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The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Kevin Kelly (Author), George Newbern (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 3,089 ratings
Goodreads Choice Award nominee
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A New York Times Best Seller

From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the 12 technological imperatives that will shape the next 30 years and transform our lives.

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends - interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning - and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another.

These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading - what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place - as this new world emerges.

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  1. Listening Length
    11 hours and 30 minutes
  2. Author
    Kevin Kelly
  3. Narrator
    George Newbern
  4. Audible release date
    June 7, 2016
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Penguin Audio
  7. ASIN
    B01EB3OR32
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 11 hours and 30 minutes
Author Kevin Kelly
Narrator George Newbern
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date June 07, 2016
Publisher Penguin Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B01EB3OR32
Best Sellers Rank #21,145 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#25 in Future Studies
#35 in Technology & Society
#68 in Strategic Business Planning

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
3,089 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book well-written and thought-provoking. They appreciate the simple, compelling style and detailed portrayal of the future. Many consider it a worthwhile read and value for money. However, some feel the content lacks imagination and is repetitive.

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ReadabilityInsightStylePacingValue for moneyEnjoyment
169 customers mention "Readability"159 positive10 negative

Customers find the book well-written and informative. They appreciate the thoughtful chapters and interesting ideas. The author distills complex thoughts into a succinct summary with helpful examples. Overall, it's a must-read for entrepreneurs and leadership-focused individuals.

"...twelve trends technological forces identified by Kelly in this very important book...." Read more

"...are summarized and the benefits detailed so the upshot is that it reads smoothly, each paragraph an arc that ends optimistically, an exercise in..." Read more

"...34;The Inevitable" is classic, articulate, empowering, premiering the analytical projection of life in transformation to the futuristic world of..." Read more

"...The chapters are well thought out, so you will find this sort of tracking by those who track (gov't et al) listed in the chapter titled..." Read more

162 customers mention "Insight"157 positive5 negative

Customers find the book insightful and thought-provoking. It provides a good intellectual journey on how technology has evolved and the likely trajectory in the future. The author looks back at where we've come and gives a glimpse of what lies in store for the future. Overall, readers describe it as an important and insightful work.

"...I admire Wired because I think it looks carefully at technology and thinks for itself, which I find admirable. So, what does the book say?..." Read more

"...can get an overwhelming variety of music and video, a constantly evolving encyclopaedia, weather forecasts, satellite images of any place on earth,..." Read more

"...It is not about doctrine, nor does it get into the cultural squabbles. "Cyber" shows up once. Tencent and Baidu also make an appearance...." Read more

"...34;The Inevitable" is classic, articulate, empowering, premiering the analytical projection of life in transformation to the futuristic world of..." Read more

13 customers mention "Style"13 positive0 negative

Customers find the style simple and engaging. They say the book paints a compelling picture of its vision for the future, providing a reasonable overview of technology and society. The detailed portrayal of the future is appreciated as a brilliant look ahead. Readers appreciate the clear view and judgement of this era.

"...The style is the clincher, it is deceptively simple like common sense, eschewing terminology for everyday words...." Read more

"...And I love his style, right to the point, without the small stuff...." Read more

"...Brilliant look ahead. This book hands you your goggles through the future fog. Get it! Read it!" Read more

"...I like it all - topic, language and style, structure, and, above all, a positive approach to futurism which is a quite rare rhing rarely." Read more

8 customers mention "Pacing"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book compelling and illuminating. They describe the author as clear and believable, providing a realistic inside into what is going on. The book provides an extensive and interesting overview of the topic, with an overwhelming variety of music and video available.

"...your phone, tablet or computer, you can get an overwhelming variety of music and video, a constantly evolving encyclopaedia, weather forecasts,..." Read more

"This is my first book review on Amazon. Kevin Kelly's work is so compelling and illuminating that I had to express my admiration for it here...." Read more

"...a cofounder of Wired, and his insights are deep, provocative, and wide ranging...." Read more

"...By far the most far-reaching, detailed and interesting book on the subject I've read." Read more

8 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book provides good value for money. They mention the first chapter is worth reading and buying it. The book offers ownership, more services, cost sharing, and ah-ha moments.

"...futuristic world orchestrated by AI, less ownership, more services, cost sharing...." Read more

"...alone presented in this book are astonding and stand alone as worth the cost...." Read more

"Ok good value" Read more

"...or hoping for, with no big surprises or ah-ha moments, but still worth the time." Read more

33 customers mention "Enjoyment"8 positive25 negative

Customers find the book has too many words but little content. They find it repetitive and unimaginative, with too many words for them to be insightful. Some of the chapters are repetitive, while overall it's a solid book. However, some feel the philosophy is long-winded and not exhaustively explored.

"...Kelly outlines twelve domains of the future. None is exhaustively explored, but all are tantalisingly prised open just far enough for the reader to..." Read more

"...to recognize that links on the internet are passive and do not represent knowledge; links in the mind do. They are activated automatically...." Read more

"...reads smoothly (his excellent writing style accomplishes this), is entertaining and educational. I highly recommend this book." Read more

"...It is just too rich, too full of what we need to know and imagine, that it almost defies summary. An adequate book report would be many pages long...." Read more

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Top reviews from the United States

  • fitzalling
    5.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile - the author has had a 30 year ringside seat watching technology change
    Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    When I saw that Mr. Kelly was a founder of the magazine Wired, I knew that I wanted to read this book. I admire Wired because I think it looks carefully at technology and thinks for itself, which I find admirable. So, what does the book say?

    The author looks back over the 30 years that he's had his ringside seat, considers what he's seen and predicted over that 30 years and then he projects forward over the next 30 years to see where he thinks technology will take us. He clearly states that he considers the positive aspects of future change, not the negative aspects. The author predicts that certain technological trends or impulses are inevitable, not specific outcomes. So, don't expect to see predictions of a world free of war or cures for all cancers, that's not what he views as the what he terms "bias" of technological change. He identifies 12 of these biases and discusses how they have played out over the 30 years that he's been observing them and how he thinks they'll evolve over the next 30 years. For instance, he views telephony as inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The internet was inevitable, but the specific form of internet that we presently have was not.

    I'll touch on a few of the 12 and encourage you to read the book for the full observations. Flowing - the book describes the internet as the world's largest copying machine. Information in many forms is copied and distributed. usually for free. The industrial revolution brought analog copies of information such as music. These copies were exact and cheap. The internet brings digital music - exact and free. This affects value propositions and law, which causes change. He considers how this change and looks for responses to this change. Trust may become even more valuable.

    Screening - where once we may have been people who read books and did things "by the book," the author argues that we are now people of the screen (the computer screen). People of the Screen live "in a world of constant flux." Paperback at pg. 88. As he says, "truth is not delivered by authors and authorities, but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves." Pg. 88. I'll let you decide how this may be playing out in society today.

    Questioning - Wikipedia was a great shock to the author. When Wikipedia began, Mr. Kelly could not believe that it would be anything other than an abject failure. As he says, "I knew from my own 20-year experience that you could not rely upon what you read from a random stranger.... I believed that an aggregation of random contributions would be a total mess" Pg. 269. The ability to many people to self-organize through the internet a reasonably coherent body of information was eye opening. "I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years." Pg. 274.

    The author describes "becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing,interacting, tracking, questioning, and beginning" as areas in which change is inevitable. In all of these I find the "tracking" most troubling. But, like the author, with the passage of time, I may find my mind changed a lot.

    I encourage you to read the book and see if it challenges your mind.
    36 people found this helpful
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  • Ian Mann
    4.0 out of 5 stars grasping the effects that they produce is not easy. We need someone like Kelly to highlight these ...
    Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Kelly co-founded and was the executive editor at Wired magazine where he now holds the title of Senior Maverick. He is widely known and respected for his acute perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and society.
    Because we are so immersed in the technologies that surround us, grasping the effects that they produce is not easy. We need someone like Kelly to highlight these effects to be able to understand their relevance.
    Pause and consider for a moment that most of the important technologies that will dominate our lives 30 years from now, have not been invented. (Pause.) Add to this the effect of the ongoing development of the technologies we use all the time.
    Not too long ago, all of us decided that we could not live another day without a smartphone. Only a decade ago this need would have dumbfounded us. Today, as I write this column, I am frustrated because the network is slow: but not too long ago we never had a network. Few imagined the miracle the web would become. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous,” Kelly observes.
    Add to this, that new technologies require endless upgrades. Even if you don’t actively choose to upgrade and so change the app you have become so used to using, continual upgrades are so essential to technology systems that they are now automatic. In the background, the machines we use upgrade themselves, slowly changing their features over time. This change happens gradually, so we don’t notice the evolution.
    But the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating continuously, as we can see from the latest new cell phone, computer or app. Soon we won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced. “No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless,” say Kelly
    Every technology we use is in a state “becoming”: it is never complete. We will remain in the newbie state for the rest of our lives.
    From any window onto the internet, your phone, tablet or computer, you can get an overwhelming variety of music and video, a constantly evolving encyclopaedia, weather forecasts, satellite images of any place on earth, up-to-the-minute news from anywhere in the world, road maps with driving directions, real-time share quotes, and the list goes on.
    Not too long ago, no one would have been silly enough to suggest this vision of the near future. After all, there simply wasn’t and still isn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a development.
    What has transpired one study found, is that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is a function of duty or passion. All the content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter was not created by their staff, but by their audience.
    “If we have learned anything in the past three decades,” Kelly reminds us, “it is that the impossible is more plausible than it appears.”
    It is hard to imagine anything that could change our lives as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI). This is a computer programmed not only to host and catalogue information, but more importantly to constantly learn from the information and arrive at new conclusions.
    In 2015, researchers at DeepMind published a report describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They didn’t teach the computer how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games. This is the profound difference AI offers.
    After half an hour, the computer missed only once every four times. By the 300th game it played, an hour later, it never missed. AIs like this one become smarter all the time, unlike human players.
    This is not a trend we might see in the future, it is here already. Consider IBM’s Watson, a computer built on AI that can continuously absorb bodies of information far too large for any human to absorb, let alone gather. This collection of ongoing knowledge is being put to medical use as a medical diagnostic tool. “Most of the previous attempts to make a diagnostic AI have been pathetic failures, but Watson really works,” says Kelly. Soon Watson will be the world’s best diagnostician.
    And the race for AI has only just begun in earnest. AI has attracted more than $18 billion in investments since 2009. Yahoo!, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since 2014. In 2014 alone more than $2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology.
    The business opportunities flowing from AI will take this form: find something that can be made better by adding AI to it.
    In the legal field, it could be used to uncover evidence from mountains of documents to discern inconsistencies between cases, and then have it suggest legal arguments. In the field of investment this is already happening. Companies such as Betterment or Wealthfront optimize tax strategies and balance holdings between portfolios. These are the sorts of things a professional money manager might do once a year, but the AI will do it every day, or every hour.
    AI can be added to laundry so that clothes “tell” the washing machines how they want to be washed and the wash cycle would adjust itself to the contents of each load.
    Rather than using AI to improve its search capacity, Google is using search to make its AI better. Each of the 3 billion queries that Google conducts each day is “teaching” the AI process. Consider what another 10 years of improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand times more data and a hundred times more computing resources, will do to Google’s unrivalled AI. “My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI,” Kelly suggests.
    There are twelve trends technological forces identified by Kelly in this very important book. Anyone who wishes to have a profound insight into the trends that will significantly impact our future, would do well to read ‘The Inevitable’ carefully.
    Readability Light ---+ Serious
    Insights High +---- Low
    Practical High ---+- Low

    *Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of the soon to be released ‘Executive Update’.
    14 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Adriana
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great
    Reviewed in Germany on January 4, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    I've bought used book and it matched the description for its condition which was "very good". The book was intact as if it has never been read, just a couple of page had a trace from being folded in the middle (probably from being stored improperly). I was pleasantly surprised of the overall great quality.
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  • Odar07
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book !
    Reviewed in France on January 25, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Very clear and easy to read book even though it treats of complex topics. I recommend it. It was written in 2016 and 7 years afterwards We can already see some forecasts come true (ie. AI ).
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  • MIGUEL ANGEL TORRES AVILA
    5.0 out of 5 stars Una mirada al futuro
    Reviewed in Mexico on August 31, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    Este libro da una visión muy acertada de lo que podemos esperar de la tecnología en las siguientes décadas. En mi caso me ha ayudado a comprender las megatendencias para anticipar mi visión de negocios.

    Lo recomiendo ampliamente.
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  • Prabhakar Mishra
    5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
    Reviewed in India on October 16, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Really a very good and insightful book, I highly recommend it to those who are looking into the future, the book is not destinies but the trajectories this book of a no predictions of where we end up but else simply that in the near future we are headed inevitably in certain directions
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  • Tommy Gunn
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, this and Rise of the Robots and ...
    Reviewed in Canada on August 24, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Great book, this and Rise of the Robots and The Second Machine Age are all great reads. Very informative. They all remind me of Alvin Tofflers groundbreaking book Future Shock. Very insightful in terms of the future of human labour.
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