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However you read blinks, we hope they help you become an even
brighter you.
What’s in it for me? Prepare yourself for the inevitable
future.
In the future, will you be married to a handsome android? Will we travel in
flying cars?

These blinks show you that the future is now. Computer technology and the
internet are already fundamentally changing how we think and the ways we
work, consume and relate to each other.

And the forces and ideas that inspired these changes are not going to go away
but only get stronger. Let’s learn about the 12 distinct trends or forces that will
shape society over the next decades.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

why the concept of a “supermind” is more reality than science fiction;

how Uber provides faster service than regular cab companies; and
why in the future, there will be no more experts but only “newbies.”
Technology is constantly improving and always in flux.
How would you like to live in a utopia – a perfect world in which you never
suffer yet also never change?

If this prospect sounds boring, don’t worry – this isn’t what the future holds.

Instead, what we’re experiencing and will continue to experience is a protopia –

a world that keeps getting better, one baby step at a time.

In a protopia, things are always a bit better today than yesterday. For instance,
even if some inventions produce problems such as higher energy demands, the
benefits always outweigh the costs.

But living in a protopia also means that nothing is fixed. Technology moves
forward, accelerating progress. To put it differently, everything is in a state of
becoming – which means you and everyone else will always be “newbies” in
this ever-evolving technological world.

No invention is ever finalized or fixed if each invention is a starting point for

another invention or development. Just think of how the advent of personal
computers paved the way for the internet.

Basically, all human technology is permanently moving forward, and this

process, in which every innovation has the potential to trigger another
innovation, will never be straightforward or predictable.

Because of this, the best predictions we can make about future events are
generalized trends.

And since technology never stops improving, you’ll always feel like a newcomer
no matter what you learned or experienced in the past. You’ll have to upgrade
your devices to adapt to the evolving digital landscape – and we all know how
long it takes to get used to new technology.

Your permanent newbie status is also a result of the decreasing longevity of

devices and software, which means you likely won’t get to spend enough time
with any technology to truly master it.

For example, the average lifespan of a smartphone app – the amount of time it
takes a user to stop using the technology – is now 30 days.

So we now know that technology, especially information technology, never

stops moving forward. Next, we’ll explore how this fact is tied to the rapid
growth of artificial intelligence.
“Endless newbie is the new default for
everyone, no matter your age or
experience.”
Artificial intelligence and robust online filters will shape
how we work and what we learn.
Over 100 years ago, the advent of electricity transformed the tools we use
every day. The next technological step is artificial intelligence.

Today, AI is cognifying objects, turning them into tools that are “intelligent.”

Making previously “dumb” objects “smart” is one trend that will dramatically
shape the future. This process isn’t limited to physical objects, however. In fact,
AI will cognify chemistry, for example, using algorithms and databases to run
virtual chemistry experiments.

But if this is the future, will AI replace all human intelligence?

Definitely not. Yet AI will certainly redefine human intelligence and perhaps
humanity as a whole.

While AI can enhance certain areas of study, such as medicine, this doesn’t
mean AI will replace human specialists in those fields.

People and AI working together will produce the best outcomes. The most
accurate health diagnoses will be made by physicians, for example, who
combine intuition with state-of-the-art diagnostic software.

Humans won’t become superfluous, but we will have to constantly evaluate the
things we can do better than computers and delegate other tasks accordingly.
This will leave us to perform tasks that are uniquely human, such as caring for
others and engaging in intuitive thinking, while letting AI take over other jobs
such as memorization. As a result, AI will shape what we do and, in time, who
we are.

But AI isn’t the only technological force guiding the world of tomorrow.

Online content has been expanding at an exponential rate. To make sense of all
this data, we need to be able to filter out what’s important to us. Filtering,
which depends on AI, will help shape the future.

In just 9,000 days, people produce over 60 trillion web pages! If you ever want
to find what you’re looking for online, you’ll need to use a robust filter, such as
a Google search engine.

AI can ably filter through content and identify relevant pieces because it can
process massive quantities of data. All the while, AI learns to personalize results
to individual user preferences.
“Let the robots take our jobs, and let them
help us dream up new work that matters.”
“Hard” goods were yesterday; flowing content and
shareable resources are the future of commerce.
Material goods used to define commerce. With the advent of the internet,
however, much of what is bought and sold is intangible, streamed online or
shared offline.

In other words, modern goods are flowing.

A flowing good is a good you can purchase as a service or real-time update.

For instance, previously if you wanted an answering machine for a phone, you
had to purchase and install hardware. Today, software can automatically install
itself on your smartphone without you lifting a finger.

Once a good is digitized, a user can transform, copy or share it. Consider music
streaming service Spotify, which allows a user to build playlists to then listen
to, like or share with friends.

Services such as Twitter, Spotify and Netflix which offer real-time content
streams are just the beginning. People who subscribe to and use these services
also contribute to another force that’s shaping our technological future.

When you watch a movie, listen to a great song or share an insightful tweet
over a social network, you’re adding your content to the general stream of
online information. Sharing, therefore, is another key force that will affect how
we engage in commerce in the future.

Every day, people share 1.8 billion photos on social media. We’re witnessing the
evolution of a sharing economy, a market in which people form networks,
exchange resources and collaborate on projects – such as the open-source,
online community encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

A sharing economy allows any person to become a producer, by giving that

person access to equipment, such as a 3D printer, for example, without having
to own it personally.
So we’ve explored how AI will play a major role in the future of technology and
humanity. Yet have you considered how, in just a few hundred years, machine
intelligence will meld with human minds to produce a “super intelligence?”

This intelligence is called the force of beginning, and it marks a new era – that
starts today.

Consider this: 15 billion devices are already linked through the internet,
essentially forming one massive circuit. New connections are made every
second. What will this mean for the future?
Why buy goods when you can rent them instead?
Possession will give way to access in the future.
In the not-so-distant past, possession, whether of a business or a good, was
essential to engage in a commercial transaction.

Today the largest provider of accommodation in the world, Airbnb, owns none
of the real estate it offers as rentals. This business is part of a larger trend, in
which physical possession is less important and access is more important.

Businesses are seeing the benefits of providing services instead of selling

physical goods. Offering car rentals instead of selling a vehicle outright means
a business can accrue greater benefits from the same object. A business
doesn’t even need to own the object it’s “selling,” thus requiring less capital
outlay for maintenance, too.

Additionally, access-based businesses are often available in real time, and

therefore offer better service.

Peer-to-peer taxi service Uber, for example, can offer a ride to a customer
faster than can a centralized taxi service, precisely because of its decentralized
workforce. Every Uber driver is self-employed and owns a car, thus allowing
Uber to offer the services of multiple drivers at any time, anywhere.

Accessing instead of owning is a key driver of the future. This force will enable
another crucial force, remixing. More and more growth today is generated by
rearranging content – even further rearranging rearranged content – instead
of producing new resources.

It’s not possible to talk about remixing without mentioning the transformation
of people from passive consumers to active content producers. While
Hollywood makes 600 feature films yearly, 100 million video clips are shared
on the internet every day, and many are simply remixed snippets of preexisting
movies.
Now that it’s so easy to copy and remix content, the next step should be a
service that offers video hyperlinks, allowing people to cite specific frames of a
film or video at the click of a button.

This also means that property rights will need to adapt, as most are written for
a world of tangible, owned goods, not digitized snippets that are easily
accessed and remixed.
 “Accessing rather than owning keeps me
agile and fresh, ready for whatever is next.”
Virtual reality and screens will transform human
interaction, bringing the world into our living rooms.
Virtual reality, or VR, is a form of simulation that is essentially fake but feels
real, which is why it could change our lives.

For instance, the possibilities offered by VR will transform human interaction

while increasing the actual number of interactions people have. Interacting is
another key force that will affect the future.

As devices become less expensive to produce and purchase, people will be able
to spend more time in virtual reality scenarios. As the technology develops to
react more accurately to voice and movement, for instance through eye
tracking, VR will begin to feel more “natural.”

But VR will also offer people the feeling that they have “superhuman” senses,
such as x-ray vision. With time, people may start to perceive such senses as
synonymous with regular human senses.

A person’s interaction with VR technology will undoubtedly change his self-

perception; and as a result, that person will want to keep interacting with VR.
Immersion in technology will become the norm, and objects that don’t offer
VR capabilities, such as printed photographs, will start to appear “broken.”

VR will open up space for greater interactivity between people. Within a virtual
world, you can meet thousands of people from all over the world without
setting foot outside your home!

While virtual reality will transform the world and our relationship to it, screens
as well are having a profound impact on how we absorb information. Indeed,
screening is another powerful future trend.

In the future, screens won’t just be fixed on subway station platforms or

smartphones, but will appear everywhere. This is an important development.
On screen, text and ideas aren’t fixed and authoritative as they appear in
printed books but rather constantly changing and thus open to question.

Compare the Encyclopedia Britannica, a series of printed tomes, to its online

equivalent Wikipedia, where users can discuss and edit entries.

Screens encourage us to interact, pushing us to research and discuss the ideas

on display.
Personal privacy and certainty will disappear in the
future, but really, it’s not all that bad.
Do you value your privacy? If you do, you might be curious about a trend that
has the potential to chip away at your privacy online.

Tracking will bring both big risks and big opportunities in the future. Here’s
what it will do.

Today we quantify and document an ever-greater amount of our lives, and in

the process, we are producing tons of data. If performed accurately, data
collection can be then used to customize aspects of our lives to match specific
needs, such as creating personalized medicine.

But if tracking becomes too invasive, we’ll spend too much time monitoring
personal data and little time living our lives.

There is also the risk that personal data could be compromised. Businesses or
even other people could collect your data from sources such as blogs, social
media and apps, using the information against you.

Is this frightening to you? Even if it is, this new “transparency” is inevitable.

Society will undoubtedly learn to accept it, even enjoying its upsides. While
coworkers will be able to track you, you’ll have the option to track them as well
– and as a result, everyone will be more accountable.

As tracking becomes a larger part of our lives, so will questioning. The future,
with its exponential growth of content, will force us to sift through a
tremendous amount of information in search of truth.

The amount of information society generates doubles every 1.5 years, yet
much of it is contradictory and uncertain. For every fact we discover, we’ll find
another to dispute it.

And remember, plenty of society’s longest-held assumptions have been proven

false over time. For instance, we used to assume people would never work for
free, but today free intern labor is widespread.

The point is, people have begun to question everything, no longer believing in a
universal truth but rather in multiple truths assembled from a stream of facts.

This desire to question can only grow since every truth or solution produces
new questions and as a result, new knowledge.
Final summary
The key message in this book:

The future will be shaped by 12 inevitable forces that are emerging today.
These are becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering,
remixing, interacting, tracking, questioning and beginning. While these forces
are mostly technological in nature, they will touch every aspect of our lives.
Despite potential problems, for the most part, we’re facing a future of great
opportunity.

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Suggested further reading: Out of Control by Kevin Kelly

Though written from the perspective of 1994, these blinks paint a startlingly
current and still futuristic image of how technological developments like the
internet and artificial intelligence could affect society and humanity.
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