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

The holy grail of visuality is findability—the ability to search the library of all movies the same way Google can search the web, and find a particular focus deep within. You want to be able to type key terms, or simply say, “bicycle plus dog,” and then retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle. In an instant you could locate the m

The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we’ll treat these articles as social property.

The consequence of moving away from centralized organization to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything—both tangible and intangible—must flow faster to keep the whole going together. Flows are hard to own; possession seems to just slip through your fingers. Access is a more appropriate stance for the fluid relations that govern a decentr

We should properly call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images.

An embedded AI will change how we do science.

The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages.

ACCESSIBILITY

“Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed

hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence.