The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Audiobook & Book Summary [Book Summary - On Books #40]

oh hey what's up um books listener how you doing I'm excited because this week I'm gonna bring you the inevitable by Kevin Kelly yes in the last episode we did chat with Kevin he was here on the show and he was talking about this book and well a lot of other things that you can go back those into that conversation if you didn't already I'm hoping that this is gonna be a bit of a shorter episode that's my goal at least is to bring you a little a little snippet a little a little taste of Kevin's new book I'm gonna read to you from the book as I do sometimes as well as highlight so this book the inevitable is talking about inevitable changes in technology over the next about you know 20 to 30 years so that's the vibe and I think it'd be really great if you especially if you have a start-up if you're interested in in culture any kind of business really definitely I feel like there's a big a big resonance here and knowing about this but also for for artists writers and and just just human beings just to kind of understand where where things are going alright so Kevin Kelley he is one of the cofounders of Wired magazine he co-founded the quantified self movement which is the self tracking movement if you have a Fitbit or you ever you know count your steps every day that's that's it that's what we're talking about and he serves on the board of the long now foundation along with like a million other accolades so let's get into the latest book like having Kelly the inevitable these are some of my favorite moments things that spoke to me in that I really want to share with you and that hopefully you get inspired to to learn from and maybe read the book yourself so here it is this is Kevin Kelly's be inevitable enjoy all right so the book title is the inevitable what is inevitable well Kevin Kelley right in the first few pages tells us that yeah I know that that's a loaded word saying that something is definitely going to happen so he makes it clear what he means he says I mean inevitable in a different way and the way that he's talking about is the kind of inevitability that if we were to replay history right from all the way in the past the Big Bang until now there are certain things that we can say without a doubt would have happened right what are those being the telephone till he writes telephony long distance electrical transmitted voice messages was inevitable but the iPhone was not and what he's referring to there is the idea I don't know if you've ever heard this but when the telephone was invented there was actually something like 20 or 30 other people who invented it within like days or weeks of Alexander Graham Bell's invention and you just don't hear about those people because well Graham Bell had the better marketing or the better team or he'd you know it's the whole VHS versus beta there's there's a lot of times there's Wars of you know getting getting the thing out there that's gonna stick and then we you know history remembers the winner so we remember the one person that won and that's basically was talking about though is that within these technologies they are the the physics and math being all things being equal tend to favor certain behavior certain behaviors within these forces would come to the surface something like the wheel would have eventually happened maybe the SUV not so much so that's what he's looking at really there is sort of like a academic kind of philosophical layer to a lot of this writing here and it's deep in that way looking at the ways that nature the history of the world biology a lot of these kind of Sciences influence the day-to-day you know the iPhone the apps that we have AI all those kind of stuff and he's pulling that together in this book to show us what patterns and trends are inevitable in the next twenty to thirty years in that journey he comes up with twelve technological forces as he calls them these 12 forces that are inevitable and each of the chapters is one of the twelve forces the words themselves don't really mean too much becoming flowing screaming accessing I just say this to you you know in and of themselves you can't really like take away a learning from them but I'm gonna do the first three and and you need to go a little bit deeper and I'm gonna take you there so that the first three becoming cognate and flowing by the end of this episode will make some sense to you so let's start with becoming it's the first of the inevitabilities and in my opinion it's one that that it goes further than just you know the next 20 to 30 years this to me this idea of becoming is really ingrained in all of and all things that are alive and so let me explain that to you by reading the first few pages from becoming here we go kevin kelly writes it's taking me sixty years but i had an epiphany recently everything without exception requires additional energy in order to maintain itself i knew this in the abstract as the famous second law of thermodynamics which states the everything is falling apart slowly this realization is not just a little meant of a person getting older but long ago i learned that even the most inanimate things we know of stone iron columns copper pipes gravel roads a piece of paper they won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of an additional order existence it seems is chiefly maintenance now that is quite the Epiphany that's something that i learned early on when i started building websites for people and maintaining the website became almost bigger sometimes then the job of just building it and i started to notice that in the biology of the code that i was writing for these systems and seeing how it degrades just month-over-month by the whole ecosystem getting upgraded i was able to kind of watch a system the code the website itself you know fall apart and need updating and i started to notice that myself you know as kevin does as he outlines in this chapter i started to notice that in in my body as I was getting older in in New York City the biology of the city the ecosystem that is in New York City remember being super young in high school and the Meatpacking District was actually a place where they packed and sold meat and now it's the Sedo trendy nightclub area but just seeing how things evolve and how they get maintained get updated and how that's part of the process and that's what this chapter is all about so um wow that the first paragraph really resonated with me let me read a little bit more from becoming so Kevin writes what has surprised me recently is how unstable even the intangible is keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keeping a yacht afloat yep it is a black hole for attention I can understand why a mechanical device like a pump would break down after a while moisture rusts metal or the air oxides membranes or lubricants evaporate all of which require repair but I wasn't thinking that the non-material world of bits would also degrade what's to break apparently everything so that's what becoming is all about to me it's it's finding an acceptance in this idea that things are always going to be deteriorating always needing maintenance and in that if there's an acceptance through that I find it's kind of relieving you know because it allows me to think about even starting new projects a lot of times you're like oh if you if you think of something that you want to complete you know some project you know like even this podcast for me it's like yeah I can just yeah just make a few every every week that becomes much more work than I think you know right now I'm having the software upgrade honest literally this is true the software ScreenFlow that I use is upgrading and crashing when I'm exporting so every week there's like new challenges and maybe in the software or your voice may not be working whatever it is there's always gonna be challenges and and something in accepting this is an inevitability in the things that we invest our time into is somewhat relieving to me and and he talks about this as a consumer and basically saying that you know the way the market is looking we're moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions and because of that there there's a benefit to getting in on the ground floor of that you know that if you look at uber right uber is the biggest taxi service in the world they own no cars they have no products right there the service though and they built in to their business model the upgrades that have to happen so that you is the customer don't have to worry about that and as a business they have it in their model right so that's some of the examples in some of the ways that we can think about this I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit more into becoming so so kind of rounding out the chapter here is that once we accept and admit you know this becoming and it gives a lot of different examples but once we kind of come to terms with that we can look at the way the web is moving and in ourselves kind of make peace that we're gonna have to keep learning to so our learning is kind this is the thing that I love is like our learning also is degrading and not just because our memory might be degrading but because there's an arms race right of everything is getting upgraded and quicker and different all the time so we need to keep up which the positive because that sounds like a negative thing with the positive side of that is that everybody else needs to keep up as well so if you look out and you think oh man those developers at Google or my friend who's a vino whatever it is who's like so smart you can become that person because we're all kind of moving like there's no there's no just like finish line of any of this so it's inspiring to me to think if there's something new that I want to get into you I can I can still get into that because the reality is that learning skills is like you're on a treadmill right everybody is you don't just learn how to become a great artist and then stop you have to constantly learn and you can I can get in on that I can you know and it's not just if I want to learn a new coding language but maybe it's yeah if I want to be an artist or write a play or or whatever industry you might want to get into or innovation right Kevin mentions this thing in here too about how he says 30 years after the Internet it feels saturated with apps and platforms and devices right doesn't it you look around you're like well everything's already done it always feels like you know it's already been done every generation feels that way and then we look back right if you were to look back now with like the you know 90s you're like 99 you're like oh my god nothing nothing even if I went back there now I could rule the world I'll make over back then right for example and so he's saying we need we need to think long or long term and he says here's the thing in terms of the internet nothing has happened yet he writes the Internet is still at the beginning of its it is only becoming if we would climb into a time machine journey 30 years into the future and from that vantage point look back at today we'd realized that most of the greatest products running the lives of the citizens in 2050 were not invented until after 2016 people in the future will look at their holodecks and wearable virtual reality contact lenses and downloadable avatars and AI interfaces and say oh you didn't really even have the internet back then or from whatever they call it back then you know and they'd be right because I'm our respective right now the I mean what's the greatest thing we have online right now right we have all you have all these things but all the miraculous inventions there's tons that aren't yet here yet the craziest ones right the ones that are impossible to even imagine you know so I'm looking to those people in the future and thinking about a longer now those people would have told us hey people of 2016 can you imagine can you imagine how awesome it would be to be you the internet was a wide-open frontier in 2016 you could just like pick any category and just like add AI to it put it on the cloud just like a gazillionaire so that's the idea of becoming constantly involved evolving technologies evolving like nature and you my friend you are not late to get in on I don't know life join it so you're not late that's what becoming Sibel all right so chapter 2 is called cognate I and that's the second of one of the technological inevitabilities that Kevin talks about in the book cognate I well let me break that down what do you beads by cognate I essentially is a I he's basically saying that things will get smarter if you've heard of the Internet of Things or artificial intelligence so a large part that is what he's talking about and he really believes this is an untouched market so when we were talking about becoming a little bit ago about all the things that you could get into to innovate the Internet in the world this one cognate is a specific one that he's like in the next 20 to 30 years this is this is what we're talking about let me read so he's saying you know amid all the activity that we're seeing now a picture of our AI future is coming into view and it's not how 9000 a discrete machine animated by characteristic yet potentially homicidal human-like consciousness right from the movie what was it 1 2001 Space Odyssey anyway so um it's not a machine that's going to kill us or the singularity rapture which is basically saying that machines are gonna kill us like terminator so you're saying machines are not going to kill us they're gonna be cool they're gonna stay cool and that's his vision of AI he's saying the AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services right which is a cheap kind of reliable way to run your website and services on the cloud Amazon Web Services or AWS we use that here this common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need you simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity it will enliven inert objects such as electricity did more than a century past three generations ago I really like this line he says three generations ago many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electrical version take a manual pump Electrify it find a hand ring or washer Electrify it alright that was if you look in the past it was like everything just added add electricity to it the kitchen of the future egg timers anything you want the that was me kind of riffing but the entrepreneurs didn't need to generate the electricity they bought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual things now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognate I 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 take X and add AI find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it all right so he goes deeper into this by even giving a handful of what do you think you know really thinks of the next startup ideas cognate I nursing cognate I'd toys cognate I'd sports he kind of like he's like take these ideas and make them I want you to I want you to do these because he wants to see them and then he says you know part of cognitive terms with machines will get this smartness and will replace some of the jobs that we have nowadays and this has been as far as becoming goes this has been happening for centuries now right where technologies come and replace older jobs and he's like we need to let go of that so we need to let go of things that the machines can do better than us and not be afraid of they're gonna you know turn on us and murder our faces but that they're going to work with us and if we trust them then we can use that cognitive ability in our machines and he says this is not a race against the machines if we race against them we will lose this is a race with the machines it is inevitable that the robots take our jobs and let them help us a dream up new work that matters period yep alright so there's a lot more in there if you want to read it yourself but again really nice nicely put alright finally I'm going to just happen to you the third of the 12 the third one here is flowing the third inevitability and flowing this I really like I love love love this chapter a lot of this came of this idea of flowing came from Kevin Kelly's blog KKK org and I've read this a few years ago and I see he's just kind of like you know rework this idea and put it in the book but the idea of flowing and or at least the part that I really love is the acceptance so first you have to accept that the Internet is a copy machine basically if something can get copied it will if that doesn't make sense to you I would say read read this in full because that is a fact of how the internet works basically even if you were to upload something to be learned at one time it is being copied because it has to send it from server node to server node there is no not copying something and that was the big problem with the the music Napster and the RIAA suing people was just that like it doesn't make sense to say that you can't copy and share something on the internet in certain ways because just by putting it there one time on Spotify or ever the infrastructure of the internet copies things it's what it does and so it's hard to deny that biology all right so that's my rant on that he goes briefly into that point and then says well if it is a copying machine then by that means everything is free on the internet right and we know that right because you can just share anything it could be digitized can be shared pretty easily so if things are copyable to be copied and if many things are free you know music now is often free videos blog content images he's like well what are we paying for and this is what he breaks down in an argument called better than free and he wrote this I think was six years ago now and a lot of it has even already come to be you know the truth and there's still so many more kind of kind of good nuggets in here so he's saying well what would people pay for and this was before Spotify and he you know this is the height of it and he talked about how well people will pay for things like accessibility so being able to access I'll use music as the analogy because it's pretty good being able to access the music consistently on the iPhone on your laptop the accessibility of it is something people will pay for such as with Spotify right discoverability is something that people will pay for it's you know if things are free and it's all over the internet being able to quickly discover the best things right and find them quicker is is a genera t'v what he says is is something genera t'v that you would pay for as well as findability right which is something that like Netflix or Hulu in a way they have a good find ability because they allow you to kind of sort through the junky you know versions or the the rips the Chinese rips of DVDs that you you know give subtitles over the bottom they find you the better version and they get it to you quicker all right so I'm kind of riffing here to give you an idea but he breaks this down in this one chapter this is just beautiful list of of things that you can sell on the internet that he writes are better than free and the whole kind of ethos and pushes hey you you listening whatever you're doing right now if you can you know if it is a digital product or whatever part of that is digital make that free share it as much as possible and then sell these things the the personalization the findability the discoverability the immediacy of it and he just goes Paige over page of how you can find value by giving something away for free and uh Wow yeah I'm just looking through this and getting excited telling you about it so whoo all right that's the third one there right slowing is what he calls it so I hope you enjoyed this episode of on books again this was hopefully a little bit of a shorter episode the inevitable is what we talked about Kevin Kelley is a new book and each week I discuss books that matter a lot to me that I think are life-changing if you know if you read enough of these books I think you can really really change your mind and and heighten your consciousness of the way you see the world so trying to curate a bunch of books that will do that for you and bring you the kernel of knowledge in that book to get you excited and to maybe reading it or to go hey that's enough I bet that book's not for me so that's what this show is all about if you like on books you can subscribe on iTunes at on - books calm I put book notes and you can listen to the podcast there you can tell a friend you can follow me on Twitter I'm at on book show there's like a million different ways that you can get jazzed about books and about books in general you'd also write me too i'm chris at on - books calm yeah let me know your thoughts how did you like this episode would you like to see shorter episodes longer episodes more interviews all that kind of stuff and i'll be getting back to i have this idea of doing more series of series is how you say that i have that the social good book series which is all these books about doing better in the world that i put together and I'm gonna be continuing with that I have more coming in that list and I have some other series of books such as one on nutrition that will eventually get to I have a few other ones in the work so if there's something on your mind let me know I want to get to it I want to I want to connect and share that with you because I'm really excited these folks are awesome I didn't write them I'm just just telling you the stories behind them so that's the show all right so that's the inevitable I hope you enjoyed it I want you to do me one thing one more thing just have a great day just have an awesome day smile make somebody else smile feel good alright alright sign it off from New York City Chris Castiglione