The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

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3. Jobs We Didn’t Know We Wanted Done

Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this ubiquitous cognification. We will want to watch them.

Then I had an epiphany that I am sure others have had as well. If I purchase a book ahead of time, it just sits in the same place that a book I have not bought sits (in the cloud) but in the paid bucket instead of the unpaid bucket. Why not just leave it in the unpaid bucket? So now I don’t purchase a book until I am ready to read it in the next 30

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to c

Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself. I knew this in the abstract as the famous second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything is falling apart slowly.

Here are the Seven Stages of Robot Replacement: 1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do. 2. [Later.] OK, it can do a lot of those tasks, but it can’t do everything I do. 3. [Later.] OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often. 4. [Later.] OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need

The general approach for entrepreneurs is to unbundle the benefits of transportation (or any X) into separate constituent goods and then recombine them in new ways. Take transportation as an example. How do you get from point A to point B? Today you can do it in one of eight ways with a vehicle:

As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth.