When I saw that Mr. Kelly was a founder of the magazine Wired, I knew that I wanted to read this book. I admire Wired because I think it looks carefully at technology and thinks for itself, which I find admirable. So, what does the book say?
The author looks back over the 30 years that he's had his ringside seat, considers what he's seen and predicted over that 30 years and then he projects forward over the next 30 years to see where he thinks technology will take us. He clearly states that he considers the positive aspects of future change, not the negative aspects. The author predicts that certain technological trends or impulses are inevitable, not specific outcomes. So, don't expect to see predictions of a world free of war or cures for all cancers, that's not what he views as the what he terms "bias" of technological change. He identifies 12 of these biases and discusses how they have played out over the 30 years that he's been observing them and how he thinks they'll evolve over the next 30 years. For instance, he views telephony as inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The internet was inevitable, but the specific form of internet that we presently have was not.
I'll touch on a few of the 12 and encourage you to read the book for the full observations. Flowing - the book describes the internet as the world's largest copying machine. Information in many forms is copied and distributed. usually for free. The industrial revolution brought analog copies of information such as music. These copies were exact and cheap. The internet brings digital music - exact and free. This affects value propositions and law, which causes change. He considers how this change and looks for responses to this change. Trust may become even more valuable.
Screening - where once we may have been people who read books and did things "by the book," the author argues that we are now people of the screen (the computer screen). People of the Screen live "in a world of constant flux." Paperback at pg. 88. As he says, "truth is not delivered by authors and authorities, but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves." Pg. 88. I'll let you decide how this may be playing out in society today.
Questioning - Wikipedia was a great shock to the author. When Wikipedia began, Mr. Kelly could not believe that it would be anything other than an abject failure. As he says, "I knew from my own 20-year experience that you could not rely upon what you read from a random stranger.... I believed that an aggregation of random contributions would be a total mess" Pg. 269. The ability to many people to self-organize through the internet a reasonably coherent body of information was eye opening. "I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years." Pg. 274.
The author describes "becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing,interacting, tracking, questioning, and beginning" as areas in which change is inevitable. In all of these I find the "tracking" most troubling. But, like the author, with the passage of time, I may find my mind changed a lot.
I encourage you to read the book and see if it challenges your mind.
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