Kevin Kelly was one of the founders of Wired magazine and The Well (a pioneering online community which existed well before the web). Kelly’s last TED talk was almost 2 years ago so his talk is one of the most anticipated at TEDx Amsterdam. For a man who has made a career out of technology, he seems curiously ambivalent about it as you can see in his presentation “What Technology Wants“. In that talk he mentions how he once gave away all his gadgets except for a bicycle and cycled 3000 miles across America under his own power. Yet the subject keeps drawing him back.
I took a look at Kelly’s 2007 talk on “
href="http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html">The next 5000 days of the web”. He recollects how when the World Wide Web first arrived on the scene, how people thought that it would be like TV, only better. Similarly we expect the result of the next 5000 days to be like the web, only better, and we are equally wrong. What we are constructing, in Kelly’s opinion, is a single global machine into which all our electronic devices are only portals. This machine, of which the web is the operating system, is constantly increasing in complexity and reach and, like a black hole, gradually draws in all the information available. You can see this happening in the recent trend towards cloud computing. The digital will become embedded into the material world so that physical objects can be linked to the universal machine in the upcoming “Internet of things”.
We are not much more than 500 days into the next 5000 days of the web after Kelly’s talk. This period has already seen the emergence of the real-time web, driven by Twitter, augmented reality browsers on mobile phones and an explosion of location-based services like FourSquare. What’s next? Kevin Kelly’s guesses are probably as good as we will get.
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