Kevin Kelly is the founding editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the editor and publisher of Steve Jobs’ favorite publication, The Whole Earth Catalog. His writings have also been featured in leading media outlets such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, and Science.
His 1994 book, Out of Control, anticipated many aspects of today’s mobile Internet and business applications, including public intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, virtual reality, collaboration, online communities, and the network economy. For this reason, Kelly is often called the “Father of Silicon Valley Spirit” and the “Father of the World Internet.” As a visionary of the Internet, his forecasts on economic and social development have influenced many key figures in the tech world.
Inevitable is another of his landmark works, following Out of Control and What Technology Wants. Drawing from his extensive career and sharp insights into future trends, Kelly outlines twelve key technological trends that will shape the future. These are summarized as twelve essential keywords:
- Formation – Everything is constantly evolving and upgrading.
- Intelligence – Your ability to collaborate with artificial intelligence will determine your value.
- Screen Reading – Any surface can become a screen.
- Flow – All business activities are data-driven.
- Recombination – Most innovations are reorganizations of existing elements.
- Filtering – Capturing attention is the key to generating revenue.
- Interaction – Its impact will be as profound as AI itself.
- Use – Value will shift from ownership to usage rights.
- Sharing – At its core, sharing means collaboration.
- Start – Technology’s purpose is to be used.
- Questioning – Asking good questions is more important than having perfect answers.
Regarding the popular topic of “sharing,” Kevin Kelly emphasizes that the essence is not merely sharing itself but collaboration—sharing = collaboration. Scalable collaboration enables thousands or even billions of people to interact and work together, generating social change on an unprecedented scale. This goes far beyond just sharing devices; it creates enormous value and wealth, driving significant societal transformations.
Currently, many shared products, especially the surge in “shared bicycles,” have effectively addressed the “last mile” transportation challenge for residents. They have optimized the allocation and utilization of social resources. This concept of “sharing” as collaboration is also influencing other industries deeply.
Take, for example, the construction industry’s “Guitu Cloud,” which aims to enable visual collaboration among all project participants. It significantly reduces digital construction costs, enhances project coordination and management efficiency, and progressively achieves visual management throughout the entire project lifecycle. This is made possible by integrating cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud rendering, and other next-generation Internet technologies.
In Inevitable, Kelly also highlights the reliability of cloud technology, noting that clouds can deliver the famed “five nines” (99.999%) uptime—offering nearly flawless service. The cloud handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes, while our devices serve merely as portals to access cloud functions. This model exemplifies the advantages of “Guitu Cloud.” Its real-time rendering technology caches data once on the server, displaying results through a browser. Role-based access controls ensure third parties can only view content without accessing source models, effectively safeguarding users’ intellectual property.
Looking ahead to the next 30 years, trends such as materialization, decentralization, immediacy, platform collaboration, and cloud computing will continue to flourish. As these developments progress, usage rights will increasingly replace ownership, making the use of goods more important than owning them in everyday life.
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