The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking.

With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.

We filter by ourselves: We

Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.

There are practical limits to how gigantic one company’s cloud can get, so the next step in the rise of clouds over the coming decades will be toward merging the clouds into one intercloud. Just

As with AdSense, big is not where the leverage is. Rather this new corner of ad space liberates the small to middle—a billion businesses who would have never thought of, let alone ever got around to, developing a cool advertising campaign. With a peer-to-peer system, these ads would be created by passionate (and greedy) users and unleashed virally

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to c

This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.

However, neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia. Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.