Believing in the impossible – Kevin Kelly talk

There’s always something – usually many things – that I find interesting in a talk from Kevin Kelly. In this talk at LinuxCon he is in “thinking big” mode, placing the evolution of technology within the context of human history and the story of the whole planet – his model of the technium, seeing all technology as a network, effectively a super-organism that is evolving and growing rapidly. He explored this idea in his book, What Technology Wants.

On a more personal level I enjoy his reprise of the theme of “the impossible” happening all of the time, all around us. In his “Next 5,000 days of the Internet” 2007 TED talk, he talked to this idea – that things we would have thought impossible ten years ago – he cited Google Earth and Wikipedia – are now normal, almost mundane.

In this talk he implores…

We have to believe in the impossible, because the impossible is happening all the time.

A really useful thing for everyone to remember, in this age of rolling disruptions.

The future will be stranger than you think…

Looking back at predictions that seem to have been far of the mark is diverting entertainment.

Take these French visualisations of what like would be like in the 21st century

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Heath-Robinson flying machines… Sky cops! Crazy! how wrong they were…

Oh wait – here’s the world’s first electric-powered multi-copter flight in Germany…

So ten years from now we’ll be hovering to work surrounded by a small cloud of drones recording the experiencing it, Tweeting it and jamming the electronic recording and snooping devices of others… or something.

Alan Patrick has some more serious observations about the “internet of flying things” etc. over on his blog.