Kevin Kelly
The Next 30 Digital Years
Recorded live on Jul 14, 02016
at Herbst Theatre
Digital is just getting started
In Kevin Kelly’s view, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress. Artificial smartnesses, for example, will be added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become cyber-centaurs -- co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game.
Every possible display surface will become a display, and study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. “Everything that can be tracked will be tracked,” and people will go along with it because “vanity trumps privacy,” as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention flows, money will follow.”
Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now. We will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other people.”
In the Q&A;, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.”
Kelly concluded: “We are at the beginning of the beginning—the first hour of day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the next 25 years have not been invented yet.”
“You are not late.”
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bio
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired, a magazine he helped launch in 01993. He served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 01999. From 01984 - 01990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 01985. Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a pre-Wired compendium of digital tools. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, a blueprint for the emerging digital economy, and wrote the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. His newest book is called What Technology Wants, due out in the Fall 02010. He is also editor and publisher of several very popular websites including Cool Tools, True Films, and the Quantified Self.
Kevin Kelly's writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, Time, The Smithsonian, Harpers, Science, GQ, Wall Street Journal and Esquire. Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 01970's he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines. In 02001 he co-founded a scientific initiative called the All Species Inventory to discover and describe all the living species on Earth. That project eventually became the Encyclopedia of Life.
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