“The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future” is a book from Kevin Kelly that tries to anticipate the near future of technology.
My Goodreads.com review:
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin KellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was pretty interesting, and it is an easy read if you are a “future enthusiast”.
I think the author was pretty spot on on identifying the current trends shaping technology. The author says he tries to not speculate too much about the future but rather just take existing trends and push them further. Well, there is definitely some wild speculation there, but I think it is more to illustrate potential technologies rather than assert exactly how the future will be.
There is one point that made me uneasy: his defense of mindlessness. Kelly spend a lot of time justifying how our scattered attention is not a problem, how it is just a welcome evolution forced by technology; how it doesn’t matter much that you can finish a single article in one go without ten times checking ten social feeds. The irony is that people that actually read his book probably don’t fall into this category, or at least are trying not too. After spending years without reading a single books because I couldn’t take my eyes off various time-wasting stuffs on the net, I discovered the benefit of mindfulness, cut off social medias time and finally learnt again to read (to this day this is still a hard exercice of attention). Maybe it means I am old, but I believe mindfulness is important and it will be a challenge for future generations to hold it in the face of so much attention grabbers.
With that said, I enjoyed the book a lot overall.
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