In the previous episode, we discussed that intelligence has no single meaning, Computers can be intelligent as they can solve multiplications and divisions faster than you and me, but when it comes to making sense of world around us, it shits its pants. Whereas humans can do these tasks almost instantly and with little to no conscious thoughts and efforts. But they are catching up by mimicking the most intelligent thing known to us, i.e. And now they are calling this whole artificial neural networks thingy Artificial Intelligence. Artificial as in not natural, we humans are naturally intelligent, machines!

At the end of January 2019, it suddenly dawned on me that my understanding of artificial intelligence was insufficient. It is increasingly impacting our every day. AI defends our inboxes from spam, it powers weather updates from Alexa, it enables Amazon to recommend a purchase or Netflix to suggest a movie. Every time we open Twitter or Facebook, it's human versus an AI that knows us better than we know ourselves. Yet here I was -- a professed technologist with so little awareness of what AI actually is.

You might not have ever heard his name, but Kevin Kelly has been considered by some a modern-day prophet. He is an important influencer who has shaped the world and the way we think, and he has authored some books about the future too. Kevin Kelly is now in his 60s, but during his career, his influence has included being part of The Well. This was an early forum online. He also worked with a co-founder to develop Wired magazine, being one of his most known ambassadors.

You might not have ever heard his name, but Kevin Kelly has been considered by some a modern-day prophet. He is an important influencer who has shaped the world and the way we think, and he has authored some books about the future too. Kevin Kelly is now in his 60s, but during his career, his influence has included being part of The Well. This was an early forum online. He also worked with a co-founder to develop Wired magazine, being one of his most known ambassadors.

Remember "The Clapper?" You're ready to go to bed and, with two claps of your hands, the lights go out. Now imagine waking up and asking your coffeemaker for a cup of espresso. You ask the thermostat to turn up the heat to 75 degrees. You tell your key fob to start your car before you're even out of the door. These are the kinds of things that Kevin Kelly, in his book The Inevitable, predicts will be commonplace by 2046.

At the start of the 20th Century, the majority of Americans were farmers, today that number is less than 2%.We've created new jobs. Most jobs that exist today didn't exist 100 years ago. In fact, in 1910 service jobs and agriculture together accounted for 70% of the US labor market. Today, service jobs account for almost 80% of jobs with industry making up the remaining 20%. In the past 10 years alone, we've seen the advent of new jobs which are now widespread, including app developer, social media manager, cloud computing specialist, data scientist, sustainability manager and YouTube content creator, amongst a plethora of other roles.

Choosing „The Inevitable" as a title for one's book makes a clear statement: I am in a position to declare the future. I don't bother if I am right or wrong. Kevin Kelly has done it before: "Author of What Technology Wants" is displayed proudly on the book's cover. Kelly has a known track record as a technology evangelist. He has been editor famous of the Californian counterculture's catalogue Whole Earth Review, co-sponsor of the first Hackers Conference and executive editor at Wired Magazine. The Inevitable makes a big promise: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Shape Our Future. Cool trick: Every review of the book will surely spend the maximum allowed number of characters just to sum up these twelve forces! As a matter fact, the book has received much attention, but hardly any criticism. Although the book is listed as a "New York Times Bestseller" and is among the Top Ten in Amazon's Business Processes and Infrastructure-section, no solid review is to be found via Google – only interviews with the author, which basically function like advertisement. The impression of a Silicon Valley conspiracy is hard to resist. To be fair: In the opening chapter, where Kelly sets the tone, everything is done to avoid the impression that The Inevitable will just present random guesses at the future. The basic concept is this: There are some technical developments which are inevitable. But within the areas defined by these cornerstones, many options are possible. That sooner or later someone just must have come up with the invention of the telephone is, according to Kelly, inevitable. The i-phone, on the other hand, is not inevitable. The car was inevitable – the SUV is not. One might argue about the specific examples. But that there are some inventions which, in the history of a civilization such as ours, are very likely to happen is per se an appealing thought. A second element of inevitability is process. Once installed, a process will run by itself. If successful, it will be replicated. Kelly's example for this is the scientific method. "This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it." Again: One might argue if something like the scientific method exists and if it does exist, it will really breed products. But as a general approach, looking for processes in order to detect inevitabilities seems promising. Some parts of the book indeed follow this line. In these parts, Kelly shows us how to think about the future in an interesting and inspiring way – without making predictions. "You'll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.

The following excerpt has been selected exclusively for StartupNation readers from "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future" by Kevin Kelly, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. In Chapter 2 of "The Inevitable," titled Cognifying, Kelly discusses the concept of artificial intelligence. In the excerpt below, he introduces the three recent breakthroughs that will make artificial intelligence more prominent in the years to come. Thinking is an inherently parallel process. Billions of neurons in our brain fire simultaneously to create synchronous waves of computation.

In an age of self-driving cars, virtual reality worlds and artificial intelligence, some would say the future is already here. Technology moves at such breakneck speeds that companies in Silicon Valley often have product roadmaps that stretch five to ten years ahead. In the search for the next big thing, we often lose sight of the even bigger picture: of how the actions of today can affect our great-great grandchildren of tomorrow. The Long Now, however, is a foundation that aims to correct that. Created in 1996, the Long Now is a San Francisco-based non-profit organization dedicated to long-term thinking.

Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as the only self-conscious species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular. Our own intelligence is a society of intelligences, and this suite occupies only a small corner of the many types of intelligences and consciousnesses that are possible in the universe. We like to call our human intelligence "general purpose," because compared with other kinds of minds we have met, it can solve more types of problems, but as we build more and more synthetic minds we'll come to realize that human thinking is not general at all. It is only one species of thinking. The kind of thinking done by the emerging AIs today is already somewhat unlike human thinking.