Published by Penguin Books, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a guide through the 12 technological imperatives that will shape the future and transform our lives.
About the book:
It’s 2046. You don’t own a car, or much of anything else, paying instead to subscribe to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your device with a common set of hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Every aspect of your daily life is tracked by you or someone else. Advertisers pay you to watch their ads. Robots and AIs took over your old job but also created a new one for you, doing work you could not have imagined back in 2016.
Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives – from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture – can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces.
Kelly both describes these deep trends – flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning – and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These large forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits.
Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading – what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place – as this new world emerges.
About the author:
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He is editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors a month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of The Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He is the author of Cool Tools, What Technology Wants, New Rules of the New Economy, and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.