I’m currently reading “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future”. It’s by Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine and an internet pioneer in the 1980s.
It’s brilliant and very relevant to the news industry. Here is a highlight from chapter one.
You are not late
… here is the thing. In terms of the internet nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of the beginning… If we could climb into a time machine, journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realise that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2050 were not invented until after 2016…
from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit – the equivalent of the dot-com names of 1984.
Because here is the other thing the graybeards in 2050 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an innovator in 2016? It was a wide-open frontier! You pick almost any category and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And they they would sigh. “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
So the truth: Right now, today, in 2016 is the best time to start up. There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefits/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute. This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and day, “Oh, to have been alive and well back then!”
The last 30 years have created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. But what’s coming will be different, beyond, and other. The things we will make will be constantly, relentlessly becoming something else. And the coolest stuff has not been invented yet.
Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin.
You are not late.
Chapter 2 talks more about AI. I’ll post a highlight soon…