The Inevitable

The Inevitable is a work by Kevin Kelly (often called "KK" by readers), founding executive editor of Wired, following Out of Control and What Technology Wants. Its original English title is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. The Chinese edition was translated under the auspices of the Eastern Library, with Zhou Feng, Dong Li, and Jin Yang as co-translators, and published by Publishing House of Electronics Industry in 2016. The Chinese edition appeared before the English edition and sparked widespread discussion in China's internet circles. The book is built around twelve verbs: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and Beginning. KK's core argument is a kind of "inevitability": the overall direction of technology has its own inertia, while specific product forms can vary enormously—for example, the emergence of the internet was inevitable, but which network would be chosen was not; mobile telephony was inevitable, but the iPhone was not. Through these twelve forces he describes a world in continuous "becoming": everything is turning into a verb, products are becoming services, ownership is giving way to access, content gains value through flowing and remixing, machine intelligence is being "cognified" into all things, and human value moves upward to questioning and judgment. The book offers no fixed timetable and no operating manual; instead it provides a coordinate system for observing technology: rather than predicting whether a particular product will succeed, judge whether it aligns with the direction of these twelve forces. For readers caught up in technological change, the book offers the patience and the language to "see the trend."