In a few years we’ll have artificial intelligence that can accomplish professional human tasks. There is nothing we can do to stop this. In addition our lives will be totally 100% tracked by ourselves and others. This too is inevitable. Indeed much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends which are already in motion, and are impossible to halt without halting civilization. Some of what is coming may seem scary, like ubiquitous tracking, or robots replacing humans. Others innovations seem more desirable, such as an on-demand economy, and virtual reality in the home. And some that is coming like network crime and anonymous hacking will be society’s new scourges. Yet both the desirable good and the undesirable bad of these emerging technologies all obey the same formation principles.

Kevin Kelly groups these shaping forces into 12 technological imperatives. Each is a long-term process – a direction rather than a destination -- that will continue to bend our culture in the next 30 years. Kelly’s 12 mega trends include “cognifying,” the process of making everything a little bit smarter using AI that you get from the cloud. They include “flowing”, the move from fixed assets like documents or files, to streams, flows, and liquid states that are ever changing. Another is “tracking,” which is becoming the default mode online and offline. Also “interacting,” exemplified by the rapidly improving technologies of virtual and augmented reality, so that we immerse ourselves inside our computers. All 12 of these forces amplify each other, forming an inexorable push that will shape our lives.

These forces are independent of geography or politics; they will occur in any regime, any state, anywhere because they derive their power from the basic physics of digital technology. They are inevitable. The more inevitable a technology, the more widely disruptive it is, the more it provokes attempts to outlaw it. Witness the pushback against Uber. But prohibiting the inevitable always backfires. Kelly argues that we should embrace these emerging technological forces with our eyes wide open, rather than trying to slow them down, or even stop them. A vigilant embrace gives us the maximum leverage to shape the inevitable. If we understand the thrust of these 12 mega trends, and engage them, we will be much better prepared to make the best of them, to harness their benefits and minimize their harms.