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.

 

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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]