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Kevin Kelly (Goodreads Author)

3.97 · Rating details · 6,295 Ratings · 727 Reviews

From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives

Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic ro ...more

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published June 7th 2016 by Viking

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Jun 14, 2016 Marcus rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Part I - The Inspiring Part
While I have mixed opinions of many of the ideas in The Inevitable, this particular paragraph stuck out as insightful and, for anyone interested in building products, potentially inspirational for some good ideas.

"Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn't need to generate the electricity; they bought it from t ...more

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Aug 07, 2016 Goran rated it it was ok · Women 2 Black 6 Shoes Lolittas Cheap Peep Slipper Sandals for Toe Beach Bohemian Boho Size Flatform Wedge Fit Outdoor Red Wide Summer 4Hw4vAx8

Speaking as a regular reader at KK's Technium, this book is ok. It might blow my mom's mind, but many ideas are better developed on the blog, where the bits of geekery are not flattened out for the mythical average reader; too much reads like jingoistic futurist rambling, using very assured future tense with wild projections ignoring the social context and environmental debt we'll have to pay; and too much feels like padding. Take this paragraph (please, I don't need it):

...in order to run in r

...in order to run in real time, our technological infrastructure needed to liquefy. Nouns needed to be verbs. Fixed solid things became services. Data couldn’t remain still. Everything had to flow into the stream of now.

The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud. Software flows from the cloud to you as a stream of upgrades. The cloud is where your stream of texts go before they arrive on your friend’s screen. The cloud is where the parade of movies under your account rests until you call for them. The cloud is the reservoir that songs escape from. The cloud is the seat where the intelligence of Siri sits, even as she speaks to you. The cloud is the new organizing metaphor for computers. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.

And there's heaps of that. The book title says "understanding" where it should "vaxing poetically on".

Also, reading the blog I never really noticed how myopic his predictions seem. Perhaps because there it was always just KK, doing his peripathetic futurism geekery thing, you go for a walk and a ramble, but in a book purporting to predict future trends, you read it all and notice that things like energy generation, politics or genetics are conspicuously missing and his projections consist mostly of lifestyle fluff marginalia. The computer in my car will know the moment in a video I've stopped watching at and continue as I get in? In the future, it's really a bicycle or there's rat soup for dinner. ...more

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Sandals Black Black Plato Sandals Sole Black Sole Sandals Plato Sole Plato Black qqwSEr6 Charles Franklin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: millennial, technology

This book both freaked me out and intrigued me because it showcased a future that blew my mind unlike any other book has before. Kevin Kelly presents a view of the future that is overly optimistic (despite my secret fear that robots will take all of our jobs and that every move will be tracked by a government agency that wants to control us). Kelly says that we shouldn't fight against the future, rather we should embrace. Yes, there will be more tracking. There will be more upgrades of the stuff ...more

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Jul 18, 2016 Atila Iamarino rated it it was amazing

Shelves: futuro, tecnologia

Depois de ler o What Technology Wants, qualquer coisa que o Kevin Kelly escrever, é leitura obrigatória para mim. Bastante coisa óbvia entre as tendências inevitáveis, justamente porque são inevitáveis, mas os desdobramentos futuros que ele dá são muito bons. Não mexeu com minha cabeça como o livro anterior mexeu, mas talvez porque eu jé esteja mais interado, mas muito bom de qualquer forma.

As noções de conexões, relacionamentos pessoais facilitados pela tecnologia e principalmente de uso ubíqu ...more

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Dec 17, 2016 Otis Chandler rated it really liked it · Women 2 Black 6 Shoes Lolittas Cheap Peep Slipper Sandals for Toe Beach Bohemian Boho Size Flatform Wedge Fit Outdoor Red Wide Summer 4Hw4vAx8

Shelves: business, nonfiction, science, ai, futurism, audio

Kevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters to be worth reading, and a few not to be. I enjoyed the sections on AI and books. And sometimes just zooming out to get bigger perspective is engaging, which was the case for me in the sections on VR/AR and tracking. Much of the rest of the book seemed geared for people less technically savvy, which was my only complaint as it really drew the book ou Pumps Pointed Kitten Court Brown ELASHE Heels Shoes Stiletto 2 6 5cm Women Classic Toe Python qaxxtwRI

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Jul 27, 2016 Anders Brabaek rated it it was ok

This is not a good book

Summary:
Kelly introduces the technological forces he believes will shape the future. These are;
AI/artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, robotics, the scalable cloud, virtual and augmented reality, omnipresent screens, quantified-self technologies, and social media.

Rather than using the headers I have used above, Kelly is taking outset in what impact these technologies will have. For the non-techie, that might provide a look into certain possibilities in the nea ...more

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Apr 07, 2018 Oleksandr Golovatyi rated it One Runner One Peacoat 2 Hoka Plum Trail Womens Speedgoat it was amazing

Incredibly interesting book about the main directions of development of our civilization:
1) Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions
2) Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud
3) Flowing: Depending on unstoppable streams in real-time for everything
4) Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens
5) Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets, to one where instead we will have access to servi ...more

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Mar 06, 2017 Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: contemporary, nonfiction, smart-nerdy, personal-favorite, hipster

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It was a fascinating experience to read Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable right after tackling Nicholas Carr's Utopia is Creepy , an experience that teaches a lot about why so many other tech writers come and go with the same blazingly fast trendiness of teenage pop singers, while Kelly has been around since l (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It was a fascinating experience to read Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable right after tackling Nicholas Carr's Utopia is Creepy , an experience that teaches a lot about why so many other tech writers come and go with the same blazingly fast trendiness of teenage pop singers, while Kelly has been around since literally the 1970s and continues to be one of the most thought-provoking writers of that entire industry. For while Carr's book is a disappointing series of blog-sized old-man rants about basically any name-brand technology that's crossed his eyes over the last few years ("What's the deal with Wikipedia!? What's the deal with Twitter!? What's the deal with Second Life!?"), The Inevitable takes a holistic and big-picture look at all the larger trends that have been happening in all of human culture over the last twenty years, to deliver a series of predictions not about what specific technologies or webapps will be the next big trendy ones, but the ways that general human behavior and human society is changing based on whatever the newest trendy apps are.

And indeed, Kelly is in a particularly suitable position to do such a thing -- a former editor of the proto-cyberpunk hippie publication The Whole Earth Catalog, a founding member of proto-web online community The WELL, and one of the founders of Wired magazine, he's made a nearly half-century career now out of taking sweeping looks at the way technology has been changing the very nature of human existence and consciousness since the end of World War Two, delivering in this case a book of 12 chapters that each focus not on a specific technology but a general verb like "cognifying," "accessing" and "filtering." Within each of these intriguingly titled chapters, then, Kelly delves into the recent history of these kinds of activities (for example, the history of chess-playing computers in the "cognifying" chapter), which then inevitably leads to a look at the most cutting-edge current research on the subject (an extended examination of IBM's Watson), a discussion of what surprising things we can learn from this latest research (in this case, that artificial intelligence is likely never going to come in a monolithic, human-aping form like HAL from 2001, but rather an endless series of "dumbly focused" intelligent apps that each do only one thing, but do them better than literally any human could even imagine that subject being done), then ending by speculating a bit on what this trend might foretell in a science-fictional near future (here, for example, that perhaps computers will one day soon figure out how quantum mechanics work, a subject that is quite literally too difficult for human brain comprehension but that might not be for a "silicon brain").

As usual with Kelly's writing, it all adds up to some pretty heady stuff, an admirable hallmark from the optimistic, psychedelia-influenced era of cutting-edge technology in the 1970s he comes from, that we are sadly losing more and more in our current age of technology as capitalist commodity. One of the last grand thinkers from that era of the industry, Kelly's writing is still worth gobbling up with both hands whenever you can get ahold of it, with The Inevitable coming wildly more recommended than any of the other "What's the deal with...?" old-man rants of the moment that litter the tech bookshelves these days.

Out of 10: 9.8 ...more

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Jul 21, 2016 Craig Jaquish rated it it was ok

I’m growing increasingly skeptical about the utility of William Gibson’s frequently quoted observation (quoted again in The Inevitable itself) that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Distribution speed is technological too. The “leveling” nature of the very technologies we’re discussing means that it’s increasingly difficult for anyone to gain a better vantage than anyone else. A more apt observation of Gibson’s (made also by other commentators) is that science ficti ...more

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Jan 04, 2017 Leo Walsh rated it liked it

Okay, I've been following Kelly for decades, since the Whole Earth Review and his tenure at Wired. So maybe his optimism has worn thin by now. Or maybe its because I'm older.

But color me skeptical about gee-whiz technology. After seeing some high-profile algorithmic flops -- like the 2008 crash, driven by computer investment portfolio algorithms. Or Facebook showing fake news because people hit "like" a lot, despite knowing that its fake. Or how 'smart' policing using computer algorithms, desig Okay, I've been following Kelly for decades, since the Whole Earth Review and his tenure at Wired. So maybe his optimism has worn thin by now. Or maybe its because I'm older.

But color me skeptical about gee-whiz technology. After seeing some high-profile algorithmic flops -- like the 2008 crash, driven by computer investment portfolio algorithms. Or Facebook showing fake news because people hit "like" a lot, despite knowing that its fake. Or how 'smart' policing using computer algorithms, designe to stop violent crimes, like rapes and murders, ends up sending cops to ghettos to stop petty crimes like jaywalking or smoking dope. Not because there's more petty-crime per person in these areas, but because there's more crime per square foot, and thus maximizes the police departments arrests per man hour. To the abuse of credit reporting, etc.

Needless to say, I'm skeptical of tech... even though I'm extremely tech savvy. And while I'll acknowledge the validity of some of Kelly's points, I am not sure of how "inevitable" anything he discusses is. Afterall, just because we can do something -- because technology and science make it inevitable -- doesn't me can or should. For instance, we can empty our overcrowded prisons by starting a war and making them fight for their freedom. It solves a problem, and we can do it easily... but is the payoff justified by the cost?

Which makes me a little more tolerant of regulation than most Silicon Valley visionaries like Kelly. But powerful technology, like big-data and automated algorithms, does require big oversight. Since a handful of people wielding code have the power to consolidate wealth into unsavory hands.

Does anyone really think that a person creating fake news deserves to outearn a real reporter who actually had to bust thier hump to source an article? Or that a 20-year-old facilities worker at Ohio State, who lives in a nearby ghetto, has a 800% greater chance of being arrested for smoking dope than an upper middle class fraternity boy at Ohio State?

Perhaps there are people who do. I am not one of them. These notions run counter to my Christian values of justice.

That said, Kelly is spot-on about so much. For instance, the tradeoff between anonymity and sharing. You can either not share, and allow the technology to serve you up a generic product that appeals to all -- like, for instance, recommending a Big Mac dinner. Or share information and allow the algorithms to recommend something better -- like, for instance, a nearby restaurant that serves your favorite Thai dish.

Like many tech writers, Kelly remains bubble-bound. For instance, he ignores that our cheap screens today depend on slave labor in mines and cheap labor in factories. He also ignores that Americans today, the nation closest (next to, maybe, Japan) to the wired ideal, consume more power per capita in 2016 than they did in 2006, after consuming more in 2006 than 1996, etc. And that is not sustainable. So some of this technologic gee-wizardry may (or may not) hit an unseen kilowatt/ hour wall.

So while I have reservations, Kelly, as always, provides a fun ride. And, if society and our energy supply can continue its stable trajectory, he does The downside is, the sounds exactly like Bill Gates's 1999 "Business @ the Speed of Thought," and several other techno-utopia tomes I've read over the decades that ignore physical, biological and geo-political forces that can mess things up.

So I'll not hold my breath.

3-stars. Fun read but shallow. And, for an innovator like Kelly, not very original. ...more

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Jan 14, 2016 慧芳 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

凯文.凯利（KK）在《必然》一书中指出，未来三十年中产品和服务的总趋势已清晰可见。下述12种力量将会凸显：

形成(Becoming)、知化(Cognifying)、流动(Flowing)、屏读(Screening)、使用(Accessing)、共享(Sharing)、过滤(Filtering)、重混(Remixing)、互动(Interacting)、追踪(Tracking)、提问(Questioning)、开始(Beginning)。

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Jun 09, 2016 Kathrin Passig rated it really liked it · Women 2 Black 6 Shoes Lolittas Cheap Peep Slipper Sandals for Toe Beach Bohemian Boho Size Flatform Wedge Fit Outdoor Red Wide Summer 4Hw4vAx8

Shelves: computing, cultural-history-ish

Ich habe mich oft geärgert und oft gefreut. Die Grundidee ist überzeugend, in den Details war es mir zu religiös-schwärmerisch. Die Zukunftsvisionen "So wird mein Tag in zwanzig Jahren aussehen" fand ich naiv, privilegienblind und überwiegend peinlich, bin aber froh, dass er sich getraut hat, sie aufzuschreiben, damit wir in zwanzig Jahren vergleichen können. Am interessantesten fand ich die Stellen, wo er darüber berichtet, wie sich sein eigenes Arbeitsleben in den letzten dreißig Jahren veränd ...more

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Oct 22, 2017 Stephen Heiner rated it One Womens Hoka Plum Speedgoat Trail Runner One 2 Peacoat liked it

Shelves: tech

About halfway through the book I was bored. Not because the issues that Kelly discusses are unimportant to me, but because he delivers it in the one-note cadence implied by his title: The Inevitable. The only true inevitable was that I would finish the book so as to be prepared for the discussion with my fellows at the book club, not because I felt that he had a particularly relevant work, and 300 pages later, I still feel the way I do: Kelly falls far short.

I believe that we as humans are imper About halfway through the book I was bored. Not because the issues that Kelly discusses are unimportant to me, but because he delivers it in the one-note cadence implied by his title: The Inevitable. The only true inevitable was that I would finish the book so as to be prepared for the discussion with my fellows at the book club, not because I felt that he had a particularly relevant work, and 300 pages later, I still feel the way I do: Kelly falls far short.

I believe that we as humans are imperfect, though immortal (because of our souls), and that whatever happiness we may possess in this life is fleeting and unimportant.

Kelly presents us in this book a vision of the future that I find horrific: a world of twitch, free from simplicity, bound with complexity, and ending with convergence in a matrix. In one of our late chapters he uses exactly that word and describes something similar, in feel, to what that move so perceptively predicted decades ago: a fake world we may prefer to the real one.

Kelly feels no compulsion whatsoever to ask "should" we accept the "inevitable" but rather keeps beating the drum for what we "can" do. Here are some revelatory quotes:

"We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them." (p. 3).

"We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled." (p. 11)

"We need AIs to tell us who we are." (p. 49)

"Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters." (p. 60)

On page 108 I wrote in the margin "absolutely horrifying" after reading a description of a "day in the life" in the near future in which the only time we won't be seeing digital screens throughout the day will be at night when we sleep.

I'm no Luddite. I'm happily pounding away on this keyboard, sharing my thoughts on this book with my friends and whomever else may be interested in reading, and I do it tied to my social media identity. There are technological changes that I welcome. But what Kelly never does, and what I am constantly asking, is twofold:

1) *Should* we make these changes?
2) Is it possible our lives will be worse, not better, because of technology?

And given his stature in the tech space, it's pretty irresponsible to write a book like this and not weigh in on these matters. 300 pages of high-fiving ourselves and pointing out some important (and fascinating) trends. Got it. And then? We are made for more than a plugged-in VR/AR future. The problem is Kelly thinks we need to wait for that future to consider the truly important questions. The reality is that the future doesn't matter if you don't answer those important questions now. ...more

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Jul 27, 2016 Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: innovation, mindgasms

Yes!

What does the future look like? It looks more amazing than I could have imagined. Kevin Kelly outlines what AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) will look like in the next 30 years. He wrote this book before Pokemon Go came out. I have been obsessed with catching all the Pokemon and evolving the ones I have. Just having played this one AR game, I can see how AR and VR games will take over the world. So fun! Kelly also looked at the impact of VR in the home.

When talking about job Yes!

What does the future look like? It looks more amazing than I could have imagined. Kevin Kelly outlines what AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) will look like in the next 30 years. He wrote this book before Pokemon Go came out. I have been obsessed with catching all the Pokemon and evolving the ones I have. Just having played this one AR game, I can see how AR and VR games will take over the world. So fun! Kelly also looked at the impact of VR in the home.

When talking about jobs and economics, Kelly knocked it out the park. Logical arguments about how each generation worried that their jobs were being taken over by tech, only to see that in the next generation, that tech created more jobs and an easier life. His discussion of using phones to self-track was equally great. Want to change your behavior, your health, your habits? Use your smart phone to help!

But are all advances in tech good? No. Kelly is first in line to share concerns about how government and corporations are tracking us. However, he thinks there is little we can do to stop it. All our fighting might place limitations but will never actually stop the efforts of those with power who want to track the rest of us. Knowing this, Kelly suggests we put all our efforts into ensuring transparency. He likens the government and hackers' attempts to track citizens and corporations to the immune systems of animals (what a treat!). He suggests that while it's too early to tell if Anonymous is good for society, he sees value in small anonymous groups, because if the groups with all the power remain anonymous (e.g. gov keeps everything secret or corporations track you but you can't track them), then there will always be a power imbalance. The only way to ensure equality in any area of society (including dealing with law enforcement) is to have transparency. For this reason he is a fan of responsible whistle blowers and any kind of tech that ensures transparency.

One of the most novel and exciting books I have read in a while. ...more

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Dec 24, 2017 Begüm Saçak rated it it was amazing

This book is so insightful that I wish this book was compulsory for people pursuing technology & computer science degrees. The book Inevitable is divided into sections and each section is a gerund or force that is shaping us as a result of the technological advances. I want to point out how he is not only talking about technology but also the philosophy behind and how the gradual change is realized through current examples and glimpses of potential future adaptations.

Regarding technology, I ...more

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Apr 21, 2016 Jay rated it really liked it · Women 2 Black 6 Shoes Lolittas Cheap Peep Slipper Sandals for Toe Beach Bohemian Boho Size Flatform Wedge Fit Outdoor Red Wide Summer 4Hw4vAx8

I really enjoyed Kevin Kelly’s predictions for the future in this book. He has that kind of over-the-top, goofy way to point things out – you can just tell he loves telling how he thinks things will be. I have a nephew that gets that excited talking about drifting, and he comes across about the same as Kelly. The best part of this book is when Kelly decides the way to express his idea of the future is to tell a story. He does this a few times throughout the book (more would have been better), an ...more

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Jun 15, 2016 Tanner rated it it was amazing

Audible. I love this book. Whether or not KK's predictions about the future are on point, the content and story telling of this book stretched my mind. I've never read a book by a 'futurist' before so this book was a real treat for me, as it also applies to the work I do as a product manager.

The book left me feeling in awe about what the future holds--it also left me feeling a bit uneasy, as I scrambled to internalize this vision of the future. It even stressed me out a bit, with the notions th ...more

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Aug 17, 2018 Kent Winward rated it it was amazing · Women 2 Black 6 Shoes Lolittas Cheap Peep Slipper Sandals for Toe Beach Bohemian Boho Size Flatform Wedge Fit Outdoor Red Wide Summer 4Hw4vAx8

We are all newbies now. Kelly's approach to technology is an analysis of trends. The greatest benefit of the book is that Kelly's thoughts are a fantastic jumping off point for musing on your own experience with technology. Considering my life span has covered technological advances that are so mind-numbingly rapid, being able to think of them as trends has the added benefit of making me not feel like an overwhelmed, curmudgeonly Luddite. Kelly's section on books was especially thought provoking ...more

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Jul 22, 2016 George rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, nook-ereads

INTERESTING AND INSIGHTFUL. INFORMATIVE AND DELIGHTFUL.

“We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs.” (p. 11)

“In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming.” (p. 12)

Although parts left me puzzling: what the heck was what I just read all about?, Kevin Kelly’s deeply insightful book, THE INEVITABLE: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, is a futurist's delight. Kelly offers cogent and reas ...more

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Jun 18, 2016 Radiantflux rated it liked itNavy 2018 gum Figgy black Dose Fall Emerica Brown 4vAPIWW

Shelves: technology

39th book for 2016.

Wow. The Silicon Valley tech-heads live in a happy-happy future world; a world where we are all connected, all the time, in vast Hive Mind; where all our most private thoughts are given up to the corporate cloud; where our most basic consumptive desires are anticipated by ubiquitous AIs.

In Kelly's take on things, there is no point questioning the future. No point in dwelling on critical questions of autonomy or ecological stewardship, as our fluid, connected, constantly dist ...more

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Nov 19, 2017 Guilherme Ferreira rated it really liked it

Uma instigante análise das prováveis forças que estão e continuarão revolucionando o nosso mundo. Recomendo para todos os profissionais de tecnologia para que seus produtos/servicos sejam criados olhando para o futuro.