
Book Summary: The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly - durmonski
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/the-inevitable/
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crimsonalucard
Literally cannot predict the future without a chapter on energy and the
environment or some aspect of the world outside of IT.

These types of people are so abstracted away from the real world they think
the future doesn't involve anything outside of this abstraction. They think
you can write an app and use it to fix global warming.

Your life and your children's lives will be more greatly shaped by events and
innovations in the physical world moreso than IT. It may not seem this way
now, but this is the future.

What is inevitable is that the world will warm up and energy resources will
become scarce enough in our lifetimes that either there will be a collapse or
a paradigm shift to a new resource or a new way of life. This is more
inevitable then anything the author talks about which tbh is largely
speculative.

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ilaksh
It's a good point about energy and the environment being important aspects
missing from the book. But I don't find the summary to be discussing largely
speculative predictions. It sounds more like trends or situations that already
exist today.

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crimsonalucard
These are virtual trends that give an illusion of progress. Yes you can order
something off of Amazon now, but the product is still being transported to
your home, physically. Think of the web as another api to interface with the
real world. The trends within this api are largely inconsequential and
unpredictable because they have less bearing on reality then something like
inventing a teleportation system or fusion reactor.

The technological trends of the past 40 years have largely been in the area of
illusion. IT and finance are where most of this growth occurs. There are
definitely some tangible benefits but most economic improvements are more
abstract/illusory then physical and real. Aa true paradigm shifting event
happens in the real world. Energy, transportation, climate are where it's
really happening.

The appification shopping, listening to music and other abstract stuff are
largely unpredictable because that's all it is: virtual abstractions. It's
fluid like software and it's easy to change. Speculating on where this change
goes is like predicting stock prices.

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rramadass
Well said.

We are living in a "virtual world" of our making and people are forgetting
that at some point it meets the real and physical world through our own
manifestations. And that is where the "Great Unknown" lies. How is it changing
Us, our Society and the World at large? Can we afford to hold an illusion of
infinite resources and possibilities while reality sets definite bounds? We
are living within a "mental maze" and not realizing that we are merely
extending and complicating it rather than breaking out of it.

This is _maya_ in the 21st century.

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loganfrederick
I enjoyed Kevin Kelly's EconTalk interview about the book more than the book
itself: [http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-
inevitable/](http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-kelly-on-the-inevitable/)

~~~
durmonski
Will check it out for sure. Thanks!

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
>If you’re planning to start a company of some sort, don’t aim to sell goods.
Your main focus should be to build a strong bridge between you and your
desired customer. To create a process of some sort that will offer ongoing
benefits. In the new era, smart processes (imagine Uber and Spotify) will
outwit single products.

I am not so sure about this. Uber is bleeding money. Spotify, ended up in a
world of trouble after Apple(a company known for making products) entered the
streaming music business.

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lpcamacho
We need to focus on growing food differently because as we do it right it's
not environmentally sustainable.

We can not keep up replacing perfectly good computers every couple of years.

As we start to get most of our materials locally we will see a shift in the
market from services to secondary or primary area.

I don’t think that this future is possible or desirable. It isn't worth
wasting our lives on bullshit jobs and wasting the planet's natural resources.

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magicbuzz
Post author needs to discover the difference between break and brake.

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krustyburger
I enjoyed his book What Technology Wants. I’ll have to pick this up.

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undershirt
Every technologist should read it. My favorite passage from it:

> About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to
> modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That
> threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping
> point where the technium’s ability to modify us exceeds our ability to alter
> the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don’t think we
> have a good name for it yet.

> Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon
> [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes
> unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by
> this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully
> according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which
> constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for
> the particular components.”

He says that a bacterium or a sea cucumber doesn’t really think or have
consciousness, but they exhibit tendencies that can be seen as behavioral
desires. Similarly, the technium is a superorganism of ideas and artifacts
which has entrenched itself into the global culture and economy, and that we
have to understand it as separate from us so that we can discern its desires
from our own. We cannot dial it back because that’s not what it wants, so we
have to make sure we find a way to live in symbiosis with it.

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bryanrasmussen
As climate change has not fully played out yet it is still undetermined if we
have indeed surpassed the planet's ability to modify us.

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undershirt
well said

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hans1729
Oh hey, it's my new friend on the internet! Keep up the great work, your site
is a pleasure to read :-)

btw, there's a typo under 2./Cognifying:

>7 billing human

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durmonski
Hey, thanks for mentioning about the typo. Just fixed it :)

