Introduction
You often feel overwhelmed by the rapid pace of modern technological change. You buy a device today, and it requires an update tomorrow.
These shifts are not random accidents or human choices. Deep physical and network laws make broad historical trends inevitable.
Static nouns are rapidly becoming fluid verbs. You no longer just own things; you access, share, and track them continuously.
Attempts to ban or resist these technological tides always backfire. You must embrace them to understand where civilization is heading.
The book explores twelve technological imperatives shaping our future. What forces drive this continuous state of becoming? How will artificial intelligence alter your daily work? Can you thrive in a world where access replaces ownership?
1. Becoming and Flowing
Technology perpetually upgrades itself in a state of continuous flux, shifting our economy from fixed physical stocks to dynamic digital flows.
Accelerating technological cycles and mandatory updates mean that everyone will remain a perpetual beginner in the future.
Because software and hardware undergo endless automatic upgrades, menus morph and defaults disappear. This continuous state of flux ensures that no one has time to fully master tools before they are displaced.
The average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days, forcing users into a constant learning loop. You face an upgrade arms race that keeps you in the role of an Endless Newbie.
The internet is fundamentally a massive copy machine that circulates data continuously, making the free flow of copies inevitable. Every message, thought, or action sent across the internet is copied multiple times through routers, servers, caches, and memory. Because our digital communication network is engineered as a superconductor with minimal friction, once a copy is introduced, it continues to flow forever in an endless contagious wave.
Society's economic focus has shifted from static physical stocks of goods to dynamic flows of intangibles, turning solid products into fluid, updating services. While physical warehouses and factories are still necessary, they are no longer sufficient for wealth and happiness.
Solid cars parked in driveways are transformed into personal on-demand transportation services supplied by Uber, Lyft, Zip, and Sidecar. Smartphones receive continuous operating system updates instead of requiring new hardware.
The Eight Generatives
To make money in a world of free copies, creators must sell generatives. These are uniquely produced, uncopyable qualities that add value during a transaction.
Generative values cannot be cloned, stored, warehoused, or faked. They must be generated uniquely for a specific exchange in real time.
Radiohead allowed fans to pay whatever they wished for a free copy of their In Rainbows album. They earned about $2.26 per download and made more money than all previous label-released albums combined. Top ten music videos have been watched for free 10 billion times.
To succeed with this model, you can follow specific pricing guidelines:
- It must be extremely easy to do.
- The amount must be reasonable.
- There is clear benefit to them for paying.
- It is clear the money will directly benefit the creators.
2. Cognifying and Interacting
Infusing artificial intelligence into existing inert processes and objects is the most consequential and disruptive technological force of our future. Adding a tiny amount of useful intelligence to existing processes boosts effectiveness dramatically.
The first genuine AI emerges from the net as a planetary superorganism fed by human minds.
Unlike previous expectations of standalone supercomputers, this entity acts as a thin and loosely connected network powered by exabytes of data. Private investment in the AI sector expanded by an average of 70 percent annually over four years. By 2014 alone, investors poured 2 billion dollars into 322 companies with AI-like technology. Total investments since 2009 reached 18 billion dollars.
IBM's Watson evolved from a single room-sized supercomputer into a cloud-based service running across open-standard servers. It now provides medical diagnosis tools like identifying giardia from symptoms described in plain English.
The 60-year-old overnight success of artificial intelligence was triggered by the convergence of cheap parallel computation, big data, and deeper algorithms. Neural networks require parallel processing, which was unlocked when graphics processing units originally built for video games were adapted for machine learning by researchers like Andrew Ng. Geoff Hinton used stacked deep-learning layers 15 levels high to optimize recognition tasks like recognizing a human face. A neural net with 100 million parameters can now be calculated by GPUs in a day instead of weeks. Massive online databases act as fuel for these learning algorithms.
DeepMind's cloud-based AI learned to play 1980s Atari video games through deep reinforcement machine learning without human coaching. It eventually discovered a winning loophole in Breakout that its creators never imagined.
Take X and Add AI
The business plans of thousands of upcoming startups follow a simple formula. Entrepreneurs take an existing product or service and add online intelligence to it. About 10,000 startups rely on this approach.
Just as entrepreneurs a century ago electrified manual tools using power from the grid, future entrepreneurs will infuse everyday fields with cloud-based AI. Phone cameras eliminated heavy glass lenses and mechanical shutters by adding algorithms, computation, and optical intelligence to calculate pictures directly from light rays.
You do not need to compete against machines. In freestyle chess tournaments, human-and-machine hybrid teams known as centaurs listen to AI suggestions while using human judgment to override them. In the 2014 Freestyle Battle championship, pure chess AI engines won 42 games, but centaur teams won 53 games. There are now 2 times as many grand masters as when Deep Blue first beat Garry Kasparov.
Virtual Reality and Presence
Virtual reality aims not to suspend disbelief, but to ratchet up belief so thoroughly that the primitive brain reacts as if the simulated environment is physically real. Advanced VR hijacks vision, hearing, and touch to convince your embodied self that you are somewhere else.
Visitors standing on a virtual plank 30 meters above a pit at Stanford University tremble, sweat, or fall despite knowing intellectually they are on a flat floor.
Augmented reality projects digital layers onto the physical world using light field technology, allowing virtual objects to coexist seamlessly with physical spaces. Systems like Microsoft's HoloLens overlay semi-transparent holographs onto your natural view, letting you inspect virtual objects from any angle.
Standing in a kitchen and seeing a high-resolution holographic robot like R2-D2 lets you walk around and inspect it.
3. Accessing and Sharing
Accessing goods and services in real time is becoming far more important than owning them outright. Digital media and advanced technology allow you to borrow or stream whatever you need instantly. You gain the benefits of utility without the responsibilities of maintenance, cleaning, storage, insurance, or upgrades.
Real-time access and decentralized platforms eclipse isolated ownership, fostering a massive rise in collaborative peer production.
Companies like Uber own no vehicles, Facebook creates no content, Alibaba holds no inventory, and Airbnb owns no real estate.
Dematerialization
Products are undergoing dematerialization, delivering more benefits while using fewer physical atoms by substituting heavy materials with lightweight bits and smart software. Products are shrinking in mass as intangible design, software, and connectivity replace heavy physical materials.
A beer can weighed 73 grams in 1950, dropped to 21 grams in 1972, and weighs 13 grams today. The weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent since the 1970s. In 1870, you needed 4 kilograms of raw material to generate one unit of US GDP. By 1930, that amount dropped to 1 kilogram, and from 1977 to 2000, GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 to $3.58.
The blockchain provides a fully decentralized public ledger that generates high levels of trust among strangers through peer-to-peer accounting rather than central intermediaries. Bitcoin uses a blockchain public ledger updated six times an hour to track transactions and secure coins without a central bank. In 2009, the distributed currency held $3 billion in bitcoins in circulation and reached 100,000 vendors accepting bitcoins.
Digital Socialism
Ubiquitous connectivity is quietly giving rise to a revised, state-free version of technological socialism based on sharing and peer production. Unlike old-school industrial socialism driven by centralized command economies, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet. Projects like Linux, Apache, and Wikipedia demonstrate how masses of people contribute labor without direct wages and share products in common.
Online social arrangements follow a hierarchy of increasing coordination:
- sharing
- cooperation
- collaboration
- collectivism
Users upload 1.8 billion personal photos daily across Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram. Meanwhile, 35 million servers run free Apache software hosting half of all web pages, and 650,000 people work on more than half a million open source projects tracked by Black Duck Open Hub.
Crowdfunding platforms enable fans to collectively prepay and finance creative projects, bypassing traditional middlemen and institutional financing. Kickstarter enabled 9 million fans to fund 88,000 projects in seven years, raising over $34 billion annually across various crowdfunding platforms. Projects reaching their funding goals have a 40 percent success rate, while the highest grossing Kickstarter campaign raised $20 million.
To participate in this economy, you can follow these steps:
- go onto a crowdfunding platform and make a short video pitch for what you want funding for
- set a funding goal and a time limit
- rely on the escrow service to hold funds until the total amount is reached
4. Screening and Remixing
Human culture is shifting from being based on fixed printed books to being based on dynamic digital screens. While printing press technology created an era of linear logic, fixed authority, and physical copies, the proliferation of billions of digital screens has fostered a culture of constant flux, pixels, hyperlinks, and real-time assembly of truth by audiences.
Dynamic digital screens and infinite options drive a culture of constant re-combination, where asking profound questions outvalues static answers.
Over 5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives today, with display manufacturers producing 3.8 billion new additional screens per year. You move from the era of the People of the Book to the People of the Screen.
Superabundance and Filtering
Humanity has reached an unprecedented peak of plenitude, creating an endless hall of options that makes it physically impossible to review every potential choice. A person can now access more ancient Greek texts, Chinese scrolls, or live Mozart concertos than historical elites ever could. Because the sheer volume of choices far outstrips human lifespan, navigating this superabundance requires systematic triage and assistance.
Every 12 months the world produces 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, and 400,000 new products. This adds up to 180 million total songs recorded on the planet, which fit on a 20-terabyte hard disk holding all recorded music with standard MP3 compression.
To deal with the escalation of options, you rely on a wide variety of traditional and automated filters to winnow choices down to what is personally relevant. Traditional filters include gatekeepers like authorities and teachers, intermediates like publishers, curators in museums or retail, brands, governments, cultural environments, friends, and individual self-selection. As options continue to multiply, these are supplemented by sophisticated automated recommendation engines that track user behavior to predict preferences.
Netflix employs 300 people with a $150 million budget for its recommendation system, while Amazon generates a third of its sales from more like this offers, amounting to $30 billion in sales for Amazon in 2014 resulting from recommendation filters.
The Power of Questions
Real economic and technological growth does not come from new resources, but from rearranging existing elements into more valuable combinations. According to economists Paul Romer and Brian Arthur, all modern technologies and economic growth derive from a combination of primitive technologies. Because simpler elements can be combined in limitless ways, the rate of possible combinations grows exponentially and expands culture and the economy. Innovators take traditional media genres like newspaper articles or sitcoms, unbundle them using digital technology, and recombine them into newborn forms like listicles and tweet storms.
As answers become cheap, instant, and abundant, the economic and creative value inverts, making good questions far more valuable than answers. Because automated systems can supply factual answers instantly, the skill of generating profound questions becomes the true engine of innovation. A good question challenges existing assumptions, opens up new territories of thought, and cannot be answered immediately.
Albert Einstein asked himself what he would see if he traveled on a beam of light, a question that launched the theory of relativity and the atomic age. In 1964, Pablo Picasso offered a statement on computers to writer William Fifield.
Recognize these qualities of a productive query:
- a good question is not concerned with a correct answer
- a good question cannot be answered immediately
- a good question challenges existing answers
- a good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked
- a good question creates new territory of thinking
- a good question reframes its own answers
- a good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business
- a good question is a probe, a what-if scenario
- a good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious
- a good question cannot be predicted
- a good question will be the sign of an educated mind
- a good question is one that generates many other good questions
- a good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do
- a good question is what humans are for
5. Tracking and Beginning
Routine tracking infrastructure is technologically inevitable, requiring symmetric coveillance while humanity forms a planetary superorganism.
The Tracking Infrastructure
You encounter numerous routine tracking systems every day across travel, communication, commerce, and work. The modern environment features constant routine data collection from cars, traffic cameras, ride-shares, postal mail, smart home devices, credit cards, and web cookies. While these streams remain mostly independent and unintegrated, companies aggressively collect customer data as the new business gold.
Camille Hartsell and Kevin H. helped tally routine US tracking systems, finding that 68 percent of public employers and 98 percent of banks operate under cameras, while every car since 2006 contains a chip recording driving habits. Highway traffic cameras record seventy million license plates monthly.
Self-tracking shifts medical and personal experiments from large populations to N=1 studies where an individual acts as their own test subject and baseline control. While traditional medicine relies on massive randomized trials to eliminate bias, quantified-self experiments focus entirely on the individual. By tracking a wide variety of metrics over a long period, you establish your personal normal and baseline, bypassing misleading population averages and generating laser-focused results. Standard medical tests involve one hundred thousand subjects to eliminate oddballs, and the majority of medical trials use five hundred participants or fewer for economic reasons.
Larry Smarr tracked around a hundred health parameters daily and sequenced his excrement monthly, allowing him to self-diagnose the onset of Crohn's disease before any symptoms appeared.
Ubiquitous tracking is technologically inevitable, meaning society must shift from a dangerous one-way panopticon toward a symmetrical, transparent system of mutual watchfulness called coveillance. Trying to outlaw tracking is as futile as outlawing copying. To prevent the hell of a one-way surveillance state, society must engineer systems powered by mutual vigilance where citizens can track the trackers, hold them legally accountable, and ensure mutual benefits and data accuracy. Bitcoin transparently logs every economic transaction in a public ledger verified by a coveillance of users rather than a central bank.
The Global Superorganism
Humanity is currently in the Beginning of forming the holos, a planetary-scale superorganism uniting billions of human minds and artificial neural pathways. Driven by the connection of billions of mobile phones, computers, chips, and sensors, the modern technological network functions as a vast virtual brain with transistor counts significantly exceeding the human brain. Every digital interaction and web click continuously programs and strengthens this emergent global mind.
In 2015, fifteen billion devices wired into one circuit across fifty-one billion hectares, consuming five percent of the planet's electricity. This mesh of four billion mobile phones and two billion computers runs with six hundred exabytes of external storage and ten terabits of data coursing through backbone nerves in one second. The holos achieves a processing speed of one megahertz while housing a sextillion transistors, which compares to the eighty-six billion neurons in the human brain.
Kevin Kelly notes that cities act as the ganglions of nerve cells and lighted highways act as axons, mirroring biological neural networks when viewed from a satellite at night.
The mass interconnection of society represents a discontinuous phase transition that shifts human culture from rigid hierarchies to fluid networks. Just as water transforms into steam under changing temperature and pressure, the rapid increase in global connectivity crosses a complexity threshold into a new state. Old cultural forces like centralized authority recede while forces like sharing, tracking, accessing, and cognifying become dominant. Scientists compare the planetary-scale network to a physical phase transition, where a small quantitative increase in connections results in a qualitative change in societal behavior and norms, supported by thirty years of digital infrastructure running continuously with zero downtime and a projected thirty-year timeframe during which the holos will continue expanding its core forces.
10 Key Ideas
- Deep physical and network laws make broad historical trends inevitable, meaning you must embrace technological tides rather than attempting to ban them.
- Accelerating technological cycles and mandatory updates transform static physical stocks into dynamic digital flows, ensuring everyone remains a perpetual beginner.
- The internet functions as a massive copy machine that circulates data continuously, forcing creators to sell uncopyable generatives like real-time experiences to make money.
- Infusing artificial intelligence into existing inert processes through cheap parallel computation, big data, and deeper algorithms is the most consequential and disruptive technological force of our future.
- Real-time access and decentralized platforms eclipse isolated ownership, allowing products to undergo dematerialization while collaborative peer production and blockchain technology foster trust among strangers.
- Ubiquitous connectivity gives rise to a state-free version of digital socialism characterized by mass sharing, open-source projects, and crowdfunding.
- Dynamic digital screens and infinite options drive a culture of constant re-combination, making good questions far more valuable than static answers.
- Because the sheer volume of choices far outstrips human lifespan, navigating superabundance requires systematic triage through traditional filters and sophisticated automated recommendation engines.
- Routine tracking infrastructure is technologically inevitable, requiring society to shift from a dangerous one-way panopticon toward a symmetrical, transparent system of mutual watchfulness called coveillance.
- The modern technological network functions as a planetary-scale superorganism known as the holos, uniting billions of human minds and artificial neural pathways into a fluid network.