The wave of technological revolution is surging, artificial intelligence is reshaping social structures, and China is rising as a global power – these complex variables intertwine, making the future both hopeful and unpredictable. Faced with such a complex and changing landscape, we need not only acute insight into trends, but also a bold imagination for an ideal future.
Technology futurist Kevin Kelly deeply believes that a truly wonderful world will not appear by chance; the future we desire must first be imagined. Just as one cannot build a complex machine without a blueprint, we cannot enter an ideal high-tech society without a vision.
K.K.'s new work, “2049: Possibilities for the Next 10000 Days,” is precisely such a bold imaginative experiment – setting a 25-year horizon to depict a future society driven by technology and creativity. To make this imagination more tangible and perceptible, K.K. condenses the complex future landscape into ten keywords: Invisibilization, Transparency, Mutual Visibility, Simulation, Disintermediation, Trust, Open Source, Customization, Abundance, and Cool. These include what he believes are the characteristics and rules of the future world, as well as the keys to how we should act 25 years from now. So, how should these “keys” be understood and used?
The most important and influential innovations of the next 25 years have not yet been invented. We now have precisely the opportunity to imagine them and thereby build the future.
Author
Kevin Kelly
Founding Executive Editor of Wired magazine
Before founding Wired, he was an editor and publisher for Whole Earth Catalog. He is also a contributor to The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Science, and other publications. His works include “Out of Control,” “What Technology Wants,” and “The Inevitable.” In 1984, K.K. initiated the first Hackers Conference. K.K. is seen as a spokesperson and observer of “cyber culture,” and some refer to him as a “technology prophet.” Kevin Kelly is affectionately known as K.K. by Chinese readers, and his representative work “Out of Control” is hailed as “one of the most important works of this century to have a profound impact on the Western world.” He has influenced a generation of internet pioneers, including Steve Jobs.
10 Keywords for the Next 25 Years
The characteristics and rules of the future world can be summarized by 5 keywords: Invisibilization, Transparency, Mutual Visibility, Simulation, and Disintermediation. How we should act in 25 years can be summarized by another 5 keywords: Trust, Open Source, Customization, Abundance, and Cool.
One: Invisibilization
The shift from an industrial economy to a digital economy is a transition from tangible to intangible. In the next 25 years, the speed at which the intangible replaces the tangible will further accelerate. China's continuous emphasis on intangible digital assets is an example. The Mirrorworld, the XR world, is an intangible world.
Another meaning of invisibilization is invisibility, which is the secret to technological success: they succeed by being invisible. Electricity was the most important general-purpose technology after the Industrial Revolution, yet it is intangible; people don't see it, nor do many pay attention to it.
In the next 25 years, AI will also become more invisible, operating in the background. We won't be aware of its presence, nor will we think about it. It will exist like electricity, doing all sorts of things without us realizing, which will be quite wonderful. AI is the most crucial infrastructure enabling the “Mirrorworld,” and it will be an invisible infrastructure. The faster it develops, the faster other technologies will develop.
AI will be the unsung hero of the future world, as most of the Mirrorworld's work will be done by AI. We can understand AI through three progressive points.
First, it is the most important digital/algorithm engine behind the Mirrorworld, and like future electricity, the cost of using AI will continue to decrease.
Second, the Mirrorworld is a simulation of the real world. AI will support the construction of digital twins, and based on digital twins, we can conduct much research.
Third, AI is the most important tool in “human + machine” collaboration.
Similarly, a series of AI-related applications will succeed due to their invisibility, such as smart contracts, which may make decentralized cooperation smoother, and people may not even realize the existence of smart contracts.
Two: Transparency
Invisibilization brings digitalization, the rise of the virtual world. The future world will also be transparent; in a digitalized world, once something happens, it will be perceived, recorded, and leave “digital traces.” This helps us build digital twins and train AI. With the widespread adoption of data capture, the physical world will also be constantly recorded and digitized. Recorders will include not only governments and large enterprises but also every smart machine, every person, and every smart device we use and wear.
For example, when every student has an AI teaching assistant, it will always record your various learning behaviors in a highly transparent manner. By observing students, it can clearly understand their mastery of different knowledge. Because of frequent interaction between the AI assistant and students, it can truly achieve mutual learning during conversations, answering students' confusion and better understanding their comprehension abilities, thereby providing students with a more fair, objective, and comprehensive evaluation.
In the future, each of us will have smart glasses that can be used anywhere, anytime, providing AR/VR/XR experiences. They will capture everyone's environment and record everyone's language and expressions. To process such massive amounts of information, we will need enormous computational power to equip each pair of glasses with a powerful AI engine. Of course, this engine will also transform into an indispensable AI assistant for everyone, whispering advice in our ears, providing prompts in our line of sight, and helping us manage various routine and trivial tasks in our work and daily lives.
Three: Mutual Visibility
Transparency means almost everything that happens will be recorded. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” specifically criticizes how platforms collect user information and sell it to advertisers, fueling the attention economy. However, in this book, I coin “mutual visibility” to particularly emphasize that ubiquitous information collection and digital recording will be the norm of the future, a necessary choice for society's progress. Therefore, we need to change our mindset, no longer debating whether to record, but rather who should record, what rights and obligations recorders and recorded individuals should have, what rules should govern the use of massive information, and how to make this process public and transparent.
Why is this necessary? Because AI training requires massive amounts of data, both governments and companies will increasingly rely on insights derived from big data analytics. Customized and personalized services require AI to understand our individual behaviors as much as possible, enabling it to determine our preferences and recommend content and services more accurately. Such customized services encompass learning, medical and health, career planning, entertainment, and of course, more personalized e-commerce, which will profoundly impact economic operations.
Massive data is also essential for the Mirrorworld. To build the Mirrorworld, on one hand, we need to construct digital twins of the real world, and on the other hand, we need to build realistic virtual spaces and find ways to better live in a world that combines virtual and reality. Everyone needs to contribute data to build the Mirrorworld.
Why will the future world be transparent and mutually visible? How will privacy be protected in such a world? One must either choose to accept transparency and enjoy customized services, or choose to protect privacy and forgo various personalized services; a trade-off is required. You cannot enjoy customized services while refusing transparency and refusing to contribute personal data.
To resolve this contradiction, the concept of mutual visibility becomes particularly important.
First, users need explicit right to know – what information of mine is being collected by whom? It's impossible for only users to be transparent; governments and large enterprises also need to be transparent. Second, users can access their collected information, so that if problems arise, they can clearly know what evidence is against them. While decentralization is not easy, without mutual visibility, society could easily slide into the “dystopia” depicted in the TV series “Black Mirror.”
Four: Simulation
AI-driven innovative worlds and Mirrorworlds are highly simulated worlds with physical engines capable of simulating the real world. Chemical and biological experiments can be simulated, drug clinical trials can be simulated, and every person and machine will have its digital avatar, which is also a form of simulation.
Simulation initially complements the real world and real experiments, but in the future, the virtual world will increasingly replace the real world. Simulation will also evolve from simple to complex. For example, humans can now map the brain of a fruit fly with 140,000 neurons; next, humans may map the brain of a mouse, and eventually, a human brain map with 86 billion neurons will be drawn. Furthermore, humans may even be able to simulate the entire Earth's climate system.
Five: Disintermediation
Disintermediation means detachment from intermediaries. What is an intermediary? An intermediary is a proxy, a signal for transmitting information, a summary and generalization of the real world. The great development of human intelligence relies on language and writing, which are the mediums for human thought, allowing humans to connect, communicate, and collaborate, and enabling knowledge to be passed down across generations. The history of human development can be said to be a history of major medium development. The invention of printing and subsequent technologies propelled the great development of media, from large-scale printed books and newspapers to radio, film, television, and then the internet.
The value of media/intermediaries lies in compressing and distilling information, allowing the “bandwidth-limited” human brain to process information better. Why will the future world be disintermediated? Because AI will no longer have bandwidth or data processing capacity limitations. One of the most significant benefits of the Mirrorworld is that everything that happens is digitized, can be shared and analyzed, and is transparent and easy to process for AI. AI's most powerful ability compared to humans is precisely its capacity to process massive amounts of data. With AI, we no longer need to rely on intermediaries but can directly achieve data interconnection.
Because the amount of data machines can process is far beyond what humans can grasp, a series of compression methods that facilitate information processing for “bandwidth-limited” humans, from reports, summaries, and abstracts to resumes in daily life, may become less important. Machines can gain insights by processing raw data.
Disintermediation means we no longer need summaries and generalizations, but can better use firsthand information directly. In an educational setting, we will no longer rely on a child's extracurricular activity summaries and essays to evaluate them, because their daily learning activities and various other activities are recorded, allowing their potential and characteristics to be fully revealed. Perhaps we will still need recommendation letters, but there may be other forms of recommendations, such as evaluations from different people about a child's participation in various activities, rather than requiring a specific person to write a recommendation letter.
We can understand disintermediation as a change in communication. On one hand, AI assistants will play an increasingly important role in our work and life; they will handle communication for us, and their communication will not require language or other compressed intermediaries. On the other hand, besides language, humans may also communicate in other more effective ways, such as advanced brain-computer interface developments – telepathy, where what I think, you can immediately perceive. This “you” can be a person or a machine. Of course, disintermediation has another more practical meaning: everyone is a creator, and people no longer need to rely on media to disseminate information as they do now. Many businesses and individuals operate their own media, from SpaceX launch live streams to high-tech companies' new product showcases, to CEO/expert sharing, and various podcast content outputs, all of which have become important sources of information for people.
The next 5 keywords summarize how we should act in the future society: Trust, Open Source, Customization, Abundance, and Cool.
Six: Trust
The digital age is built on trust, and we need to reconstruct trust in many aspects, including trust between nations, trust between the public and governments, and trust between consumers and large corporations. At the same time, we need to create other ways to verify the authenticity of things; in the Mirrorworld, seeing is no longer believing.
How can you believe that what you see is real and not machine-generated, fictitious, or highly simulated? This requires us to reconstruct trust mechanisms. Similarly, in an era of geopolitical volatility, rebuilding trust between nations, especially major powers, is crucial. Disintermediation means that the mechanisms for building trust will undergo massive changes. Previously, trust was built on trust in intermediaries, because not everyone could know everything happening everywhere. Now, trust must be built on a series of new verification mechanisms.
The future society is built on trust. If trust is lacking, technology is very likely to be misused. To build trust mechanisms, we need to integrate the rules of the digital world and require a series of new digital governance systems and rules.
Trust relates to how to form an external thinking framework and collaboration method for this digital intelligent world. It is not only the basis for the credibility of the content and actions produced by our machines, but also the most fundamental condition for cooperation between nations and between enterprises.
Seven: Open Source
Open source means openness and cooperation. The problems humans face in the future will become increasingly complex, and the only way to make progress is through openness and cooperation. Open source, in a narrow sense, is a software development term, but in a broad sense, it is actually the most important rule for human scientific progress. Every invention and creation is public and transparent, and every new innovation is built upon the progress made by predecessors. Solving complex problems and finding new breakthroughs are no longer tasks that can be accomplished by individuals alone; they require more people to collaborate. Open source is the future; open-source products are more enduring than any company that produces them.
The opposite of open source is closed source. Working in isolation has significant limitations.
From the perspective of technological development, open source means fully utilizing the best and most advanced achievements in the world. Open source also indicates that in the field of engineering technology, there may be gaps between different countries or enterprises, but scientific development will ultimately be globally synchronized.
Eight: Customization
Customization is the most important business rule of the Mirrorworld. Over the past 25 years, we have experienced a process from search to recommendation. With the continuous advancement of AI, personalized and customized services will become the norm, such as customized learning and customized medical care. Simple product and service recommendations will now evolve into more personalized and thoughtful services.
In the next 25 years, with the widespread adoption of AI assistants, some small decisions in our work and life will be directly handed over to AI, such as scheduling, travel bookings, and daily necessities procurement. In this process, marketing methods in the attention economy – for example, Google placing ads related to your search content next to your search bar – will evolve into increasingly high-match suggestions, extending from consumption to all aspects of work and life, ultimately evolving into what Steve Jobs called “people don't know what they want until you show it to them,” meaning recommending entirely new experiences beyond consumers' imagination and perception.
Nine: Abundance
If customization is the business rule of the future digital intelligent world, then the shift from scarcity to abundance is the economic development foundation of the Mirrorworld. We need to expand our understanding of abundance; it is not just economic prosperity measured by money, but also prosperity at the lifestyle level, measured by the richness of services and experiences an individual can enjoy.
The advancement of AI will bring about a significant increase in productivity, driving economic prosperity, resulting in the farewell to scarcity and the embrace of abundance. The great development of productivity may also make Universal Basic Income (UBI), which many governments want to promote, possible, lifting everyone out of poverty.
However, the abundance of the Mirrorworld is built on the foundation of a rich variety of services and experiences at affordable prices. I have always had a method for predicting the future, which is to observe the lives of today's wealthy individuals and use that as a basis for envisioning the future. Services and experiences that only the wealthy can afford today will become increasingly affordable in the future due to technological advancements, eventually being enjoyed by everyone. Bill Gates was once the richest person in the world, and he had a team of 200 people dedicated to serving him and his family, including personal shoppers and a dedicated public relations team. With the popularization of AI assistants, having an AI that understands you help you choose suitable clothes or manage your social circles will become commonplace, affordable, and efficient. With the help of AI, ordinary people may also be able to have various personal assistants, just like the world's richest individuals. This is an example of abundance in the digital intelligent era.
In the early days of the AI era, our vision for AI assistants was that having one would be like having a personal assistant only available to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In the next 25 years, AI assistants will cover a very wide range of fields, including education, healthcare, and career, enabling everyone to enjoy customized services, receive personalized consultations anytime, and access global knowledge bases at will. The abundance of this invisible world will bring astonishing impacts.
A world of abundance will also have endless content. Platforms similar to YouTube will create massive amounts of high-quality UGC content, and many will be unique first-person experiences that users can enjoy immersively through smart glasses. As described at the beginning, thanks to the richness of content, an AI assistant can create background music most suitable for the user's mood anytime, anywhere, providing meticulous care.
This abundance will benefit everyone globally. We won't have to wait 25 years; we will soon have high-quality real-time translation, which will facilitate mutual understanding between different cultures and help us strengthen communication and build trust. Korean pop culture has gone viral, with movies like “Parasite” and TV series like “Squid Game” creating a sensation in the United States. And before that, the spread of Japanese culture, from manga to games, also demonstrated its soft power. Once language barriers are broken, the competition for quality resources will no longer be limited to local markets, and high-quality local content will also gain audiences globally.
Ten: Cool
Behind the global abundance of content lies the final keyword – Cool.
Cool will be the most important element distinguishing humans from machines in the future, the most attractive characteristic when different cultures collide, and it also represents the common values shared by young people in the future. The global phenomenon game “Black Myth: Wukong” in 2024 went viral precisely because it made traditional Chinese culture “cool.”
One potential impact of coolness is that it allows people to gradually build trust in different cultures. Cool culture is easier to spread and more appealing. Products presented by high-tech companies are clearly cool. Here, I want to remind that “cool” is not just about young people finding it hip; although young people may be the most globally conscious, the connotation of cool is broader, including making people feel interesting, touching, and capable of strong emotional connection.
Although in this book I attempt to envision the development in the next 25 years, the critical development phase is actually the next 10 years. Whether AI will bring about fundamental changes or if it's just an overhyped bubble will soon be revealed; what kind of tone the competition and cooperation between China and the US will take, in terms of great power game, 10 years is already a sufficient amount of time; and organizational changes may also flourish in the next 10 years.
Finally, I still need to emphasize that no one has a crystal ball, and I am not trying to predict the future accurately. We must admit our own ignorance and also acknowledge that the biggest constant in the future is change itself, so my vision is merely a form of scenario thinking, hoping that such scenario thinking will inspire your imagination.
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About Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute
The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute is one of the world's largest private brain science research organizations, founded by Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo with a donation of $1 billion. It supports brain science research to benefit humanity, focusing on globalization, interdisciplinary collaboration, and young scientists.
The Chen Institute has established the Applied Neurotechnology Frontier Lab and the AI & Mental Health Frontier Lab in collaboration with Huashan Hospital and Shanghai Mental Health Center; and partnered with Caltech to establish the Caltech Tianqiao Neuroscience Institute.
The Chen Institute has built an ecosystem supporting brain science and artificial intelligence research, with projects spanning Europe, America, Asia, and Oceania, including academic conferences and exchanges, summer school training, AI-driven science awards, clinical researcher incentive programs, special case communities, and Chinese media outreach, among others.