Yahoo Finance 6 Inevitable Trends That Will Totally Transform Everything: Flowing
In this week's Rule Breaker Investing podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner brings his listeners a special treat: an interview with futurist/writer/journalist/pioneer and all-around clever person, Kevin Kelly. Among other things, he was a co-founder of pioneering online community The WELL and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. He's written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, Time, and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent book, published in 2016, is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. And he's not talking about specific technologies like autonomous vehicles or blockchain -- he's looking at shifts that are so wide, they're verbs.
Frankly, it's a great interview, and David would encourage you to listen to the whole thing -- but it was so long that to fit in all 12, his producer had to split it in two, with the second six in a bonus podcast. Meanwhile, for those who would like to enjoy this chat in smaller bites (bytes), we at The Fool are happy to oblige.
In this segment, they talk about the overarching trend he describes as flowing. Put simply, the way information moves so easily in the modern world changes the optimal structures for getting things done.
A full transcript follows the video.
More From The Motley Fool
This video was recorded on Feb. 14, 2018.
David Gardner: No. 3 -- "Flowing." Flowing. So, you call the third phase of computing -- after first, desktop computing and then second, the digital age, the web -- the flows.
Kevin Kelly: There are several things. One of the greatest trends in the last 25-30 years has been a move from centralized organizations to decentralized organizations. To the ability of what they often call "flattening," where you don't need as many levels. There's less top-down control. And that's true for all kinds of human organizations and it's true for technology, too.
We had this idea of peer-to-peer, and Uber -- which I took over this morning -- being a prime example of that. Instead of having a taxi dispatcher deciding who's going to go, you have peer-to-peer. I need a ride, and some guy has a car, so we'll be matched up. That's this flattening, this flowing, and it's all made possible by the fact that we have this flow of information.
In the old days, if you were a general in the Army and you wanted to command 100,000 soldiers, the only way to do it was a top-down command structure. You wanted the people at the base to obey you because they didn't have any information. But in the world in which we have a lot of information, and information flows between things, it's better, actually, to have that peer-to-peer. It's much more adaptable and much more accurate, and there's a disadvantage to trying to command from the top.
The new technologies -- the flows of information that we have constantly -- has enabled us to have decentralized institutions and decentralized technologies. It's all been permitted, and we're going to keep going in that direction.
At first, it seems crazy. How could an encyclopedia that was written by anybody in the world and changeable at any time, how could that possibly be reliable? And it turns out that it was because it was easier to undo a vandal's change than it was to actually create it in the first place. It was easier to undo vandalism than to make vandalism. We see the effects to something like Wikipedia which was bottom-up, and Uber and other examples of peer-to-peer where you had the bottom doing everything and very little control.
There are several things to say about that. One is that having the bottom-up is not going to take us all the way that we want to go. We've learned that you can't have the ideal encyclopedia unless you have some top-down control, as well. You can't have a completely autonomous organization where everybody's on the bottom without some direction, but it can take you further than you thought you could go, and it's always the best place to begin.
The rule seems to be you can go further with the bottom only than you thought. Eventually you'll need some top-down control, and it's always the best place to begin. So, part of what we're seeing, again and again, is we're moving into the world where we're saying if we have a flow of information, and it's peer-to-peer and everybody has it, what can we do with just having very few layers of control? And the answer is you can probably go further than you think -- it's a great place to start -- but eventually you'll need some other levels to get all the way to where you want to go.
David Gardner has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends The New York Times. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
