn continuously.

Together with artificial intelligence, robotics will begin to develop rapidly, and in these promising directions, says Kelly, is the best investment. Robots will do the work of a person much better than him. 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 job in new conditions, 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 coded form from one network protocol to another, are continuously copied. What gets into the network 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 constantly.

It is impossible to stop this process: it contradicts the very nature of the Internet as a global communication system. Now these streams of copies are still trying to contain with the help of copyrights, 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 there were web pages on the net. The pages were filled with hyperlinks, each containing information. The desktop interface has been replaced by a browser.

Already now, instead of pages and browsers, we are surrounded by streams of information. We follow these streams on Twitter and Facebook, on YouTube channels and RSS feeds from blogs, and are bathed in notifications, apps and updates. We are watching a continuous stream of videos, photos, events. It has no past, no future, 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 the mouse is enough for the money from the account to go to pay bills or buy something 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 other forms of mutually beneficial cooperation will come in place of money.

If any information becomes free - what will they buy then, because content producers will go bankrupt? According to Kelly, the commodity will be something that cannot be copied, such as trust. 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 in a stream of endless free copies? Kelly believes that such people will be supported by fans of talent. People love philanthropy: it allows them to be closer to those they admire. The main thing is that such support should be easy to implement, the amounts should be reasonable, the benefits should be clear, 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 works in huge numbers of copies. Kelly says that the management of a channel with a million subscribers recently released a magazine about the best free TV shows. The audience paid for the magazine, and the TV channel made money on this more money than on the broadcast of their programs in a month.

Amazon and Kindle make money not only from book sales, but also from access to book reviews. Readers willingly buy these reviews and summaries in order 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 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 many additional options that can be easily changed.

4. In the future, we will perceive information mainly from screens.

Kelly believes 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 latest news. A small panel hanging next to the bed displays messages from friends. While he is taking a shower, the bathroom wall monitor reflects beautiful pictures made by friends. A 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 switch it off 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 is true when jogging, where the user in special glasses sees the virtual notes of his friend who has already run this route, notes about the places where it is laid, and even the names of the birds living in the park.

Books in paper form, Kelly believes, will gradually fade into the background. They developed a contemplative mind - screens promote 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, educates real-time thinking. Screens are connected into a single whole by interaction with the network, and people along with them.

Tiny screens built into glasses, Kelly believes, will in the near future show a person walking down the street where the nearest toilet is, where he will find what he was going to buy, whether his friends are nearby. The screen will become part of our identity. It 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 could be covered with an information layer in the form of a text overlay.

5. In the world of the future, access to products will be more important than owning them.

Kelly quotes a recent reporter from TechCrunch:

Uber, the world's largest taxi company, does not own vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular social network, does not create content itself. Alibaba marketplace does not have any stock. Airbnb, the world's largest booking provider, owns no real estate. There is a transition to new forms of business.

Netflix allows you to watch movies online without purchasing them. Spotify, the largest music streaming company, allows you to listen to any music - which means that buying a record or downloading does not make sense. Every year, Kelly notes, we use Moreover that we don't buy. Ownership has 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 everything is rented out. If a fashion bag costs $500, then its occasional rental is about $50 a week. Rental and exchange will become increasingly popular. A thing dematerializes if it is used but not owned.

Kelly believes that decentralization of everything, including money, is already happening. 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 enhances decentralization. Thanks to continuous copying, they become common, and therefore draws. And this trend will intensify, blurring the concept of ownership.

Kelly's advice for future-oriented entrepreneurs is to come up with schemes for renting, renting and accessing different types goods and services.

6. People will collectively pay for inventions, participate in projects and artworks

The spread of the internet has put an end to the dominance of the mass audience. Creative people find niches in the form of all kinds of online communities of interest. Each of these niches is very small, but their total number is huge. The audience consumes content, but what about the authors? They trade their creations with fans and like-minded people, but who will finance 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 collected money from fans on Kickstarter. Together with friends, he came up with a full-color graphic novel, or comic book for adults. They released the first part on their own, and it took another $40,000 to pay the writers and artists for the sequel.

They explained what the money was for in a short video presentation, published it on Kickstarter and raised it. The principle of operation of Kickstarter is that if at least a dollar is not enough to reach the required amount, the money is returned to the donors. This protects the fans: it means that the project is underfunded and doomed to failure. 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 building a car to releasing a music album. People will participate in the process and not just consume the final product. The whole process will be open so that even mistakes made can be easily seen.

The Internet is creating new forms of collaboration, and we need to be ready for them, Kelly said. Those who come up with bright ideas need to format them correctly and ask for help on the Internet: it unites us, and it will also teach us new principles of interaction.

7. The line between reality and virtual reality will almost disappear

Kevin Kelly remembers the movie "The Matrix" in which the protagonist Neo runs, jumps and fights hundreds of clones in virtual world. Neo experiences this world as real or even hyperreal. Already now it is possible, wearing a virtual reality helmet, which advanced real estate agencies have, to “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 to point in the right direction, or simply select the right image with their eyes and, holding their eyes, send it one or another signal.

Kelly believes that all devices in the future should interact with a person. He talks about a friend's little daughter who has been playing with his iPad since she was two years old. When her father brought the girl a high-resolution photo printed on photographic paper, she tried to enlarge it several times and finally said with a sigh, "It's 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. Anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past

The very nature of the Internet is such that any activity can be tracked on it. According to Kelly, this is the fastest tracking machine. 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 whistle-blowers and some political refugees, but in large quantities it will poison the system as a way to avoid responsibility.

Lack of accountability, Kelly believes, brings out the worst in us. Privacy is based on public trust, and trust requires constant identification. Anonymity will not be completely eliminated, but it should tend to zero. Kelly believes that the time for full openness and transparency is at hand.

9. People and machines will connect in a single matrix

Our society is gradually moving away from rigid hierarchies and moving towards fluidity and decentralization, Kelly believes. The possession of material products is replaced by access to them, information flows in a continuous stream of copies that will soon be freely available. Questions have become more important than answers because they move knowledge forward. The network brings people together more and more, everything old dies in it and something new is constantly born. Inevitably, there will come a moment when all people and machines will connect in a global matrix.

It is impossible to reliably predict the future, says Kelly. 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 one can clearly see the general direction: everything will move towards continuous transformation, sharing, control, access, interaction with virtual reality, information filtering, transparency and openness. Now we, according to Kelly, are at the very beginning of the journey.

Final comments

The book is full of interesting ideas and examples, written in a bright and expressive language. The author's fantasy does not go beyond the reasonable and does not give the impression of a utopia, and his admiration for new technologies, the Internet and progress in general is sympathetic.

Advantages of the book: an interesting and optimistic picture of the future of mankind; a convincing analysis of emerging trends.

Disadvantages: many of the book's ideas will be incomprehensible to people far from information technology; The author focuses mainly on positive aspects progress.

Kevin Kelly

THE INEVITABLE

UNDERSTANDING THE 12 TECHNOLOGICAL FORCES THAT WILL SHAPE OUR FUTURE

Published with the support of Veles Capital

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

From a publishing partner

Before the army, I studied at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University, and upon my return I transferred to the Faculty of Economics. And the first lecture I got to was political economy - humanitarian subject. My new classmates have been intensively studying it for a year now. I thought that if I won prizes at Olympiads in physics and mathematics, then the humanitarian course, taken from the middle, would not cause me any difficulties. But I did not understand anything from this lecture. That is, it seems that the words are all understandable, but in general - abracadabra.

When reading this book, a similar phenomenon occurs. The book, despite the abundance of technical details, is similar to a humanitarian scientific work. A work about science that studies the nature and patterns of development of the digital and Internet spheres. In places, readers will have to wade through special terminology, which is abundant here and which is not formed from scientific concepts such as “synchrophasotron”, but from ordinary words such as “hierarchy”, “social”, “system”, but in meanings and combinations that are unusual for perception. However, despite all the difficulties, this book certainly belongs to the category of must read for every educated or simply interested person who would like to understand the processes taking place today.

The book evoked two vivid associations in me. The first one is related to the reading at school of positivist science fiction writers: Efremov, Lem, the early Strugatskys – from the period when they were not yet censored or banned. Their first works were very positivist: about the right future, built by the right people on the basis of the right social order and the right interaction with science. In school, I read this fiction from cover to cover and was very positive about scientific progress. This book breathes exactly the same optimism. One of the main impressions from reading is the absolute belief that the processes described by the author will lead us to a brighter future. And the author wants to believe, because he explains directly how and what will happen. True, this is perhaps the only drawback of the book: it does not touch on the other side of the coin at all, for example, all sorts of apocalyptic predictions about how this “Internet outrage” might end.

The second association concerns the instructions for use attached to modern sophisticated technology, whether it be a telephone, a car, or a mega-advanced washing machine. At first you try to push the buttons with little understanding. But if you want to really understand, then you start reading a 200-page manual, the very sight of which is demoralizing. But you read, and the nature of things opens before you.

So it is with this book: it is not so much futuristic as practical, since it explains a lot in the present and in the future - how and what works, what are the trends that the author presents as inevitable, and they really look like that. And just as instructions can be useful for mastering complex technology, so this book can expand the horizon and change the angle of view of almost any interested person, and in completely different areas.

The new information world transforms our reality - for the better in the author's philosophy and towards destruction according to apocalyptic scenarios. Two amazing recent events in the political and public sphere - Brexit and the election of Trump as President of the United States - are the result of the changed laws of the electronic media, social networks, and the new reality.

Absolutely incredible revolutionary changes are taking place in business thanks to new technologies. Consumers take photos of boots from a photo - not even from a barcode! – find the best price offer, thereby undermining the traditional trade in the bud. A weak, downtrodden and silent consumer turns out to be a tough dictator, and what awaits trade in this context is hard to imagine.

In the investment field, in which your obedient servant has been working for many years, the rapid development of technology will also entail powerful tectonic shifts.

We will see much more impressive declines of the leading companies than the decline of Xerox, Kodak and Nokia, and more impressive rises than that of Apple and Google.

Change is happening daily in all areas. Completely new situations arise, from the comic to the tragic. The first time my co-worker entered the elevator looking at his phone and exited on another floor without looking up or saying hello, I had mixed feelings. It's only been two years, and now it's almost the norm, and it doesn't bother me. In interpersonal relationships, completely new rules emerge daily. No one has ever studied them anywhere - neither in the family, nor at school, nor from books. The question is no longer who gives the coat to whom, opens the door, or is the first to reach out. A few years ago, WhatsApp did not exist in nature, but now, if you see that your interlocutor entered the application, saw your message in the messenger and did not respond, you ask yourself: how long is it permissible not to answer? New norms appear just on the go, as well as very complex moral and ethical issues, on which there are heated discussions on the Internet. For example, the page of a deceased person on social networks: is it correct for someone to maintain it, and if so, to whom?

The number of questions will increase, and for those who would like to understand the nature of the ongoing changes at different levels - in politics, business, interpersonal relationships, psychology and culture, - this book will be very helpful.

And although this book is not a complete instruction for use, since it is very difficult to keep up with new technologies, but it allows you to face the inevitable and adjust your vision of the future.

Dmitry Bugaenko,

Managing partner of the investment company "Veles Capital"

Introduction

When I was thirteen, my father took me to an exhibition computer technology in Atlanta. It was 1965, and my father was absolutely delighted with these room-sized computers, built by leading US corporations such as IBM. My father always believed in technological progress, and these first computers became for him the harbingers of the future that he envisioned. The exhibition did not work for me not the slightest impressions are the reaction of a typical teenager. The sight of computers filling the showroom was dreary: an endless row of rectangular metal boxes. No flickering screen. Not a single device capable of receiving speech or reproducing it. The only thing they could do was print endless rows of numbers on folded paper. From the science fiction that I was reading avidly at the time, I knew exactly what computers were supposed to be - well, these were fake.

In 1981, at the research lab at the University of Georgia where I worked, I saw an Apple II computer. Although it already had a small black-and-green screen to display text, this computer didn't impress me either. He was better at typing than a typewriter, and was adept at presenting numbers as graphical information, as well as processing and tracking data, but he still wasn't hereby. He couldn't change my life.

Kevin Kelly

THE INEVITABLE

UNDERSTANDING THE 12 TECHNOLOGICAL FORCES THAT WILL SHAPE OUR FUTURE

Published with the support of Veles Capital

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

From a publishing partner

Before the army, I studied at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University, and upon my return I transferred to the Faculty of Economics. And the first lecture I got to was political economy, a humanitarian subject. My new classmates have been intensively studying it for a year now. I thought that if I won prizes at Olympiads in physics and mathematics, then the humanitarian course, taken from the middle, would not cause me any difficulties. But I did not understand anything from this lecture. That is, it seems that the words are all understandable, but in general - abracadabra.

When reading this book, a similar phenomenon occurs. The book, despite the abundance of technical details, is similar to a humanitarian scientific work. A work about science that studies the nature and patterns of development of the digital and Internet spheres. In some places, readers will have to wade through special terminology, which is abundant here and which is formed not from scientific concepts such as "synchrophasotron", but from ordinary words such as "hierarchy", "social", "system", but in meanings and combinations that are unusual for perception . However, despite all the difficulties, this book certainly belongs to the category of must read for every educated or simply interested person who would like to understand the processes taking place today.

In the investment field, in which your obedient servant has been working for many years, the rapid development of technology will also entail powerful tectonic shifts.

We will see much more impressive declines of the leading companies than the decline of Xerox, Kodak and Nokia, and more impressive rises than that of Apple and Google.

The number of questions will increase, and for those who would like to understand the nature of the ongoing changes at different levels - in politics, business, interpersonal relations, psychology and culture - this book will be very useful.

Dmitry Bugaenko,
Managing partner of the investment company "Veles Capital"

Introduction

When I was thirteen, my father took me to a computer technology expo in Atlanta. It was 1965, and my father was absolutely delighted with these room-sized computers, built by leading US corporations such as IBM. My father always believed in technological progress, and these first computers became for him the harbingers of the future that he envisioned. The exhibition did not work for me not the slightest impressions are the reaction of a typical teenager. The sight of computers filling the showroom was dreary: an endless row of rectangular metal boxes. No flickering screen. Not a single device capable of receiving speech or reproducing it. The only thing they could do was print endless rows of numbers on folded paper. From the science fiction that I was reading avidly at the time, I knew exactly what computers were supposed to be - well, these were fake.

My opinion changed radically when, a few months later, I connected the same Apple II to a telephone line with a modem. Suddenly, everything was different. A whole universe appeared on the other side of the telephone wire, vast and almost infinite. There were online bulletin boards, experimental teleconferences, and this space was called "Internet". The portal on the other side of the telephone line opened up something huge and at the same time commensurate with a person. This space was perceived organically and fabulously. It directly connected people and machines. I felt that my life had risen to a new level.

In retrospect, I think that the computer age only truly began when the computer was combined with the phone and they merged into a powerful and viable whole. Until that time, computers in themselves meant little, and all meaningful changes followed only in the early 1980s.

Over the next three decades, this technological convergence between communication and computing has evolved, accelerated, flourished and changed. The Internet / World Wide Web / Mobile System gradually emerged from the shadows (these technologies, in fact, no one paid attention in 1981) and finally took center stage in today's global society. Over the past 30 years, the social economy based on these technologies has experienced ups and downs, heroes of the new time have come and gone, but one thing is clear - everything that happened was subject to its own large-scale trends.

Understanding these global historical trends is extremely important, as they are born from internal conditions that still exist and develop, which makes it possible to reasonably expect them to increase further in the next few decades. Nothing is foreseen that could reduce their influence. Even forces that would have been able to slow them down, such as crime rates, military conflicts, or our own extremes, have also begun to succumb to these growing trends. In this book, I will analyze twelve inevitable technological trends that will shape our future in the next three decades.

"Inevitable" is a strong word. For some, it is like a red rag to a bull, as these people are convinced that nothing is inevitable. They argue that human willpower and determination can – and should! - Ignore, take over and control any technological trend. From their point of view, the recognition of "inevitability" is nothing but voluntary refusal from free will. And when the concept of inevitability is mentioned in conjunction with modern technology, as I have, the objections to predestination become even more heated. Here is one of the definitions: inevitability is the final result in a classic thought experiment from the position of a historical digression. If we rewind the tape of the history of the development of human civilization to its very origins and observe the re-development of civilization, then, according to the principle of inevitability, no matter how many times this experiment is carried out to identify alternative versions of history, we would each time come to the conclusion that in 2016 teenagers every five minutes will publish messages on twitter. And that's not what I mean.

I give the term "inevitability" a different meaning. All technologies have an internal conditionality, which implies their development in a particular direction, and not in any other. Other things being equal, the laws of mathematics and physics that determine the dynamics of technology development tend to rely on certain behavioral mechanisms. These tendencies exist mainly in the form of aggregate forces that determine the general contours of technological forms, but do not control individual units or particulars. For example, the form of the Internet—a network connecting other networks around the world—was inevitable, but the specific form of the Internet we have chosen is not inevitable. For example, it could be a commercial, classified (rather than public), or national (rather than global) system. The development of telephony - the transmission of voice messages over long distances by electricity - was inevitable, but the arrival of the iPhone was not. The general shape of the four-wheel vehicle was inevitable, but the creation of an SUV was not. Instant messaging was inevitable, but tweeting every five minutes was not.

An exchange of messages every five minutes cannot be inevitable for another reason. We are changing so fast that our ability to invent new things surpasses our ability to adapt and use these inventions. Today, after the advent of a new technology, it takes us ten years to reach a consensus in society about what it means and formulate certain rules for its use. In another five years, everyone will be savvy about posting on Twitter, just like we figured out what to do with mobile phones, which can ring at any time and anywhere (set the device to silent mode). In the same way, the desire to immediately respond to the received message will quickly fade away, and then we will understand that this was neither inevitable nor essential.

The kind of inevitability I'm talking about now from a digital standpoint is the result of momentum. This is the inertia of the ongoing technological shift. The powerful tides that have shaped the digital landscape over the past thirty years will continue to rise in the next three decades. This applies not only to North America but to the whole world. Throughout the book, I give examples from the United States, but for each situation, I could well give an appropriate example that would apply to India, Mali, Peru, or Estonia. For example, Africa and Afghanistan are the leading countries in terms of cybermoney, where electronic money is often the only active currency. China is well ahead of all other market players in the development of mobile applications with the ability to share access. However, while cultural characteristics can stimulate some phenomena or hinder their development, the internal fundamental forces remain the same for all.

After living in virtual reality for three decades, first as a pioneer of this desert and wilderness, and then as a builder who builds parts of this new continent, my confidence in the inevitability of certain processes began to be based on the depth of the technological changes that are taking place. Beneath the brilliance of daily high-tech innovations that we see on the surface, there are slow undercurrents. The digital world is rooted in physical needs and natural trends in bits, information, and network structure. Regardless of geography, companies, or politics, these fundamentals in the form of bits and networks will lead to roughly the same result over and over again. Its inevitability is due to the physics of the process to which it obeys. In this book, I have attempted to uncover and describe the roots of digital technology, because it is they that determine the long-term direction of development for the next three decades.

Not all changes will be received with enthusiasm. The stability of some established areas will falter as their old business models run out of steam. Entire professions will disappear, which will lead to a change in the quality of life certain groups of people. New professions will arise with absolutely different levels income, which cannot but provoke envy and inequality. The duration and intensity of the trends I have outlined will call into question the provisions of the current legislation and will balance on the verge of legitimacy - a serious obstacle for law-abiding citizens. At its core, digital networking technologies easily cross international borders because they have no boundaries. This is both a huge advantage and a risk of conflict, confusion and problems.

When faced with such an aggressive advancement of technology in the digital realm, our first impulse may be to react defensively. Stop, ban, deny, or at least make it difficult to use. (For example, when it became too easy to copy music and movies online, Hollywood and the music industry did everything they could to stop the process. To no avail. The only thing they did was turn customers against them.) Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibitive measures in best case are temporary and counterproductive in the long run.

An open, conscious approach is much more effective. The purpose of this book is to analyze what underlies the changes in digital technologies so that you can put them to your service. When we understand this, we can work with their help rather than fight them. The principle of copying remains. The principle of tracking and total supervision remains. The principle of ownership is shifting. Virtual reality becomes real. We are not able to stop the process of improving artificial intelligence and robots, creating new types of business and preventing a situation where robotic technology will replace humans and take away jobs. It may be repulsive at first, but we will have to accept the constant development of new technologies. Only by learning how to use them, instead of fighting them, can we reap all the benefits that new technologies have to offer us. I don't recommend hiding from them. It is necessary to learn how to manage new inventions in order to prevent real (not hypothetical) harm from both a legal and technical point of view. We must “tame” technologies, make their use convenient for society. This can be achieved only with complete and personal immersion in the process and unconditional acceptance. For example, we can and should regulate taxi services such as Uber, but we cannot and should not try to prevent the inevitable process of decentralization of this type of service. Such technologies will not just disappear.

Change is inevitable. Today we acknowledge that all is changing, although a significant part of these changes is not perceptible. Seemingly unshakable highest peaks gradually wear out, animals and plants slowly but inevitably evolve into something else. Even the eternal radiance of the Sun fades imperceptibly to the human eye, although this will finally happen when our generation will no longer be on Earth. Human culture and biology are also part of this elusive movement towards something new.

At the heart of any significant change in our lives today is one technology or another. It is the catalyst for human development. Because of technology, everything we create is in a constant process of transformation. Any thing is transformed into something else while it goes from the idea of its creation to its implementation in practice. Everything is in a state of flux. Nothing is complete. Nothing is completely ready. This ongoing process of change represents the turning point of the modern world.

The state of continuous flow means more than just "things will be different." It means that the processes that are driving force flow, today become more important than the end result. The greatest discovery of mankind in the last 200 years was the invention not of a specific device or tool, but the creation of the scientific process itself. After the invention of the scientific method, humanity immediately created thousands of other amazing things that could not have happened otherwise. The formulation of this methodical process of constant change and improvement has become a million times more useful than the invention of any single product, since millions of new things have been invented since mankind began to use the scientific method. With the right organization of a long-term process, you will receive long-term benefits as a result. In today's era, processes are more important than products.

In addition, such a shift in process means an inevitable change in the fate of everything we do. The reality of concrete concepts expressed by nouns, in which we live today, is smoothly transformed into the reality of mobile verbs. In the next 30 years, before our eyes, certain concepts, such as a car, shoes, will turn into intangible verbs. Products will begin to transform into services and processes. The technology-packed vehicle is slowly being transformed into a vehicle service, into an ever-improving sequence of materials that quickly adapt to customer demand, competition, innovation and wear and tear. Whether it's a self-driving car or one you're driving, this mobility service offers flexibility, customization, upgradeability, consistency and new benefits. Shoes, too, go from a final product to an endless process of rethinking what can be an extension of our feet: the use of disposable materials, sandals that change shape while walking, mobile walkways, floors that act as shoes. During use, the focus shifted from the subject of "shoes" to the process itself. In an intangible digital reality, nothing is static or unmoving. Everything is subject to the power of transformation.

As a result of these inevitable changes, all the "failures" of modernity can be brought under control. I have had the opportunity to experience the countless technological forces that have arisen in modern reality, and I have classified them into 12 categories: for example, access, track, share and use. All these forces express actions that continue in time, act as catalysts and enhance them.

Each of these 12 categories serves to indicate a trend whose impact will continue for at least another three decades. I call these metatrends “inevitable”, because they are based not on the laws of the development of society, but on the laws of the development of technologies, the nature of these forces reflects the essence of new technologies, something that is common to all of them. A person as a creator is responsible and determines the direction of development of technologies, but at the same time, they themselves contain internal properties that are beyond the control of a person. Certain processes, by virtue of their qualities, lead to specific results. For example, many industrial processes (with the participation of steam engines, chemical plants, dams) proceed at elevated temperatures and pressures, far exceeding the level comfortable for humans. And at the heart of the development of digital technologies (computers, the Internet, mobile applications) is cheap and ubiquitous reproduction. The internal requirement of high temperature and high pressure for industrial processes necessitates the location of production in large, centralized plants, regardless of culture, social background or politics. The internal demand for cheap ubiquitous reproduction does not depend on nationality, economic situation or human desires and ensures the wide dissemination of digital technologies. This property reflects their internal logic of development. In both of these examples, the best way to get the most out of these technologies is to "listen" to the internal requirements of their development, to bring our expectations, regulation system and products to the fundamental trends inherent in them. It will be much easier to manage complexity, optimize the benefits, and mitigate the potential drawbacks of individual technologies if they are aligned with the internal development trajectory. The purpose of this book is to collect the main trends inherent in modern technologies and describe the trajectories of their development.

These main categories represent the meta-changes in our culture that will take place in the near future. To some extent, they already appear today. I do not undertake to predict which specific products will be "on the crest of success" in next year or decade, it is all the more impossible to predict this for specific companies. It depends on fashion trends and commercial promotion, and it is impossible to predict. At the same time, the general patterns of development of products and services in the next 30 years are already obvious today. Their main features are laid down in the directions created by new technologies, which today are gradually moving towards their widespread use.

This large scale dynamic system technology is changing our culture slowly but steadily and is driving the following forces: transformation, artificial intelligence, flow, scanning, sharing, sharing, filtering, mixing, interacting, tracking, asking questions, and then start.

Although to each of these tendencies I dedicate separate chapter, their action is not isolated. Rather, they overlap in many ways, depend on each other and mutually reinforce each other. It is quite difficult to talk about one trend without touching on the others. Increase sharing stimulates the state flow and at the same time depends on it. Cognition impossible without tracking. Scanning inseparable from interactions. These categories mixed up, and all of them represent one or another variant of the process start. These categories are a single field of movement.

These trends are potential trajectories of development, not predestinations of fate. They don't predict the outcome. They simply tell us that in the near future we will inevitably start moving in these directions.

- Bestseller of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal;

— The book is required reading according to Mark Andreessen, co-founder of venture fund Andreessen Horowitz;

— The book will be useful to those who want to understand what our future will look like.

One of the leading thinkers of our time talks about the main technological trends that will shape the world in the next 30 years and change our lives. Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable and will be determined by the technological trends that are already emerging. In a compelling book, Kevin Kelly paints an optimistic outlook for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy and artificial intelligence built into most things we manufacture - are the result of several long-term and accelerating trends.

Main idea

Technologies are developing in a direction that is determined by physics. Therefore, it is quite realistic to predict how the digital world will evolve. Most breakthrough inventions are still ahead of us. The author of the book believes that the future of humanity will be determined by twelve technological trends: transformation, artificial intelligence, flow, scanning, sharing, sharing, filtering, remixing, interaction, tracking, asking questions and starting.

Transformation

Everything in the world is outdated. Digital technologies become obsolete very quickly, so they require constant updates. Updates occur gradually, and a person is so used to it that he stopped noticing the constant transformation in which he lives.

The continuous development of technology encourages people to chase new things. But soon after they get something new, the feeling of novelty disappears. This creates a feeling of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction stimulates original ideas and further growth.

People have to constantly learn new things. At the same time, users do not have enough time to perfectly master this or that technique, as it becomes obsolete and a new one comes to replace it. Thus, people are doomed to be eternal newbies.

Kelly calls the society we live in a protopia - a society in a state of constant transformation. It has no end goal other than to strive for continuous improvement.

Disillusionment with the utopias of the 20th century leads people to fear the future. Kelly calls to accept both it and the transformation. The future will be the result of the changes we see today. Over the past thirty years, the impossible has become possible, and this is just the beginning.

The supercomputer already exists. IBM Watson is used in medicine to diagnose patients: it determines the likelihood of a disease from a list of symptoms. Access to this computer is currently limited to IBM partners, but over time it will be open.

Investments in the development of AI are growing every year. The world's IT leaders - Yahoo!, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter - have already acquired artificial intelligence companies because they understand that this direction is the future. Soon it will be possible to introduce AI into any technology. This process will affect many areas of activity: production household chemicals, interior design, law, music, marketing, construction and sports.

Kelly suggests that the creator of AI will be Google. Many believe that this company is already using the power of AI to improve search, but in fact it is developing search to create AI. According to the author's forecast, this may happen in about ten years.

AI obeys the law of network effects: what more people it is used, the more powerful it becomes. Therefore, its creators will be forced to grow indefinitely in order to stay ahead of competitors. This will lead to the formation of an oligarchy of two or three large companies.

AI will be different from human. Humans can't think statistically, and AI can easily handle large amounts of data. His attention will not be limited, like a person's.

The author does not agree with the fears of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk that the creation of AI will be the last invention of people. He is optimistic: AI will solve the global problems of mankind. For example, the mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy and dark matter.

The introduction of AI will give impetus to robotics. Soon, robots will replace humans en masse in traditional workplaces. Before the end of the 21st century, most modern professions will disappear. Robots will replace workers on conveyors, warehouses, agricultural fields, pharmacies, freight transport. They will clean the streets and premises and even replace qualified employees: translators, editors, lawyers, journalists and even programmers, architects and doctors. But most importantly, robots will be able to do the work that people are not capable of doing.

Ultimately, the introduction of robots will help save people from unpleasant and hard work, create new jobs that help people reach their potential.

Flow

The industrial era was a time of accurate and cheap analog copies. Information products can be copied much more easily and, moreover, free of charge. Therefore, the economy of goods is transformed into the economy of the flow of services.

Copy protection technologies are a thing of the past. Practice has shown that attempts to prohibit copying at the legislative level or through technical means do not bring results. So businesses have begun to create new forms of value that come with free copies for profit.

Kelly divides them into several groups (and says the list will expand):

Responsiveness: People are willing to pay for a premiere ticket in order to be the first to see a film that will later be available for free.
Personalization: The version of the product will be created taking into account the characteristics of a particular user.
Interpretation of information in the interests of the consumer: paid recommendations will be offered for free medical analysis.
Authenticity: any program can be downloaded for free in a pirated version, but many will pay for it to ensure its high quality.
Convenience: what cloud services sell.

The transformation to flow mode has already affected music, books, movies, games, media, education. The transport sector is next Agriculture and healthcare.

Kelly identifies four stages in the transformation of a product into a service stream:

Permanence and exclusivity. A professional manufacturer creates a quality product, each unit of which is unique and expensive.
Free and ubiquitous. Technology allows the production of huge quantities of replicas at a very low cost per unit.
Flow and sharing. The product is divided into components, each of which is useful. The product itself becomes a stream of services.
Openness and transformation. Streams of services and ready-made items that are low cost and easy to use allow you to create new products and new categories of products.

Scanning

Before the invention of printing, the culture of oral speech dominated society. The most influential people were speakers: they shaped the worldview of others. Respect for the past was valued.

After Gutenberg invented the printing press, orators were replaced by writers. New professions related to printing appeared: journalists, scientists and lawyers. Thanks to books, people began to appreciate facts, linear logic and the authority of power.

Our time is the time of screens. Displays are used everywhere. In the near future they will be placed on any flat surface. This fundamentally changes the nature of information consumption and its impact on culture.

Today people read much more than 50 years ago. However, they read differently. This the new kind Reading Kelly calls scanning. Scanning is a very fast reading of passages of texts mixed with the perception of images on the Internet.

The traditional way of reading led to the development of literacy, rational thinking, science, the emergence of the principles of justice and the rule of law. Scanning undermines these values, and with them our thinking. When reading a book, a person is immersed in a virtual literary space. When reading on the Internet, a person receives fragments of information, catches general ideas, but never dives into them.

In the future, books will also change: they will no longer be just text on paper. They will become a continuous stream of thinking, editing, sharing and display. The books of the future will be like Wikipedia. First, they will be released in digital format. Each page will have links to other books. Secondly, online books will never be fully completed. Books will begin to be created by the efforts of online communities, and not by individual authors.

All books will be linked to the global network library. Thanks to search algorithms and artificial intelligence, it will be possible to create interactive models of ideas and concepts.

Screen reading stimulates the formation of a more pragmatic type of thinking. If the user comes across a new idea, he can immediately explore the issue, get the opinion of virtual friends, find alternative points of view, create a bookmark, publish what he read on the social network. Screen reading builds quick decision-making skills, helps connect one idea with others, and teaches you how to think in real time.

Scanning is not just about reading. According to Kelly, in 30 years everyone will use augmented reality glasses. When you look at any object, you can get information about it. With the help of such glasses, people will scan the world around them.

Providing access

Thanks to the Internet, we can easily consume products that do not belong to us. Now you can not buy books, audio recordings, movies or games. It is enough to subscribe to online platforms that provide unlimited access to their resources for little money.

Thanks to the Internet, many things become available in the form of services. Hotels as a Service - Airbnb, Tools as a Service - TechShop, Clothes as a Service - StitchFix, Bombfell, Toys as a Service - NerdBlock, Sparkbox. Several hundred startups are trying to offer food as a service.

Modern services are constantly adapting to the needs of consumers. Both parties win: the manufacturer gets a loyal user, users - high quality through continuous service improvement and personalization.

Startups are looking for new ways to use those resources that are being used inefficiently. They offer idle assets to the people who need them in real time. This model can work in almost any field.

The right of access is practically the same as a lease. The user gets things at his disposal without having to spend money on their purchase and storage. Today you can rent almost everything.

A physical product can only be rented to one consumer at a time. In the digital economy, any product can be used by an infinite number of users. At the same time, the quality of the service does not decrease. The more users, the cheaper the service.

Previously, there were two main ways of organizing work: the company and the market. Recently, a third one has appeared - a platform. A platform is the foundation on which other businesses build their products and services. It offers products that it does not manufacture itself.

Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are platforms. They collaborate with external developers to develop their products. At almost any level of the platform, the principle of sharing is by default, even in a competitive environment.

Sharing

Network technologies allow a large number of people to use common resources and work together. Kelly argues that over time this will lead to the formation of "digital socialism".

It will not look like classical socialism. The class struggle will not matter in it. Digital socialism will not lay claim to a state hierarchy. It will be a system of collective distribution of resources and joint production of values.

Social networks and platforms have opened up opportunities for users to quickly and free of charge create horizontal relationships. Groups of people can exchange information, interact, cooperate - and eventually come to joint production.

Today, billions of people are already creating free content on social media. They share their stories, leave comments, post photos, create videos and music, thereby competing with entire industries.

In the commercial realm, sharing has several popular forms. There are platforms for collective investment (crowdfunding) that allow you to collect huge amounts of money to finance startups. Other platforms provide co-production (crowdsource). For example, the TopCoder platform brings together developers, testers, designers and other professionals to work together on commercial projects. This leads to a weakening of the influence of classical hierarchical organizations both in public life and in business.

There are more artists, writers and musicians in the world today than ever before. They produce all kinds of products in huge quantities. At the same time, it becomes very easy to find some highly specialized topic, and each product can easily find its audience.

Filtration

Our era is the most favorable in history for consumers information product. Many new works are created every year, and the average person with one click can access most of the books, songs, films, records. Every day their number increases. And thanks to the advent of technologies that make it easier to create something new, it is becoming easier for us to express ourselves by presenting our creation to the world.

We are flooded with options for work, development, and entertainment, but the sheer size of this “library of everything” doesn’t match our capabilities. We need help in navigating this "jungle", a tool that will discard all unnecessary and prompt right choice. Thus, we use a variety of intermediary filters, from authorities and publishers to brands and friends. But even these methods do not cope with the task of narrowing the huge number of possibilities to a minimum of the best for us. At this point, recommender "engines" come to the rescue, which sift through the already selected array and predict what you might like now. It is these recommendation filters that provide a third of Amazon's sales.

In order to suggest things that we like, artificial intelligence algorithms narrow the range of options as much as possible, discarding opportunities that we will never see. This threatens to stop us seeing everything that is even slightly different from what we already know, even if something else might be to our liking. Any filter does not pass and something good. This is the curse of the world of abundance: we are only able to take a tiny piece of all the good things that exist.

Soon we will have beautiful filters at our disposal, ready to fulfill our every desire. But the problem is that often we ourselves do not know what we want.

remixes

In the conditions of modern abundance it is difficult to create something completely new. Therefore, innovators combine early and simple media genres with more recent and complex ones, producing an unlimited number of new ones. Cheap and versatile creative tools break the pattern when it's easier to consume a product than it is to create something yourself. To the surprise of experts, tens of millions of people have spent countless hours making films in recent years. Of course, these are not Hollywood blockbusters, but it is not this that is much more important, but their number.

Technology makes it possible to fragment existing genres, repeat and mix products. So they take on a new meaning.

Being able to go back to the beginning and listen to the piece again in the same performance changed the piece. Songs have become shorter on average, more melodic and easier to repeat. Rewatchability has taken films out of the "prison" of a television program and turned them into shows that can be watched over and over again. And also share the content you like with other people, discuss, analyze and study it.

In the near future we will have the opportunity to record everything around, so that later we can find the right moment and review the recordings. This will create a new culture in which each person's past can be recreated. And parts of ideas and products will be copied and transformed to create something completely new. The most important creations of a culture will be those that most often become the basis for remixes.

interactivity

The rapid progress of virtual reality is facilitated by two of its advantages: the effect of presence and interactivity. A fake world that seems real beckons us with expanded possibilities, removes those barriers that increasingly burden us in our quest to get the maximum experience. Today, virtual reality is somewhere in the middle between an IMAX 3D movie and a holographic room that has no limits.

Microsoft is developing augmented reality to create the office of the future. Instead of working in their compartment, looking at the wall, employees sit in an open space wearing HoloLense glasses and see a giant wall of virtual screens around them. Or, with one click, they “teleport” into a 3D conference room, joining a dozen colleagues living in other cities. Or they “move” to a training room where an instructor will show them how to administer first aid by helping their avatars do the procedures correctly. Such lessons in augmented reality will in many ways surpass classes in the real world.

Although the effect of presence is very attractive to us, it is the interactivity of virtual reality that will become the basis of its success. The best examples of synthesized worlds are those that create the effect of presence not due to the highest resolution, but due to the very active engagement with other people.

We endow our devices with "sense organs" - "eyes", "ears", motion sensors, so that we can interact with them. This is a way to defeat the tyranny of computer buttons - to optimize and diversify our activity so that we can manipulate not only our hands, but our whole body. For long-term use of interfaces of the future, gestures similar to sign language are more suitable.

Tracking

In recent years, tiny and inexpensive digital sensors have made recording the parameters of the human body so simple, and the variety of these parameters so great, that everyone can now get a lot of data about themselves.

Such microscopic meters can be inserted into watches, clothes, glasses, phones, or placed in cars, offices, and public places without spending a lot of money. The number of parameters that people monitor is growing. And these experiments on ourselves have already begun to change our understanding of medicine, health and human behavior.

Self-tracking systems are already helping to diagnose diseases on early stages, the constant recording of routine activities allows us to draw interesting conclusions from "personal analytics", to isolate stable trends that would be difficult to predict. The author is sure that if some parameter can be tracked, someone somewhere is already doing it. In the not too distant future, it will be possible to use a personal database of your body (including a full genome) to create a personalized treatment plan and create customized medicines.

All these sensors produce too many pieces of information to be easily analyzed. In the long term, the data streams coming from the sensors on our bodies will no longer be numbers and will turn into new feelings. Evolution has provided man with the senses necessary for survival, which is why we react to the cold, we feel hungry. However, she did not teach human body recognize the consequences of excesses, such as exceeding normal blood sugar levels. If sensor measurements are presented in a form that can be felt, such as a vibration on the wrist, such a device will develop in us new ability what we desperately need is to feel and understand our own body.

Asking questions

The idea of an online directory, organized like an encyclopedia, that allows anyone in the world to add material to it at any time and without permission, caused skepticism among many experts, including the author of this book. But the success of Wikipedia continues to exceed all expectations. In 2015, it had 35 million articles in 288 languages. She is quoted in Supreme Court United States, schoolchildren around the world rely on it, journalists and study enthusiasts use it to quickly get information on a new topic.

It turns out that the success of this encyclopedia lies in the right tools, with the help of which it is easier to return the previous version of the article than to spoil it. Therefore, a good enough article is successful and grows over time. The Wikipedia example proves that, with the right approach, a community of collaborating people can beat the same number of competing ambitious individuals.

The number and popularity of open source products similar to Wikipedia is constantly growing. We have a lot of resources that operate without significant financial injections and are created by volunteers working without a salary and bosses. Many breakthroughs in modern society are the result of large-scale cooperation and mass social interaction in real time, which, in turn, is possible thanks to the ubiquitous instant connection between millions of people.

If knowledge grows exponentially, then, in theory, we should soon run out of riddles. However, we, on the contrary, continue to discover even more of the unknown. Thus, while our knowledge is increasing, new questions are also increasing. Moreover, it is safe to say that the most important questions we haven't asked yet.

Technologies that help ask questions will become more valuable. After all, asking questions is often more powerful than getting answers.

Start

In thousands of years, our era will be perceived as an incredible moment when the inhabitants of the planet united into something more. Since we are all integrated into this process, it is difficult for us to see its forms, for us it proceeds imperceptibly, vaguely and rarely surprises. “There are seven billion people in his heart, who will soon be nine, and they continuously form more and more new relationships, approaching the direct unification of minds,” the author writes.

The collective intelligence of all people and machines (plus the intelligence of nature and any behavior that follows from all this) the author calls holos. And all of us, each time following the next link, teach this global system to be useful and productive.

According to the author, at the current speed of the spread of technology, by 2025 everyone living on Earth will have access to this platform using some almost free device. Everything will be on it. Or in her. Or, to put it simply, everything will be it.