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Book Summary: The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

60 points by durmonski 7y ago

loganfrederick 7y ago
I enjoyed Kevin Kelly's EconTalk interview about the book more than the book itself: http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-inevitable/ http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-inevitable/
- durmonski 7y ago
  Will check it out for sure. Thanks!
hans1729 7y ago
Oh hey, it's my new friend on the internet! Keep up the great work, your site is a pleasure to read :-) btw, there's a typo under 2./Cognifying: >7 billing human
- durmonski 7y ago
  Hey, thanks for mentioning about the typo. Just fixed it :)
lpcamacho 7y ago
We need to focus on growing food differently because as we do it right it's not environmentally sustainable. We can not keep up replacing perfectly good computers every couple of years. As we start to get most of our materials locally we will see a shift in the market from services to secondary or primary area. I don’t think that this future is possible or desirable. It isn't worth wasting our lives on bullshit jobs and wasting the planet's natural resources.
magicbuzz 7y ago
Post author needs to discover the difference between break and brake.
krustyburger 7y ago
I enjoyed his book What Technology Wants. I’ll have to pick this up.
- undershirt 7y ago
  Every technologist should read it. My favorite passage from it: > About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium’s ability to modify us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don’t think we have a good name for it yet. > Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.” He says that a bacterium or a sea cucumber doesn’t really think or have consciousness, but they exhibit tendencies that can be seen as behavioral desires. Similarly, the technium is a superorganism of ideas and artifacts which has entrenched itself into the global culture and economy, and that we have to understand it as separate from us so that we can discern its desires from our own. We cannot dial it back because that’s not what it wants, so we have to make sure we find a way to live in symbiosis with it.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    As climate change has not fully played out yet it is still undetermined if we have indeed surpassed the planet's ability to modify us.
    - undershirt 7y ago
      well said
yifanl 7y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>If you’re planning to start a company of some sort, don’t aim to sell goods. Your main focus should be to build a strong bridge between you and your desired customer. To create a process of some sort that will offer ongoing benefits. In the new era, smart processes (imagine Uber and Spotify) will outwit single products. I am not so sure about this. Uber is bleeding money. Spotify, ended up in a world of trouble after Apple(a company known for making products) entered the streaming music business.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
Literally cannot predict the future without a chapter on energy and the environment or some aspect of the world outside of IT. These types of people are so abstracted away from the real world they think the future doesn't involve anything outside of this abstraction. They think you can write an app and use it to fix global warming. Your life and your children's lives will be more greatly shaped by events and innovations in the physical world moreso than IT. It may not seem this way now, but this is the future. What is inevitable is that the world will warm up and energy resources will become scarce enough in our lifetimes that either there will be a collapse or a paradigm shift to a new resource or a new way of life. This is more inevitable then anything the author talks about which tbh is largely speculative.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  It's a good point about energy and the environment being important aspects missing from the book. But I don't find the summary to be discussing largely speculative predictions. It sounds more like trends or situations that already exist today.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    These are virtual trends that give an illusion of progress. Yes you can order something off of Amazon now, but the product is still being transported to your home, physically. Think of the web as another api to interface with the real world. The trends within this api are largely inconsequential and unpredictable because they have less bearing on reality then something like inventing a teleportation system or fusion reactor. The technological trends of the past 40 years have largely been in the area of illusion. IT and finance are where most of this growth occurs. There are definitely some tangible benefits but most economic improvements are more abstract/illusory then physical and real. Aa true paradigm shifting event happens in the real world. Energy, transportation, climate are where it's really happening. The appification shopping, listening to music and other abstract stuff are largely unpredictable because that's all it is: virtual abstractions. It's fluid like software and it's easy to change. Speculating on where this change goes is like predicting stock prices.

60 points by durmonski 7y ago

I enjoyed Kevin Kelly's EconTalk interview about the book more than the book itself: http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-inevitable/ http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-inevitable/

durmonski 7y ago
Will check it out for sure. Thanks!

hans1729 7y ago

Oh hey, it's my new friend on the internet! Keep up the great work, your site is a pleasure to read :-) btw, there's a typo under 2./Cognifying: >7 billing human

durmonski 7y ago
Hey, thanks for mentioning about the typo. Just fixed it :)

lpcamacho 7y ago

We need to focus on growing food differently because as we do it right it's not environmentally sustainable. We can not keep up replacing perfectly good computers every couple of years. As we start to get most of our materials locally we will see a shift in the market from services to secondary or primary area. I don’t think that this future is possible or desirable. It isn't worth wasting our lives on bullshit jobs and wasting the planet's natural resources.

magicbuzz 7y ago

Post author needs to discover the difference between break and brake.

krustyburger 7y ago

I enjoyed his book What Technology Wants. I’ll have to pick this up.

undershirt 7y ago
Every technologist should read it. My favorite passage from it: > About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium’s ability to modify us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don’t think we have a good name for it yet. > Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.” He says that a bacterium or a sea cucumber doesn’t really think or have consciousness, but they exhibit tendencies that can be seen as behavioral desires. Similarly, the technium is a superorganism of ideas and artifacts which has entrenched itself into the global culture and economy, and that we have to understand it as separate from us so that we can discern its desires from our own. We cannot dial it back because that’s not what it wants, so we have to make sure we find a way to live in symbiosis with it.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  As climate change has not fully played out yet it is still undetermined if we have indeed surpassed the planet's ability to modify us.
  - undershirt 7y ago
    well said

yifanl 7y ago

Qw7yycy ewqfr6w

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

>If you’re planning to start a company of some sort, don’t aim to sell goods. Your main focus should be to build a strong bridge between you and your desired customer. To create a process of some sort that will offer ongoing benefits. In the new era, smart processes (imagine Uber and Spotify) will outwit single products. I am not so sure about this. Uber is bleeding money. Spotify, ended up in a world of trouble after Apple(a company known for making products) entered the streaming music business.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

Literally cannot predict the future without a chapter on energy and the environment or some aspect of the world outside of IT. These types of people are so abstracted away from the real world they think the future doesn't involve anything outside of this abstraction. They think you can write an app and use it to fix global warming. Your life and your children's lives will be more greatly shaped by events and innovations in the physical world moreso than IT. It may not seem this way now, but this is the future. What is inevitable is that the world will warm up and energy resources will become scarce enough in our lifetimes that either there will be a collapse or a paradigm shift to a new resource or a new way of life. This is more inevitable then anything the author talks about which tbh is largely speculative.

ilaksh 7y ago
It's a good point about energy and the environment being important aspects missing from the book. But I don't find the summary to be discussing largely speculative predictions. It sounds more like trends or situations that already exist today.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  These are virtual trends that give an illusion of progress. Yes you can order something off of Amazon now, but the product is still being transported to your home, physically. Think of the web as another api to interface with the real world. The trends within this api are largely inconsequential and unpredictable because they have less bearing on reality then something like inventing a teleportation system or fusion reactor. The technological trends of the past 40 years have largely been in the area of illusion. IT and finance are where most of this growth occurs. There are definitely some tangible benefits but most economic improvements are more abstract/illusory then physical and real. Aa true paradigm shifting event happens in the real world. Energy, transportation, climate are where it's really happening. The appification shopping, listening to music and other abstract stuff are largely unpredictable because that's all it is: virtual abstractions. It's fluid like software and it's easy to change. Speculating on where this change goes is like predicting stock prices.