Increasing Specialisation

Some more wonderful musings by Kevin Kelly on specialisation and the growth of long-tail niches. These trends do have profound impacts for markets, education and most notably, Government policy; in fact the impact is and will be felt in all walks of life.  I hope to write more about this later.

Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first version of the cell was a general purpose survival machine. Over time evolution honed that one generality into multiple specialties. In the beginning the domain of life was restricted to warm ponds. But most of the planet was far more extreme; volcanoes and glaciers. Evolution devised cells that specialized in living in boiling hot water, or within freezing ice, or special cells that could eat oil, or trap heavy metals, or glow in the dark. Specialization enabled life to colonize these major, but varied, extreme habitats, and also to fill millions of niche environments – such as the insides of other organisms, or on the dimples of dust particles in the air….

All the things we make with our mind, and the creations of artificial minds, will all tend over time to become more niche based. The “long-tail” is not merely a characteristic of media, but of technological evolution itself: the tail of niches gets longer and longer. We can imagine the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. Technology wants specialisation.

Link: Increasing Specialization.