Kelly Predicts The Future…Again

Kevin Kelly is a founding editor at Wired magazine. As such, he has made some interesting predictions (a thousand true fans, for example) in many fields from technology to cultural and societal change. Of course, Kelly, along with Kurzweil and other futurists, have been  wrong, and that’s okay. Thinking probabilistically is better than binary right/wrong thinking after all. As Yogi Berra famously said “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” These futurists are often semi-correct and semi-wrong which is due likely to the fact that innovation is inefficient, iterative and test based. Invention has to be created in the practical sense.

Kelly’s new book The Inevitable charts 12 tech development tech trends where he sees technological innovation thriving and defining our futures. By 2036, people will look back and wonder how it is that humans thought they were using the “internet” when in reality, the  true “internet” hadn’t really been invented yet……The exciting take away from Kelly’s talk is that  it is never too late to get on the path to testing ideas; you are only limited by your willingness to try.

Three areas of focus in the above presentation:

AI:

Artificial Intelligent colleagues will need to have good relations with other employees. Employees will be evaluated not by productivity but by innovation/art/creativity (inefficient processes). Many new business opportunities will emerge from old products that will be married (in some way) to AI. Labour markets will not need to recover from AI replacement but rather our economy will continue to evolve with humans leading in ideas and creativity rather than focusing on manual labour.

VR:

Virtual Reality will increasingly be a significant area of development. The internet of experiences will emerge. Experiential events will be an emerging entertainment format. Social VR platforms are an emerging space to watch out for….

PA:

Personal assistants and tracking/personalisation will increase. BUT, Kelly advocated that we make the tracking more comfortable. Co-valiance is critical (I know who is tracking me and there is a way to correct personal settings that aren’t to my liking and I and the data miners both mutually benefit from tracking). New research shows that vanity trumps privacy: most of us are looking to be tracked for increased personalization of services……..