Articles
With our world facing more industrial, political and financial uncertainty than ever, author Kevin Kelly provides us with a guide to navigating the rapidly advancing technological age that’s unfolding before us.
His book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future, is designed to help the frenzied, digitally-averse to cope with the hyperlinked future.
Kelly takes us through a future populated with robots, holographic screens engulfing our heads from morning till night, and a digital library to rival Alexandria’s where all knowledge available is stored on a cloud.
The author explains how anxieties about robots making our jobs obsolete or artificial intelligence usurping the world from humanity are unfounded. Instead, he pitches ideas about how we can co-exist with technology and use it to our benefit to create even more opportunities.
Describing digital connectivity as the “technological version of socialism”, Kelly describes the prosperity that could result from sharing everything we create, where we subscribe to on-demand services for instant action instead of buying products permanently.
Although Kelly’s conceptions are designed to alleviate qualms about artificial intelligence, he weaves a rather tangled web of hyperlinks with overcomplicated and convoluted suggestions to shape our future. Then again, as he says in the book, sometimes we don’t know we need something until it’s created.
Kelly invites us to explore an era of “digital natives” and emboldens the reader to have an aspirational outlook towards the rapid rise of coding and machines.
The Inevitable, by Kevin Kelly, is published by Penguin at £22.50.