Digital Age – webmindset

Book Review: The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 05:08:22 +0000

It looks like a must-read for anyone interested in technology. The new digital age is written by two executives of Google, one of the most powerful corporates of the digital age.

Both authors have magnificent titles: Eric Schmidt as executive chairman of Google and Jared Cohen as director of Google Ideas, Google’s think tank dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions.

Although it’s usually said that never judge a book by its cover, you can’t overlook all the big names who’ve endorsed the book: Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk and Madeleine Albright.

Before digging deeper, let’s have a short look at the chapter titles. The book is arranged in seven chapters each one talking about future of something:

Chapter 1: Our Future Selves

Chapter 2: The Future of Identity, Citizenship, and Reporting

Chapter 3: The Future of States (+ Stuxnet Case)

Chapter 4: The Future of Revolution

Chapter 5: The Future of Terrorism

Chapter 6: The Future of Conflict, Combat, and Intervention

Chapter 7: The Future of Reconstruction

So at first glance, it seems that we are facing with facts from future! Although the drawbacks of technology in different areas are not forgotten, the overall view of the book is overoptimistic about future of the technology and you can classify it as utopianistic as it is expected from directors of one of the technology giants.

In the rest of this post, I have quoted a few excerpts from every chapter. But before looking at every single chapter, here you can find some central passages of the book:

Digital Empowerment

Digital empowerment will be, for some, the first experience of empowerment in their lives, enabling them to be heard, counted and taken seriously—all because of an inexpensive device they can carry in their pocket.

Decentralization of Power

On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals.

Unfiltered access to the information

By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand.

Responsiveness is not equal to depth

The strength of open unregulated information-sharing platforms is their responsiveness, not their insight or depth.

Anarchy

The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. The New Digital Age

Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws.

Loss of privacy and rise of civil-society organizations seeking privacy protection

“The impact of this data revolution will be to strip citizens of much of their control over their personal information in virtual space, and that will have significant consequences in the physical world.”

“Since information wants to be free, don’t write anything down you don’t want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you “like,” and what others who are connected to you do, say and share.”

“We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection.”

Blended facts and the missing chapter

There are many other interesting and important points discussed in the book. However, to be honest, it’s much easier to read a review than reading the book itself.

It’s full of facts and reports from many different political stories around the world. You will face with a mosaic of useless news and stories glued together with some insightful and thought-provoking passages like the ones I quoted above.

Anyone with experience of writing an elaborate report can guess that the book is written by a large group of Googlers gathering information and evidence from every source (sure google search is one of them) as the text has not the expected continuity. I’d prefer to call the book as a collected report endorsed by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Although it’s still a valuable source to know the mindset of the google and other similar technical giants.

Sure there’s a chapter missing in the book: The role of global corporations like Google in the future world. Which is not logical to suppose that it’s forgotten or discarded because of the book volume.

The Verge has published a review of the book with the following subheading:

In ‘The New Digital Age’ we learn what happens when Google stops being polite and starts getting real.

I should confess that from my point of view, it’s not far from reality. Not because of all the wills which could be substituted by woulds and coulds. But because of the clear message of the book which could be read between all the lines: The technology looks for a larger pie from the cake of power and politics.

Our future selves

Reading the chapter title, you might expect a philosophical analysis of the human identity (or self-perception) affected by technology. However, the first chapter is nothing more than an appetizer.

What Schmidt and Cohen call “our future selves” is nothing more than a summary of recent technological achievements and, an optimistic account of the technology landscape in the next few decades.

Although it has some valuable clues inside, still it was more satisfying if the chapter had a more humble title (e.g., technology and our everyday life).

Chapter 1: Our future selves

Being connected will mean very different things to different people, largely because the problems they have to solve differ so dramatically.

Connectivity will not solve income inequality, though it will alleviate some of its more intractable causes, like lack of available education and economic opportunity.

Centralizing the many moving parts of one’s life into an easy-to-use, almost intuitive system of information management and decision making will give our interaction with technology an effortless feel.

There have been a series of exciting breakthroughs in thought-controlled motion technology – directing motion by thinking alone – in the past few years.

Fewer jobs require a physical presence; talented individuals will have more options available to them.

Skilled young adults in Uruguay will find themselves competing for certain types of jobs against their counterparts in Orange County.

Of course, just as not all jobs can or will be automated in the future, not every job can be conducted from a distance – but more can than you might think.

The open-source movement around the world continues to gain speed.

For governments and companies it is low cost, and for contributors, the benefits are in recognition and economic opportunities to improve and enlarge the support ecosystems.

Critical thinking and problem-solving skills will become the focus in many school systems as ubiquitous digital-knowledge tools, like the more accurate sections of Wikipedia, reduce the importance of rote memorization.

The Future of Revolutions

The fourth chapter of the book is divided into two distinct sections. The first part, about one-third of the content is talking about the future of revolutions in an optimistic sense.

You may even fill that the authors are supporting every single act of rebellion against the established structures. However, rest of the chapter emphasizes a very important point.

Technologies are facilitators of change, but the change is ultimately a human thing. Therefore, as authors conclude in this chapter, future revolutions are easier to start but harder to finish. Or to rephrase it in other form, revolutions are easier to happen, but the revolutionary outcomes will be harder to achieve.

Chapter 4: The Future of Revolutions

There can be little doubt that the near future will be full of revolutionary movements, as communication technologies enable new connections and generate more room for expression.

And it’s clear that certain tactical efforts, like mobilizing crowds or disseminating material, will get easier as mobile and Internet penetration rates rise across many countries.

Throughout history, the technologies of the time have stimulated and shaped how revolutions developed.

Many leading these charges will be young, not just because so many of the countries coming online have incredibly young population…, but also because the mix of activism and arrogance in the young people is universal.

In these new revolutionary movements, there will be more part-time and anonymous activists than today, simply because citizens have greater agency over when and how they rebel.

Most people will not identify themselves with a single cause but instead, will join multiple issue-based movements spread over many countries.

This trend will both help and frustrate campaign organizers, for it will be easier to estimate and visualize their support network, but it will be less clear how interested and committed each participant is.

… It will be up to those in leadership positions to make the strategic decision as to whether their movements actually have the support of the masses, rather than being a very large echo chamber.

The rapid proliferation of revolutionary movements across newly connected societies ultimately will not be as threatening to established governments as some observers predict, because for all that communication technologies can do to transform revolutions in ways that tip the balance in favor of the people, there are elements of change that these tools cannot effect.

Kissinger and politics of the Facebook era

As I have mentioned above, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the fourth chapter of their book ‘The new digital age‘ to the future of revolution.

In the middle of the chapter, authors state their opinion about leading future revolutions considering the unprecedented connectivity tools provided for the rebels and opposition.

Authors believe that the technology can be a lubricating tool for starting revolutions. However, the leadership role is fundamentally different from digital herding facilitated by social networks and other new media.

Here is a passage of the book, quoting Henry Kissinger, about future of leadership in the Facebook era:

We asked the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has met with and known almost every revolutionary leader of the past forty years, what is lost when that timetable is advanced [and revolutions are accelerated by technology without providing time for fostering the leaders].

“It is hard to imagine de Gaulles and Churchills appealing in the world of Facebook,” he said.

In an age of hyper-connectivity, “I don’t see people willing to stand by themselves and to have the confidence to stand up alone.”

Instead, a kind of “mad consensus” will drive the world, and few people will be willing to openly oppose it, which is precisely the kind of risk that a leader must take.

“Unique leadership is a human thing, and is not going to be produced by a mass social community,” Kissinger said.

The future of states

Chapter 3: The Future of States

We have often described the Internet as a “lawless” space, ungoverned and ungovernable by design… But states have an enormous amount of power over the mechanics of the Internet in their own countries.

Perhaps the most important question in ten years’ time won’t be if a society uses the Internet, but which version of it, they use.

Governments would largely prefer that the users encounter a virtual world that allows the powers that be to mirror their physical control.

What states can’t build in reality they will try to fashion in virtual space, excluding those elements of society that the dislike, the content that contravenes laws and any potential threats they see.

National filtering and other restrictions would transform what was once a global internet into a connected series of nation-state networks.

We have identified at least three models of internet censorship:

The blatant (e.g. China)
The sheepish (e.g. Turkey)
The politically and culturally acceptable (e.g. South Korea and Germany)

The future of identity, citizenship, and reporting

Chapter 2 (Part I): The future of indentity, citizenship and reporting

In the next decade, the world’s virtual population will outnumber the population of the Earth.

The impact of data revolution will be to strip citizens of much of their control over their personal information in virtual space, and that will have significant consequences in the physical world.

Our highly documented pasts will have an impact on our prospects, and our ability to influence and control how we are perceived by others will decrease dramatically.

We are what we tweet:

The communication technologies we use today are invasive by design, collecting our photos, comments, and friends into giant databases that are searchable and, in the absence of outside regulation, fair game for employers, university admissions personnel and town gossips.

… For children abd adolescents, the incentives to share will always outweight the vague, distant risks of self-exposure, even with salient examples of the consequences in public view.

For parents, the truly strategic will go beyond reserving social-networking profiles and buying domain names, and instead select names that affect how easy or hard it will be to find their children online.

Some parents will deliberately choose unique names or unusually spelled traditional names so that their children have an edge in search results.

As children live significantly faster lives online than their maturity allows, most parents will realize that the most valuable way to help their child is to have the privacy-and-security talks even before the sex-talk.

The story of the Stuxnet (as Eric Schmidt explains)

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the third chapter of their book, The New Digital Age, to the future of states.

One of the sections of the third chapter talks about digital provocation and cyber war.

Schmidt uses a cyber war definition offered by Richard Clarke:

Actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.

To illustrate the possibilities and the potential extents of the cyber wars, he refers to Stuxnet virus as one of the most harmful cyber warfare’s ever developed.

Here I have summarized the Schmidt’s account of the story.

The Story of Stuxnet (pp.105 – 107, 2013’s edition)

Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 and was considered the most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus known as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title.

Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on the Windows operating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran’s Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing the centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems.

Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive

… Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that its target and level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort.

The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as thirty people over several months.

Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm.

Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project… Initially green-lit under President George W. Bush, the initiative, code-named Olympic Games, was carried into the next administration and in fact accelerated by President Obama, who personally authorized successive deployments of this cyber weapon.

After building the malware and testing it on functioning replicas of the Natanz plant built in the United States – and discovering that it could, in fact, cause the centrifuges to break apart, the U.S. government approved the worm for deployment.

… Less than a month after the public revelation about these cyber weapons, security experts at Kaspersky Lab, a large Russian computer security company with international credibility, concluded that the two teams that developed Flame and Stuxnet did, at an early stage collaborate.

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An interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think”

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 20:39:09 +0000

Even after reading Clive Thompson’s book for the second time, still, I couldn’t convince myself to consider it as a good read for serious practitioners in the field.

I do acknowledge that I’m a bit pessimistic about the technology, but he seemed naively optimistic about it.

Anyway, he is a journalist, as he emphasizes everywhere; and a journalist is not supposed to be a deep strategic thinker. He is supposed to report what’s already happening and not what’s going to be happening.

When you have not a very positive attitude about a book, it’s not expected that an interview with the author changes your mind. However, it did happen.

Lawrence Ampofo on Digital Mindfulness has done a fascinating interview with Clive Thompson about his book, “Smarter than you think.”

There I learned that my judgment was biased about his work and now I’m going to read the book for the third time.

Here you can listen to the interview or download its file for listening later:

There are many insightful ideas discussed in the file. But I do recommend to pay extra attention to the following points:

The role of journalists contrasted with theoretical thinkers
The ambient awareness concept
Social media is not supposed to be a substitute for our thinking; it’s a new communication tool for increasing our awareness. As Thompson notes, it’s fairer to compare social media with the eye-blink communications in a room, instead of criticizing its weakness as a deep-thinking discussion tool.
Role of smileys and emoticons and animated gifs in our current communication style and comparing it to our original pre-Gutenberg style of writing.

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Evgeny Morozov on political consequences of technological solutionism

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 16:20:02 +0000

As I’ve written before, Evgeny Morozov is one of the widely recognized authorities and influential critics of the technology.

Morozov, a Visiting Professor at the Stanford University, has focused his writings and speeches on the political and social implications of technology.

He dubbed solutionism for his most famous critic of the technology culture and Silicon Valley as one of its most vocal proponents.

He has written two books about this concern. The first one, titled “The Net Delusion” published in 2011 was describing the dark side of internet freedom and the new generation of values promoted in digital life.

Four years later he published his second book on the same concern. The book was titled “To save everything click here.” However, instead of aiming at policymakers, this time he focused on the technologists who believe that there can be an app for solving every single problem.

Here you can see a 20 minutes video in which he describes his idea about technological solutionism. This speech is delivered in DLD, an annual conference held in Munich exploring the ways digital technology changes our life.

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Remixing: Everything is a remix

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 07:58:47 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 8

Chapter Title: Remixing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 8: Remixing

All new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies. (Quoted from Brian Arthur).

With the coming new tools, we’ll be able to create our visions on demand.

It will take only a few seconds to generate a believable image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim golden vase – perhaps even faster than we could write these words. And that is just the opening scene.

At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, YouTube Capture, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal.

The handcrafted Hollywood film is a rare tiger. It won’t go away, but if you want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming critters below – the jungle of YouTube, indie films, TV serials, documentaries, commercials, infomercials, and insect-scale supercuts and mashups – and not just the tiny apex of tigers.

If Hollywood is at the apex of the pyramid, the bottom is where the swampy action is, and where the future of the moving images begins.

If the text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new media fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease.

… the first visual literacy tools are already emerging in research labs.

The ability to scroll back to the beginning and hear music again – that exact performance – changed music forever.

Songs became shorter on average, and more melodic and repeatable.

In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Digital Socialism: Towards a New Socialism

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 12:35:14 +0000

From my point of view, among all of the 12 chapters of #the inevitable, none of them are as inspiring and enlightening as chapter 6.

Kevin Kelly has titled this chapter as ‘Sharing,’ one of the twelve forces that he believes are shaping our future. Others are accessing, immediacy, screening, and flowing to name a few.

Although he used the word ‘Sharing‘ as title, soon we learn that he prefers to use the word socialism.

Sure he knows that the word ‘socialism’ has a negative connotation for most of his readers, as he notes:

I recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal”, “communitarian”, and “collective”.

I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power.

We call social media “social” for this sames reason: it is a species of social action.

But going through the chapter, you feel that “socialism” was the best name for the trend he is trying to describe.

If previous chapters, he already called The Internet a large copying machine. Here, he emphasizes again that sharing and sampling content is the new default.

He describes Tor, as an example, a place “where one can find a copy of almost anything that can be copied”.

Bottom-up socialism is not bitter as its old top-down version

This free access to resources helped people to move toward a bottom-up socialism.

This is one of the critical differences Kelly highlights between new digital socialism and its old classic not-so-loved top-down counterpart:

The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptations, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered.

But still, there’s no reason to call the new paradigm something other than digital socialism:

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds.

Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops.

Instead of sharing picks and shovels, we share scripts and APIs.

Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritrocracies where the only thing that matters is getting things done.

Instead of national production, we have peer production.

Instead of free government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free commercial goods and services.

Kelly notices many changes in the market and ownership structure. We are not eager for product ownership anymore. We are happy with access to products and services. Netflix and Spotify are the best samples of the new value system.

The main differentiating aspect of the digital socialism

Besides all similarities that Kelly describes, there’s a critical differentiating factor we have to consider, to have a more balanced view of this digital socialism:

It’s not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.

It’s a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

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Accessing: The substitute for ownership

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 19:26:05 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 5

Chapter Title: Accessing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 5: Accessing

A reporter for TechCrunch recently observed, “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

Digital media exhibits a similar absence.

Netflix, the world’s largest video hub, allows me to watch a movie without owning it.

Spotify, the largest music streaming company, lets me listen to whatever music I want without owning any of it.

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited enables me to read any book in its 800000-volume library without owning books.

Every year I own less of what I use.

Possession is not as important as it once was.

Access is superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.

On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. Since 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent.

Appliances tend to weigh less per function.

Of course, communication technology shows the clearest dematerialization.

Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening migration from the products to services.

… In Silicon Valley the say it like this: Software eats everything.

… I predict that by 2025 the bandwidth to a high-end driverless car will exceed the bandwidth into your home.

The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we will treat these articles as social property.

To access a service, a customer is often committing to it in a far stronger way than when he or she purchases an item.

… Access mode brings consumers closer to the producers, and in fact, the consumer often acts as the producer.

The first stand-alone product to be “servicized” was software.

Today, selling software as service (SaS) instead of product has become the default mode for almost all software.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Screening: The substitute for reading

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 06:23:23 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 4

Chapter Title: Screening

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 4: Screening

In ancient times culture evolved around spoken word.

… We were people of the Word. Then about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology.

… From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

[Because of availability and low cost of technology,] authors did not have to compose scholarly tomes only, but could “waste” inexpensively printed books on heart-rending love stories, or publish memoirs even if they were not kings.

That’s nearly one new screen each year for any human on earth.

We will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface.

We are now People of the Screen.

This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.

… People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels.

Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas.

[In the screen age,] truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves.

People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.

[Although screens prevail our world,] if we count the creation of all words on all screens, you are writing far more per week than your grandmother, no matter where you live.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Flowing – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (3)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 19:36:56 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Flowing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 3: Flowing

The internet is the world’s largest copying machine… Tech companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying.

If something can be copied, it will be copied.

Formerly solid products made of steel and leather are now sold as fluid services that keep updating.

The initial age of computing was borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces.

The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files”… The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organizing principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages”.

…Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams.

We subscribe to the channels… We are bathed in streams of notifications and updates. Tags have replaced links…

Some streams like Snapchat operate totally in the present, with no past or future…

If you see something, fine. Then it is gone.

Free is hard to ignore. It propels duplication at a scale that would previously have been unbelievable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?

Trust, for instance.

Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Cognifying – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (2)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 15:43:37 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Cognifying

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 2: Cognifying

[Cognification will be one of the major forces that shape our future]

There’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter.

[We believed that] AI would be a bounded entity. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.

However, the first genuine AI will not be birthed in a stand-alone supercomputer, but in a superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the net… Stand-alone synthetic minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped…

When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it.

We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, but it will be faceless, unseen.

We will be able to reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is.

[Describing IBM’s Watson program]

Like many parents of a bright mind, IBM would like Watson to pursue a medical career, so it should come as no surprise that the primary application under development is a medical diagnosis tool.

At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.

The AI on the horizon looks… almost invisible except when it blinks off.

This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need.

You simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven your inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past.

Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify.

Quotes and excerpts from other parts of the book

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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The Becoming Era – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (1)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:05:07 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Becoming

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 1: Becoming

Upgrade is inevitable

You may not want to upgrade, but you must because everyone else is. It’s an upgrade arms race… Continual upgrades are so critical for technological systems that they are now automatic for the major personal computer operating systems and some software apps.

In this era of becoming, everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever.

Neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia.

More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination.

A protopia generates almost as many problems as new benefits.

Unlike the last century, nobody wants to move to the distant future. Many dread it.

That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we’re stuck in the short now, a present without a generational perspective.

Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays.

User-generated creations would never happen at a large scale, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. [A prediction that turned out to be false]

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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