Just finished Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.
Thoughts below:
KK has valuable insights buried in his tiring and never-ending personifying of technology.
All we need to do is to read through, skip the obvious or familiar case studies, and focus on his philosophical perspective.
The book may seem a little bit too obvious to the tech-savvy, while it would be a great first read to someone who’s relatively inattentive to the tech happenings.
The conclusion at the end is very resonant to me. While all the forces he talks about are hardly of a technological nature. We could virtually assign those “forces” to just about anything from a certain angle.
KK’s interpretative rendering of technology is very close to something pseudo-teleological.
If you’ve read the brilliant book Superforecasting, then it’s probably very easy for you to pinpoint the various obscure statements In KK’s outlook. But that’s not the core thing we can learn from him.
Maybe what we can learn from KK is that we need to look at things holistically, that technology is just one integral piece of the existence puzzle. The only way forward is to embrace it.
Technology does evolve, but only metaphorically, in the context of many other metaphors we live by. KK may be going too far in personifying the concept and reality of technology, but his outlook can sometimes be thought provoking.
Since it’s such as quick read, it’s still worth our attention to what KK has to say about future.
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Noah Fang 