The Inevitable

I'm not sure if this picture is supposed to be a joke - it seems to be a chronology of the evolution of a Nokia phone. If you don't get the joke I won't explain it, but the idea of technology evolving as if it were another form of life, that's Kevin Kelly's idea, or at least he gets lots of credit for popularizing it. (Dawkins coined memetics a long time ago.) This idea comes from his book What Technology Wants (2010).

Here's another book by Kelly, not as impactful for me, but it did have a couple points of interest:

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

Kevin Kelly, 2016

• Magnus Carlsen is deemed the most computerlike of all chess players, trained by AI (p41-42)
• Preventing Consciousness: We don't want our AI to be conscious, we just want it to be smart. "We might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them." (p42) "And consciousness-free might become the new thing in AI services.
• Firechat - decentralized wifi radio, used during the Hong Kong protests of 2014
• Paying for emails - Esther Dyson, the asymmetry of emails, you should charge senders for reading your email (p186)
• Prices head to zero? "There has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about one percent per year over the last 140 years." International Monetary Fund, 2002
• Recording in a diary is considered admirable. Recording in a spreadsheet is considered creepy." -Gary Wolf (p250)
• Surveillance: a one-way panopticon, or mutual, transparent "coveillance" where other watchers watch the watchers (p259)
• Holos - an artificial global cortex made of the network of billions of phones and computers, our brains are not doubling in size every few years, the Holos mind is. Who writes the code? We do. We think we're merely wasting time, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the holos mind, thereby programming it by using it, teaching the holos what we thing is important. (p292-293)