The Inevitable

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 the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will “cognify.“ There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.”

Thinking about this at a surface level is pretty exciting. Kelly also talks about how the general feeling in Silicon Valley in the 90's was that the gold rush had passed and that everything good had already been done. He believes that we're again in a lull where it may feel like everything has been done but that in fact we are on the cusp of another flowering of ideas and technology.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as he makes it sound. The way he talks about AI as if it were a simple commodity glosses over a lot of really big problems that aren't going to go away easily. Yes, you can rent a lot of powerful machines from Amazon or Google and install TensorFlow on them, but for any AI to work well, you need a LOT of data to train a model. Gathering data specific to a problem, normalizing it and using it in a way that gives results that are good more than 50% of the time for any given problem is very hard. If it was easy, every bit of software we use today would already have AI.

That said, the idea is exciting. A lot of problems that seemed “solved” are now ripe for the taking. If Kelly is right, and I think he is, there will be a lot of people who are either going to have to learn to incorporate AI into their products or watch helplessly as they are disrupted by smaller competitors who have products that are less feature-rich but seem almost magical in comparison.

What if your todo list could tell you what you're forgetting to add to the list based on your other tasks? What if your shopping list could suggest recipes based on your list or ingredients that would go well with what you're buying? Maybe it could even suggest your whole shopping list after it learned what you usually buy and how often you buy it.

Those are maybe the two simplest examples of how adding some IQ to an existing software could drastically change it. Niche market products and software that runs internet of things hardware are already evolving to incorporate AI in surprising ways. Kelly explores some of these in his book but the best ideas are yet to come. The more I think about it, the more exciting it is.

Part II - A General Review of the Book

I felt uncomfortable for large portions of the book. Kelly is, to no one's surprise, an unabashed technologist. Even thought the title of the book is “Inevitable,” I get the clear impression that he's not writing about what will happen as much as about what he hopes to happen. In his ideal world screens would be much more prevalent than they are now. Content would flow between them as we move between home, transportation, and work. User created content becomes more widely distributed, remixed and repurposed with micropayments flowing freely between consumers and remixers and eventually compensating original creators. Curators, some human, some AI trained by humans thrive in a world where taste and work drive the majority of humanity's leisure time. Despite having every book ever written available in the cloud, many people move will move from consuming deeply to flitting from thing to thing to satisfy their every whim. In the physical world, ownership will wane as renting and sharing increases. This means everything from clothing to transportation to gadgets and living spaces. Everything from the food you eat to the number of breaths you take a day can and will be tracked and this information will be available to share at will to those who can process it either to provide insight or to sell you more things.

It's quite the vision of hyper-pervasive technology in a hyper-connected world.

I appreciate Kelly's optimism. His excitement is contagious. The problem is, and maybe this is just my resistance to the inevitable, that this all hinges on such an extreme level of consumption that it makes even today's cell phone obsessed culture seem moderate. It comes at the expense of thoughtfulness, environmental stewardship, mindfulness and tangible, real world connection and creation.

It reminds me of the story of the islander who sits on the beach all day eating coconuts. One day he's approached by someone who tells him he should stop being so lazy and sell the coconuts. “Why?” He asks. “So you can make some money.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can get rich and build a big house and have servants.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can sit on the beach and eat coconuts all day.”

What are we looking for in this hyper-connected utopia? If all the connectivity only leads to consumption, entertainment and away from creativity and actual human connection, it hardly seems worth it.