A very interesting long term perspective on technology and society on edge.com
"KEVIN KELLY is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. His most recent books are Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants.
The Technium | Edge.org"
A few things that really strike me
While technology can be used for bad and good, it is better to progress in choice than not
"I call myself a protopian, not a utopian. I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it's better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount....Technology is continually giving us ways to do harm and to do well; it's amplifying both. It's amplifying our power to do well and our power to do harm, but the fact that we also have a new choice each time is a new good...we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good."
We need to think harder about education today that adapts to the technology available, rather than just complain that kids these days cannot concentrate
"You can't learn calculus just hanging around people who know calculus, you actually have to study it. It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do."
Governments, Businesses, Parents, People cannot hold technology back, but better to engage vigorously and vigilantly
"It's important that we understand that the proper way and the best way and the most efficient way for us to manage and regulate and control our technology is not by surrendering it and giving it up, relinquishing it or prohibiting it. The primary way we want to do this is by engaging with it, being constantly vigilant and working with it, using it, and it's through use that we can actually steer it."
Yes, businesses on data/internet can scale faster and take all, but then there are more opportunities, so best to work out quickly whether one can win in the category or move to the next
"at first we have a natural reaction saying, "Well, winner take all; there can only be one winner," but here's what technology is doing: technology is increasing the number of races in which you can win."
"The Internet is the world's largest copy machine. What the Net does is it copies things...You want to earn money through generatives and things other than copies—things that are hard to copy. Like immediacy, or authenticity. That's how you make money."
The importance of software and data has panned out as expected, and big data is real
"Fifteen years ago I wrote a book about "the new economy", in which I was talking about the way the economic world would shift...the reconfiguration of the economic landscape due to these network effects, due to the fact that you had copies proliferating, due to the fact that we had a shift from places to spaces, due to the fact that we had two numbers that were not common in business before now becoming essential: free and infinite. Zero and infinity were now parts of the equations as you thought about things, prices going to the free, infinity being the sense of the scaling potential of a network. All the things that I was talking about took a long time to play out, but they're actually more valid now."
"Big data is the real revolution happening right now. Yes, I think it's a buzzword, but it's actually justified. Big data is something you should pay attention to. We're in the period now where the huge dimensions of data and their variables in real time needed for capturing, moving, processing, enhancing, managing, and rearranging it, are becoming the fundamental elements for making wealth, We used to rearrange atoms, now it's all about rearranging data. That is really what we’ll see in the next 10 years."
While things seems faster and faster, driving short term mentality, those daring to think longer term will lead the more profound successes
"There is a tendency right now to short-term thinking, to be concerned about something that will work and scale up within five years or whenever. That is a bad habit for us, and there is in the culture right now a definite short-term bias that is unproductive for the long term...
If I was a young person, daring to transcend the short term, daring to think about something that might take 10 years to do, I would look to Elon Musk and see what he's doing with his electric cars or his crazy super tunnels, or going to the moon again or Mars. Elon, and people like him should be our role models, because we have the capability to do that, but it requires a certain kind of discipline to forestall those immediate rewards and go for something that would take 10 years."
In a globally connected world, connection is vital, and yet that is also what drives so much sameness. Innovation will come from connected difference.
"...it's not just “difference,” it's connected difference. So the aboriginals in some remote Amazon jungle have a very different viewpoint of the world. They have a set of knowledge that's separate from science, it's shamantic knowledge and it's very deep and consistent within their system, but because it's not connected to us, it doesn't really affect the rest of the world.
Every time we use science to try to answer a question, to give us some insight, invariably that insight or answer provokes two or three other new questions. Anybody who works in science knows that they're constantly finding out new things that they don't know. It increases their ignorance, and so in a certain sense, while science is certainly increasing knowledge, it's actually increasing our ignorance even faster. So you could say that the chief effect of science is the expansion of ignorance...
In a curious way, Google is all about answers. So you could say that Google is increasing answers over time, but what's interesting is that answers are becoming cheap; they're almost free, and I think what becomes scarce in this kind of place that we're headed to is questions, a really good question, because a really good question can unleash new questions.
In a certain sense what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign, are great questions, and that means that for a long time humans will be better at than machines.
Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.
The world that Google is constructing—a world of cheap and free answers—having answers is not going to be very significant or important. Having a really great question will be where all the value is."
"KEVIN KELLY is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. His most recent books are Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants.
The Technium | Edge.org"
A few things that really strike me
While technology can be used for bad and good, it is better to progress in choice than not
"I call myself a protopian, not a utopian. I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it's better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount....Technology is continually giving us ways to do harm and to do well; it's amplifying both. It's amplifying our power to do well and our power to do harm, but the fact that we also have a new choice each time is a new good...we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good."
We need to think harder about education today that adapts to the technology available, rather than just complain that kids these days cannot concentrate
"You can't learn calculus just hanging around people who know calculus, you actually have to study it. It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do."
Governments, Businesses, Parents, People cannot hold technology back, but better to engage vigorously and vigilantly
"It's important that we understand that the proper way and the best way and the most efficient way for us to manage and regulate and control our technology is not by surrendering it and giving it up, relinquishing it or prohibiting it. The primary way we want to do this is by engaging with it, being constantly vigilant and working with it, using it, and it's through use that we can actually steer it."
Yes, businesses on data/internet can scale faster and take all, but then there are more opportunities, so best to work out quickly whether one can win in the category or move to the next
"at first we have a natural reaction saying, "Well, winner take all; there can only be one winner," but here's what technology is doing: technology is increasing the number of races in which you can win."
"The Internet is the world's largest copy machine. What the Net does is it copies things...You want to earn money through generatives and things other than copies—things that are hard to copy. Like immediacy, or authenticity. That's how you make money."
The importance of software and data has panned out as expected, and big data is real
"Fifteen years ago I wrote a book about "the new economy", in which I was talking about the way the economic world would shift...the reconfiguration of the economic landscape due to these network effects, due to the fact that you had copies proliferating, due to the fact that we had a shift from places to spaces, due to the fact that we had two numbers that were not common in business before now becoming essential: free and infinite. Zero and infinity were now parts of the equations as you thought about things, prices going to the free, infinity being the sense of the scaling potential of a network. All the things that I was talking about took a long time to play out, but they're actually more valid now."
"Big data is the real revolution happening right now. Yes, I think it's a buzzword, but it's actually justified. Big data is something you should pay attention to. We're in the period now where the huge dimensions of data and their variables in real time needed for capturing, moving, processing, enhancing, managing, and rearranging it, are becoming the fundamental elements for making wealth, We used to rearrange atoms, now it's all about rearranging data. That is really what we’ll see in the next 10 years."
While things seems faster and faster, driving short term mentality, those daring to think longer term will lead the more profound successes
"There is a tendency right now to short-term thinking, to be concerned about something that will work and scale up within five years or whenever. That is a bad habit for us, and there is in the culture right now a definite short-term bias that is unproductive for the long term...
If I was a young person, daring to transcend the short term, daring to think about something that might take 10 years to do, I would look to Elon Musk and see what he's doing with his electric cars or his crazy super tunnels, or going to the moon again or Mars. Elon, and people like him should be our role models, because we have the capability to do that, but it requires a certain kind of discipline to forestall those immediate rewards and go for something that would take 10 years."
In a globally connected world, connection is vital, and yet that is also what drives so much sameness. Innovation will come from connected difference.
"...it's not just “difference,” it's connected difference. So the aboriginals in some remote Amazon jungle have a very different viewpoint of the world. They have a set of knowledge that's separate from science, it's shamantic knowledge and it's very deep and consistent within their system, but because it's not connected to us, it doesn't really affect the rest of the world.
The real key is to remain different while you're connected. The problem with being connected is it tends to homogenize everybody, so there's this pressure to be the same if you're connected."
So where is this all going?
Progress is mindful complexity, and evolving Socratic appreciation of the limits
of knowledge and asking the right questions, even while expanding
knowledge.
"It's moving in certain directions, and I would say that if we were to make a list of where it's going, it's not a destiny but kind of a direction. It's moving towards complexity, and it's moving towards more sentience—more mind. It's moving towards more specialization. It's moving towards more energy density, and there's a whole set of other directions that life is also moving towards....
My definition of technology is anything a mind produces, so I have a very broad scope of technology, and I would say that the first technologies actually came from animals....Every time we use science to try to answer a question, to give us some insight, invariably that insight or answer provokes two or three other new questions. Anybody who works in science knows that they're constantly finding out new things that they don't know. It increases their ignorance, and so in a certain sense, while science is certainly increasing knowledge, it's actually increasing our ignorance even faster. So you could say that the chief effect of science is the expansion of ignorance...
In a curious way, Google is all about answers. So you could say that Google is increasing answers over time, but what's interesting is that answers are becoming cheap; they're almost free, and I think what becomes scarce in this kind of place that we're headed to is questions, a really good question, because a really good question can unleash new questions.
In a certain sense what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign, are great questions, and that means that for a long time humans will be better at than machines.
Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.
The world that Google is constructing—a world of cheap and free answers—having answers is not going to be very significant or important. Having a really great question will be where all the value is."
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