Kevin Kelly: The genesis of ultra-broadband

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick of Wired magazine, master of all things TED, and author of such provocative works as What Technology Wants. At the Huawei Ultra-broadband Forum, he shared with industry leaders his unique brand of futurism, while sparing some time for WinWin to talk about ultra-broadband and why we need it.

By Linda Xu & Jason Patterson

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick of Wired magazine, master of all things TED, and author of such provocative works as What Technology Wants. At the Huawei Ultra-broadband Forum, he shared with industry leaders his unique brand of futurism, while sparing some time for WinWin to talk about ultra-broadband and why we need it.

A way to think about tech

Kevin Kelly has never been one for small ball when it comes to talking about the future. He refers to the sum of all technology as the Technium, and often refers to it as if it were a living thing. But don’t be alarmed. When asked by WinWin as to why he favors this language, he stated “Because the things that we make like the Internet have become so complicated, the only way we can manage is to use some of the principles of biology. An example would be viruses or spam. If you take a machine-like view of what you’re trying to do with spam, you want to eliminate and make it zero. But we have found out that the only effective way to deal with spam is to take an immune system idea from biology. You don’t actually eliminate it, but you can actually minimize it. You keep it to a level. It never goes away completely. That’s what we are discovering, the best way to understand some of the really complicated things is more life-like than machine-like. We can actually manage them that way.”

Lifelike or machine-like?

When asked as to whether the significance of ultra-broadband is more lifelike than machine-like, and what his reasons were for choosing to speak to Huawei and its partners about it, Kelly stated, “Ultra-broadband is not just another technology sector. It's not just another little industry. It's actually part of communications, which is the fundamental foundation of our culture. So what we are doing with ultra-broadband is enhancing, augmenting and amplifying culture. So this is a big deal. It is one of the most important things that we've ever done to connect everything to everything else. And we are also giving ourselves new senses through these technologies. I have a friend who is a neurologist who has invented a jacket that can vibrate. It’s a kind of clothing which has sensors and a camera. So he can give blind people a way to actually feel. They can see through feeling through vibration of jackets. So it can turn the sense of sight into a sense of feel. I think that's a kind of example where we can actually give ourselves new senses.”

He would later add, “If you think of the past 20 years and ways of connecting to our devices that has changed how we think of ourselves, our environment hasn't changed very much. The cities look the same. The physical world is pretty much the same. What's changed and what's going to continue to change is our idea of who we are, where we fit into things, and our relationships with people. We now have a lot of weaker relationships with more people. In a sense, the unusual becomes the usual and we are flooded with more possible. I think that's where it is and it's much more internal change in our own minds of how we think and who we think humans are. I think the physical world will be very slow to change but the interior world is changing very fast.”

Adding AI to it

In terms of the exterior world, Kelly stated, “I think one of big disrupters will be artificial intelligence (AI). We are going to have a lot of artificial intelligence built into devices. AI is going to come from the cloud. It's going to be one big AI and we will get that through ultra-broadband. So one of the consequences is that we will have the delivery of AI to all kinds of devices through ultra-broadband. We will have smartness in all the things that we make. So that kind of distributed AI or artificial smartness in everything will come through broadband.”

As to what all that AI means for business and the Internet at large, Kelly stated, “We are just at the beginning of the Internet. If you look back at everything on the Internet 50 years from now, you will say that in 2014 nothing really happened yet. All the big changes happened after that. It's important to remember that the web is 40 or 45 years old, depending on how you want to count it. It's still an infant. Low-hanging fruit that we can see right now is going to be AI. So the formula for the next 10,000 startups is to take something X and add AI to it. And that's going to be incredible as you are going to make something smart. That's going to be a broadband issue because all the stuff is going to be sold as a service, as a web service, and the necessity is on all the time. I think that's part of what we will see.

Did you see this coming?

Speaking of what we will see, it’ll be screens, and lots of them. According to Kelly, “Some screens will become more like paper. There is no reason why you couldn't make a screen that is as thin and flexible as paper. You can have an e-book looking exactly like a regular book, except that you could pinch, cut and paste. Screens will continue to evolve to be all kinds of things, such as wallpaper. Screens will continue to diversify and have even more varieties of them, including ones that look like paper and things that don't look anything like paper. We are heading into a world of more and more screens. That’s dynamic. Everything will potentially be a screen.”

As to what other developments he sees coming, Kelly would add, “When my son was young, about twelve years old, I was trying to explain to him that when I grew up, we didn't even have computers. He said, “No computers? How did you connect to the Internet?” So I think that in the future, digital natives will have this idea that you can ask the thing, the box, the device, and the Internet a question and get an answer, and this will seem very natural. It is like an “automated parent.” When you are little, you ask your parent and you always have the answer for things. So I think that's one kind of tool. Besides, the tool of tracking yourself, having a record of our lives, and where you've been and a kind of life log will be a natural thing, where you can go back, trace your steps and retrieve a path. You have a picture of your life log.”

As to what Kelly sees for the Internet of things, it’s pretty bold stuff. “What I have learnt over last 20 years is to believe in possible a lot better than I did before. I'm much more willing to believe in silly things now than I was even 20 years ago. We are putting more and more sensors into things and I don't expect that to stop it. It's going to accelerate. And over time they will begin to resemble living things in some ways.