"The most important and most influential innovation 25 years from now has probably not even been invented yet."
Kevin Kelly, the internationally known futurist, views the future from this vantage point in "2049: The World AI Will Make in 25 Years." Forecasting how artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies will reshape human life, industry and society, he treats the future not as a settled answer but as something that can be imagined and designed.
The 2049 Kelly sketches is a high-tech society driven by human creativity alongside advanced technologies including AI, genetic engineering and data collection. He calls it "the world I myself want to live in." Rather than dwelling on fears that technology will replace humans, he focuses on its potential to extend human capabilities.
He also draws a line against the idea that AI will think the way humans do. Kelly calls the AI of the future "Artificial Aliens." The term conveys that AI will think and solve problems, but will arrive at answers in ways entirely unlike humans. Just as fixed-wing aircraft were built without imitating the flapping of a bird's wings, AI can implement intelligence by means different from the human mind, he explains.
Kelly also addresses the personal data problem that comes with technological progress. "Transparency and privacy are two rabbits that can never be caught at the same time," he says. Enjoying finely tailored services requires handing over more personal information. Choosing between convenience and the protection of private life becomes a central question of the AI era. Within companies, he expects middle management to face the greatest change, because AI can take over much of the work of relaying instructions from the top of an organization and compiling statistics and data from front-line operations. Education, he predicts, will shift toward students designing their own pace of study and rest, while medicine will move toward mining clinical data even from failed drug candidates to identify treatments that work for a particular patient.
Relations between the United States and China could also take a new form as technology advances, he expects. The U.S. would handle free-wheeling innovation and China orderly execution and large-scale commercialization, making possible a "U.S.-China combination" in which talent and ideas move back and forth. Notably, he views competition over technological supremacy not as a simple win or loss but as interaction. He also offers the forecast that in an age of extreme technological advance, not using technology could paradoxically become a mark of wealth — as human time and attention grow scarce, securing the time and attention of others will become true wealth.
Rather than predicting exactly how humanity will live in the future, the author poses a question: what kind of future should we build? If innovations remain uninvented, the future is not fixed. What the AI era calls for is neither vague optimism nor fear, but imagining and preparing for the changes to come. This is a book that does not stop at watching technology advance, but asks in earnest what choices we will make amid that change. 20,000 won.
