the inevitable

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable

the only constant is change

Becoming

• technology is always changing, hard to predict what will come from it

• the most important thing that came out from the last century is scientific method which became the process/blueprint to create all these new inventions

• no one cared to buy domains when the internet was in the early stages

• new frontiers will always be there. in 2016, whatever invented will be akin to domains back in the days looking back from 2050

Cognifying

• "Google is an AI company, not a search company" - Brin at a party before its IPO

• when electricity was discovered, the business model is taking a tool and electrify it

• now it's take x and add AI

• cognified - music, laundry, marketing, real estate, nursing, construction, ethics, toys, sports, knitting, etc.

• AI breakthroughs now because we have: cheap parallel computation, big data, and better algorithms

• robots will blend into ours lives and take away old jobs but new jobs will be created

  • jobs humans can do but robots can do even better

  • jobs humans can't do but robots can

  • jobs we didn't know we wanted done

  • jobs only humans can do - at first

Flowing

• internet is like world's largest copy machine and copies will flow freely through the network forever

• humans like to create based on what we know

  • initial computers had a "desktop" with "folders" and "files"

  • then the web turned it into a "browser" with "pages"

  • now we have a "stream" with "channels", adding "tags", "likes", only present, no past or future

• first industry disrupted by this was music

• universal law of economics - the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts

  • electrical lighting was new and scarce, the poor burned candles

  • electricity became common and almost free, candles became a sign of luxury

• what can't be copied? Trust

• add generative qualities to the free product:

  • immediacy

  • personalization

  • interpretation

  • authenticity

  • accessibility

  • embodiment

  • patronage

  • discoverability

• 4 stages of flowing:

  • fixed / rare

  • free / ubiquitous

  • flowing / sharing

  • opening / becoming

Screening

• from people of the word -> people of the book -> people of the screen

• books will be linked like the web (sort of like wikipedia)

• universal library like the library of alexandria

• the screens will become smaller and smaller

Accessing

• from noun to verb, product to service, ownership to rental

• 5 deep technological trends:

  • dematerialization - software eats the world, SaaS

  • real-time on demand - rethink the ways to service, uber for X

  • decentralization - bitcoin

  • platform synergy - apple appstore, software ecosystems

  • clouds - dynamically distributed, final step: decentralized access (the cloud)

Sharing

• digital social-ism - collaborative filtering and promote the best stuff

• 4 steps of social arrangements

  • sharing - youtube, pinterest, foursquare, yelp

  • cooperation - creative commons, tags

  • collaboration - open source softwares and hardwares

  • collectivism - openhub.net all work for free, paid by being allowed to stay in the commune

• google, facebook, twitter all benefited hugely from sharing

• bottom up is not enough, top down is needed too

• wikipedia, linux - only a small amount of elites get to make the big decisions

• hive-mind is good enough and scales up nicely

• crowd-funding for anything

Filtering

• filters exist today: gatekeepers, intermediates, curators, brands, government, our cultural environment, our friends, ourselves

• danger of being rewarded with only what you like, filter bubble - "overfitting"

• suggest stuff that I don't like but would like to like

• large-scale personalization is coming for the masses (pills, clothing)

• in the future, people can copy your filter/recommendation and you'd get monetary value

• too much data, limited attention - the only scarce thing now

• attention is rather cheap (around $3/hr) since you always need to spend it

• google, facebook used data to match ads to users wonderfully with a bidding system

• new model could be - p2p ad creation network, pinterest like ads curation where the curator gets paid in microtransaction per view

• more things are being commoditized and decreasing in value but the experience economy is vibrant

Remixing

• golden age of new mediums - remix out of old genres

• new genres -> remixed, unbundled, recombined into new genres

• upsetting the great asymmetry in all media - easier to read a book than to write, listen than compose, view than produce

• lucas changed the way movies are made from scenes shot to mock slowly edited bit by bit

  • every scene is touched by digital manipulation

  • more in common with the way books are written, paintings are painted

• books are references and citations but movies are still lacking that

  • how to browse a film the way we browse a book?

  • video summary (from porn invention)

  • video findability is the holy grail - google is working on that by training AI to recognize photos which makes up a video

  • rewindability is another ongoing revolution - shift from orals to books, now happening to movies, music, games and more

• material to intangible brings into question what ownership is

  • house can only owned by one person, an idea can only be copied

  • laws will be lagging behind but will follow suits to technology

Interacting

• vr was first started in 1980s but never took off

• timothy leary compared vr to lsd

• vr's two benefits: presence and interaction

• eventually imax's cinema could be projected to your eyes with certain positioning of lighting

• from second life -> minecraft because too much computing power in the former game

• nano cameras to track your eye movement and displayed in vr environment

• eye tracking for auto-annotation if one gets stuck or auto-forward in a video if bored

• "trouble with computer is there's not enough africa in them"

• embed microphones, cameras and sensors to use your whole body as a controller

• eventually if something is not interactive, it's broken

• interaction expansion:

  • more senses

  • more intimacy

  • more immersion

• vr world is under total surveillance, everything needs to be tracked

• identity will be an issue in the future

• your body will be your password - typing, heartbeat, gait, blink, voice - interaction as a password

Tracking

• "quantified self" meetup where everything imaginable is tracked

• personally medicine maker box is possible with tracking

• evolve our senses with tracking

• track and share your lifestreams

• lifelogging with narrative clip to take photos every few moments

• audio lifelogging is better than visual

• every car manufactured after 2006 has a tiny obd chip mounted to track miles, speed, braking, etc.

• tracking will follow the same way of accessing - any data can be tracked, will be tracked

• ubiquitous tracking is inevitable

• government is tracking but doing it secretly which needs to be transparent

• vanity trumps privacy

• anonymity is like toxic substances. shouldn't be eliminated since it sustains life but should as close to zero as possible

• giga -> tera -> peta -> exa -> zetta -> yotta -> "unknown"

• there is a large magnitude of orders between each

• 54 billion sensors every year by 2020

Questioning

• wikipedia and ebay shouldn't be possible but did

• criminals will use creative ways to use the new tools

• future will be streams of only the impossible moments

• interwoven between work and play online - a waking dream of sort

• more advanced tools answer questions but more questions pop out from the answer

• we really don't know much about the universe at all

• question <> answer paradigm is shifted - answers are a commodity now

• a good question is worth a million good answers

• quality of a good question:

  • not concerned with a correct answer

  • cannot be answered immediately

  • challenges existing answers

  • one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked

  • creates new territory of thinking

  • reframes its own answers

  • is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business

  • is a probe, a what-if scenario

  • skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious

  • cannot be predicted

  • will be the sign of an educated mind

  • is one that generates many other good questions

  • may be the last job a machine will learn to do

  • is what humans are for

Beginning

• a cycle - a century-long process

• global system will not be utopia - will be like real-life with classes

• we are in the beginning right now with the shift from centralized to decentralized

• singularity - a frontier beyond which nothing can be known

  • "hard" - super ai learns everything there is to know and take over

  • "soft" - a complex interdependence