Kevin Kelly, digital visionary, writer on biology and business and “cool tools”, will be in Asia in June, available for speaking engagements.
BIO
Kevin Kelly has been a participant of, and reporter on, the information technology revolution for more than 30 years. Based in his studio in Pacifica, California, he immerses himself in the long-term trends of technology, tools, new media, and cultural behavior. He writes about the ripple effects and social consequences surrounding the culture of technology. Kevin’s most recent book, What Technology Wants presents a refreshing view of technology as a living force in the world. Kevin Kelly is currently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. During Kelly’s tenure as editor at Wired, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of two Oscars). He is also currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control (called “required reading for all executives” by Fortune). In addition, he writes for prominent publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire. Earlier in life, Kevin was a photographer in remote parts of Asia (instead of going to college), publishing his photographs in national magazines and recently in the photo art book Asia Grace.
BIG IDEAS
In this thought provoking presentation, Kevin Kelly introduces a brand-new view of technology. Based on research from his book, “What Technology Wants” he suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal, but a life-like, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Looking out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover “what it wants,” Kevin traces technology’s long course throughout prehistory, and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where it might be headed. What technology wants is what we want: more mind, more diversity, more energy, more complexity, more evolvability.
system, we can capture its full gifts.
What comes after the Internet? What is bigger than the web? What will produce more wealth than all the startups to date? The answer is a planetary super-organism comprised of 4 billion mobile phones, 80 quintillion transistor chips, a million miles of fiber optic cables, and 6 billion human minds all wired together. The whole thing acts like a single organism, with its own behavior and character — but at a scale we have little experience with. This is more than just a metaphor. In this presentation, Kevin takes the idea of a global super-organism seriously by describing what we know about it so far, how it is growing, where its boundaries are, and what it will mean for us as individuals and collectively. Both the smallest one-person enterprises today, and the largest mega-corporations on Earth, will have to learn to how this Technium operates, and how to exploit it.
Progress is uneven. We can count on most things getting better incrementally, but some inventions are disruptive, causing discontinuities in society and business. Think ink-jet printing, online auctions, digital cameras. During these disruptions, incumbents are overturned, and outsiders take center stage to become the main event. In many of the examples of past, the disruptive technologies were initially dismissed as marginal toys, too niche, unprofitable, or broken. And they were. But their revolutionary benefits made them worth investing in and improving. Kevin outlines 10 current technologies of disruption now in their infancy on their way to overturn entire industries.
Cheap and smart technologies today permit you to track any metric about yourself: blood pressure, activity level, sleep quality, mood, nutrition, performance, productivity, or genetic profile. Since you are in control of your self-tracking you can preform self-experiments to optimize your health or productivity. Or you can add value to any measurement by sharing it with others who are also tracking similar factors. Personalized tracking enables science to provide you with personalized medicines and treatments. This rapidly accelerating technology is revolutionizing medicine, public health, business workplaces, recreation and self-identity. As one of the co-founders of the movement Kevin provides early insight into this disruptive technology.
If you would like to engage Kevin to speak at your next event, then you simply need to contact us at China Speakers Agency.