Excerpts from an interview with John Brockman and Kelly

This article is an excerpt from an interview with John Brockman and Kelly, an American journalist, scholar and writer (author of the third culture).

Kelly (Kevin Kelly, often referred to as "KK") has multiple identities, writers, photographers, conservationists, and scholars in the Asian culture and digital culture field. But his best known is the idea of technology. He is a spokesperson and observer of Internet culture, with a profound insight into technology. According to the New York Times columnist David Carr, KK's predictions of technology are "grand and correct". He fully believes in what he calls "technical elements" and believes that it is only the beginning of a technological society. As he has done in the past decades, he is still acting as the future prophet and compass for the rest of us, pointing the way for us to find new territories.

How can we have a world where everyone is watching and feeling happy?

Unlike most people's concerns about privacy, KK believes that humans are tracking themselves, tracking each other, being tracked by companies and governments without end, and that he sees no reaction, and that being monitored is a technology requirement. Like replication, tracking is also the Internet to do things, but also can not be stopped, so only with tracking collaboration. But how to collaborate has yet to be explored, and it remains a question for him how humans can survive in a world that tracks the ubiquitous.

Protobon (Protopian), Non-utopia

KK does not believe in the utopia that technology does not bring problems, and he believes that any technology poses almost as many problems as it solves. But he believes that the day is a little bit better than the day Protobon (protopian-new possibilities bring a lot of new benefits, but they also bring in as many problems, and the interplay between these benefits and problems is very unpredictable.) But unlike utopia or enemy dystopia/dystopian, Protobon believes that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is better than today, though just a little better. ）。

KK to Shi examples. Stone hammers can be used to kill or to make creations, but the possibility of such a choice does not exist until it becomes a tool. Technology is a means of constantly empowering and amplifying our ability to do evil or to benefit. But each time we have a new choice is good, it can make the balance slightly to the benefit of this side tilt a little.

Technology is a means of generating new problems

Most of the problems we face now are caused by past technology (technogenic problems). Most of the future problems will also be caused by the technologies that are now being created. Technology is the means to create new problems, but also the means to form new solutions, but we can choose between the two to make the balance in the long-term positive side slightly tilted a little bit. Mickle, Mickle, over time, these accumulation of good choices can propel the progress of human civilization.

Of course, technology occasionally eliminates some of the old choices, but the net yield over time is a small advantage of the new choice, and civilization is the accumulation of increasing choice, the main driving force for people to move from rural to urban areas, because there are more choices in cities than in the beautiful countryside. Because we now have more choices and possibilities than in the past, so few people are willing to go back to their ancestral lives, and that is why we are more willing to move forward and accept the other things that technology brings us. So the main reason we keep using technology to make things is not to sell more things, but to create new possibilities that we haven't had before.

Evolution Change and development change

The process of developing a human embryo from an egg into a germ cell and then to the fetus and finally to the newborn is an established process of evolution. Genetic mutations are evolutionary changes, which are in the minority. The same is true of technology. Most of the technology is developmental, that is to say, if you look at the technological trajectory of other civilized planets, you will find that they all have a common course, such as ceramics.

Specific technologies will have specific precursors (precursors). The same is true of the current development of the connected world, which undergoes a number of specific stages of development, some of which experience a cycle from openness to integration. We've been through this cycle a couple of times. First, the email is open, then the integrated CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. Then came the web boom, with little, very open, and chaotic web rules, and then gradually integrated into the world of closed, nurtured Facebook and Google +. The next stage may be a very open, wild, chaotic place, and then things will be sorted out and then broken down into more closed proprietary systems when people think about what to do.

The next 20 years will eclipse the last 20 years.

Now everyone thinks the future of the Web is Web 2.0, a better web. Looking at the idea of the Web before the Web was born, the prevailing view was that the web would be a better TV, like TV 2.0. At that time, it was assumed that there would be a horse channel, a dog channel, a cat channel or something. But no one thought of the Web revolution-that most of the content was generated by the user. The web is not a better TV, the Web is the Web.

So it's wrong for us to fall into the same cycle of thinking again. Just as the web is different from television, the future is not the same as the web. The next stage will be the frontier, open, unregulated (lawlessness), enclosure, huge uncertainty, and the old forces trying to move technology in the direction they set itself. After this stage, there will be a collapse, then integration.

If we sit on the time machine and go back 20 years, we report to the people who were there. We took out the equipment in our pockets, said it contained free encyclopedias, street maps of most of the world's cities, real-time technical statistics, stock quotes and weather forecasts, PDFs for all the manuals, and so on, and told them that they were free. You must be considered a madman. They'll say no, no economic model can do this. But the next 20 years will also eclipse the past 20 years. We are just at the beginning of all these changes. It feels like all the big events have happened, but relatively few things have happened. 20 years from now, we'll go back and say, "Well, there's really nothing important in the last 20 years." ”

To be Continued ...