Kevin Kelly on Why Optimism Is a Skill and Questions Beat Answers in the AI Age

Kevin Kelly [00:00:00] Then intelligence. There's grit. There's oftentimes empathy needed. There's, there's other varieties of of iq, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence. There's so many other things, strength, adaptability, that are necessary to make something happen in the world besides iq, besides intelligence. And so among those people who like to think a lot, this is Michael Ring. I'm a cattle and crop farmer from Northern Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:44] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today. I sit down with a technological guru, one of the great minds of our modern age, Kevin Kelly, one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, and the author of many, many books about the future of technology. I had a chance to interview Kevin based on a new book that he's put out about little idioms, little pieces of wisdom that he's captured along the way. And when I first opened up the book, I didn't know what to expect, but as I read through it over two evenings, I found myself wishing it was even longer because he has taken so many of the experiences he's had throughout his life, and he's distilled them into two or three words or sentences. And it is a fantastic read. Kevin is doing a book tour, and I happily signed up to record an interview with him. This is a little out of the norm for me, but the reason I did it was because I have so much respect for Kevin Kelly's work for some of the ideas that he's put out there, and really just an opportunity to talk with an extraordinary human being. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But this weekend I had a chance to interview two people that had worked on their lives. They were intense professionals that had both developed careers while also having children. And one of the things they said to me on the way out the door was, man, the experience itself was just so profound. Even if we didn't get the recording, the opportunity to sit down and reflect on what we've done was great.

Vance Crowe [00:02:21] I loved the interview. They looked over at each other and would talk about what they admired in what the way the other was apparent in a professional things they had noticed what had drawn them together. And it was a really profound experience. But in addition to having the experience, they'll be getting a video recording of that experience so they can pass it on to future generations. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will now get to know the stories where they came from and the lives they led. They are really excited to get it, and I am so proud to be delivering it. If you are interested in having me sitting down with your loved ones, your parents, your grandparents, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, without further ado, let's head to this awesome interview with Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly, welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Kelly [00:03:14] I am privileged and honored to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:03:19] So why is it that you think optimists are the ones that determine the future?

Kevin Kelly [00:03:24] Because we have made our world so complicated and complex, the new things that we're making and headed towards are so complicated that we are not gonna be able to make them inadvertently or accidentally. And it's go, it requires us to imagine them first, to see them and to believe that we can make them and make them happen. And so if we look into the past, all the things that we are surrounded ourselves with today that were complicated and good, there was somebody back then who against all odds, believed that this was possible and would work even though it was improbable and unlikely. And many people probably thought that it couldn't work. Most people probably did or even believe that it was possible. So, so our our present is formed by optimist of the past, and it's gonna be optimists today who are gonna shape our future because they're the ones who are imagining it and believing it's possible.

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] I think you have a pretty unique view of the future. You started Wired magazine. You've written many, many books on technology, what it wants, kind of where the future is headed. Are you an optimist naturally, or do you choose to be an optimist?

Kevin Kelly [00:05:01] I am. I would say I was a have a sunny disposition, but actually I have deliberately chosen to become more optimistic as I get older. I believe optimism is a skill besides a temperament is primarily the kind of optimism I'm talking about, is a is a skill that you can get better at, that we can choose deliberately. In, in, in, in trial psychology, there's something called learned optimism. And they've understood that they can actually teach children to be more optimistic and those that are thrive better. And one of the key defining things have learned optimism in in children is coming, coming to under standard believe that setbacks your only temporary that can be overcome, that they're not your destiny that're not your identity. So instead of saying, well, I'm just unlucky, I'm an unlucky person, or bad things happen to me all the time, or I'm never gonna get out of this, or, or this bad thing is me and my fate. Whereas the optimist learned optimism is no sit backs and disasters and bad things are only temporary and they can be overcome. And so in a certain sense, it, it, it, it, it, it's very parallel to, to my framing of of that is, is that I'm optimistic, not because I think our problems are fewer and easier to solve than we think.

Kevin Kelly [00:06:36] I'm optimistic because I think our capacity to solve problems is greater than we think and increasing faster than our problems. So, so as a, as an optimist, I'm not denying our problems. I'm not in fact the problems of the source of progress. I'm, I'm not denying the, the, the ways in which things break and that the fact that most things will fail and have problems. It's just that we are able to curate a slight bit more than we destroy every year. And if we can create even 1% more than we destroy, that 1% can be compounded over time. And that if you compound 1% over time, you can have great civilization and that can overcome any kind of a setback. So that, that's, that's the power of, you know, of compounding in, in any kind of investment, is that if you take a long view, then even, even large setbacks and disasters can be overcome by that compounding over over time. So part of being optimist is taking a longer view. When you take a longer view of the future and the past, you see progress as real likely to continue then and, and the future. You take a long view of it, even fairly large setbacks can be overcome when you have that kind of compounding advance over time that civilization is,

Vance Crowe [00:08:16] It's funny, as I'm hearing you talk, there's so many of your, the bit bits of wisdom that you have in your new book that you've come out with, and I can now hear it and probably if I were to go back and read other writings. So why don't we talk a little bit about this book that you've put out, the excellent advice for living. What, what made you put this together and how do you describe it to people?

Kevin Kelly [00:08:37] Right, so the book, it's a little book like this, it is actually released today and it has little tiny tweetable encapsulated proverbs or maxims adages. And I wrote them down originally for me. I started to, to write them for me as a way for me to remember these huge books of wisdom reduced down to a sentence so that I could recall them to change my behavior. And I decided to try and write them down for my three kids who are now young adults. And the purpose of that was, you know, we never gave much advice to them, but there were things that I have come to believe I that would've done better if I heard them earlier. So my idea was, okay, well let me write this down so they can at least see it. And there were just all kinds of things that I learned that I regretted not knowing from. One piece of advice is if you have family with kids, it's like create as many rituals as you possibly can. Doesn't matter how small they are. Or we frivolous just having rituals, which I define as anything you do more than three times in a row, is really grounding and anchoring to kids because they really crave consistency and they, it's anticipation of looking forward to them, counting on it this is gonna happen, helps them with their own identity as they grow up.

Kevin Kelly [00:10:12] 'cause they have this consistent expectation and reliance on this little tiny rituals that come, come around and around. And later on in life, they'll become gigantic in their own view of their own childhood, even though they're a little tiny things like, you know, cooking pancakes every Sunday, or you know, the way you might present birthdays a little, the ritual you do at a birthday. Those are all, they seem trivial to us, but they become really, really impactful in the sense of this anchoring, sense of dependency that children really crave as they're growing up. So that's, I didn't do enough of that. I, I wish I'd known that earlier. I wish someone had told me about the importance of those kinds of things. And the same thing about outsourcing things. I was a kind of a hippie, do it yourselfer really believed in the value of making and doing things myself, and took me a long time to realize the tremendous value and leverage that outsourcing as much as possible. The kinda stuff Tim Ferriss talks about, where you are hiring other people to do things and often those people are even better than you and you're, the time equation makes total sense for you to do that. And not only that, but you can accomplish things that you can't do on your own. You can hire a programmer to make a website. Okay, I you don't have to make it yourself. So that was a, that was kinda a new idea for me. I didn't get involved. I was involved in the very early of, of the internet, but I didn't like do any startups.

Kevin Kelly [00:11:43] 'cause I said, I can't program. It never occurred to me that you just hire someone to program. Okay. So because I thought that you have to do it yourself and, and, and that knowledge about the fact that you're the only scarcity that we have today in this world of abundance is our time. And therefore the highest leverage thing you can possibly do is to pay someone else's for their time to take their time for your project. That's like, that's incredibly powerful. They're gonna spend their scarce time on your project and all you have to do is give them money. Oh my gosh, what a bargain. And so this idea of leveraging other people's expertise and willingness to work on something that you're doing, I, I just was really slow and took me, I I just wish someone had kind of took me aside and given me that counsel long ago.

Vance Crowe [00:12:41] One of the things I noticed while reading this book, first of all, when I opened it up, I had no idea. I thought it was gonna be a chapter book. So I was preparing for a a like really sitting down in a long read. But there was something really powerful about these small pieces of distilled wisdom. There seemed to be a really, a level of authenticity and vulnerability in it because really seemed like these were things that were lessons that you would only learn the hard way.

Kevin Kelly [00:13:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I, that was one of the filters of, of doing these and collecting these is is I really wanted to be sure that I stood behind it. That there was, it was like that I truly believed this, I had experienced with this that wasn't just a kind of a cliche that it was like, and, and I really tried. And, and you know, to be fair, a lot of this wisdom is ancient wisdom from the stoics, from Confucius, from the Bible. These are, these are things, a lot of it is not new, but I try to put it into my own words for one thing to make it kind of contemporary. And secondly, if at all possible for me, the best ones were slightly surprising or there was a, an element of unpredictable iness in it. So I was saying it in a kind of me a surprising way. And so I spent most of my time removing words trying to reduce these whole books and stories to one sentence. And most of ice books use stories as a way, and stories are incredibly powerful. They're very, very effective. As Einstein said, we're not really made of atoms, we're made of stories or somebody, something like that. And, and so stories are a great way, but I'm not a very good storyteller. And this caters to my strength, which is I like to write telegraphically and to reduce things to their essence. It's almost like a poetry in that sense.

Kevin Kelly [00:14:40] And so, so this was what only I could do. And that's one of the bits of advice in the book is don't aim to be the best aim to be the only. And so, so, so, so I, so, so this was something I I I'm not good at stories. Many other people can do stories. They'll do books of advice with stories in them. I'm gonna do a book of advice that has telegraphic proverbs in them.

Vance Crowe [00:15:09] Yeah, that's, so when I'm not using the studio for the podcast, what I do is I have people sit down with me and we record their life stories and their wisdom to be able to pass on to future generations. And I found what you were saying with the distillation, like bringing them all the way down to its core elements being really valuable. Because many of them were things that I would be like, oh my gosh, I've felt that before. Or I've even thought it, but I've never distilled it. Right. And I like the act of writing it down seemed to be really valuable.

Kevin Kelly [00:15:41] Yes, exactly Right. And that's what I would try and do is I was start with something that was big and amorphous and it's like, and I would work and rework and go, go around and around saying, can I reduce this even further with a turn of phrase that would encapsulate this in some ways? And, and, and that encapsulation for me was actually practical, useful because I would repeat it to myself to remind myself, these are really reminders is like how I think of it. Most of the great important knowledge in this has been already been said, but nobody was listening. So we have to say it again. And I'm telling myself this in some way to, to be able to remind myself of, of this to, to change my own behavior with this constant reminder. So I can say it in a way, like whatever it might be, like rituals. Okay. Right. You know, it's like, and now I have grandchildren, so telling myself, make as many rituals as possible 'cause it's anchoring. And so these are just ways that I think they also transmit, well, they can be transmitted on social media. They can forward it to someone and it has, can have some impact on them because it's in this kind of bullet form.

Vance Crowe [00:17:03] Yeah. One of the pieces that really stuck out to me was the one on shyness and how you basically say, look, everybody's shy. Everybody is hoping that somebody else will do the work to start the conversation. I thought that was really insightful.

Kevin Kelly [00:17:15] Right. It's also very similar to about asking stupid questions because I'm the guy up front asking the stupid question. I have no, I have no embarrassment about asking the stupid question because I've learned over many, many, many, many years. Everybody else would come up to me and say, thank you for asking that question. 'cause I had that same and I was too embarrassed to ask it. And so, yeah. And there's another bit of advice about when, when, when it's, when it's served, like everybody says along the lines of, there's no need to to say this, you should say it.

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] Oh, goes without saying. Yeah. It

Kevin Kelly [00:17:54] Goes without saying. It's time to say it because, because yeah. You wanna bring it forward. So, so yeah. So shyness. And, and, and another part of that, by the way, being shy is you have to be ready for, you know, a no, which you have to take not, you know, not be offended by a no, but it was also worth doing a follow up. Lots of people are busy and for other reasons. And so trying, again, you also shouldn't be shy about trying again. 'cause that I, you know, and I, speaking from somebody who gets a lot of incoming, and there's this, sometimes when I, I just, it gets lost. I forget. I'm, I'm meaning to respond, but I don't. And that second polite follow up will often, you know, get me to answer. 'cause I, because 'cause I'm busy. And so, so yeah. So, so not only be shy for the first guessing, but don't be shy about a polite second try.

Vance Crowe [00:18:57] Yeah. I feel like that's one of those things that when you're a young person, you're like, oh, they really, they thought about this. They told me no. Or they ignored it. And you just, like, as a young person, if nobody tells you, like you look, you don't have any idea how busy a person can be. And it's very easy for these things to just slip by them. Right. But that's, I, I mean I really did quite enjoy your book. One of the things that struck me was the idea of the creator's mind has to be away from judgment in order to be able to create,

Kevin Kelly [00:19:26] I wish I knew that earlier. That is again, the subtitle. Wisdom I wish I known earlier is, is is valid because, 'cause it just took me so long to to know that 'cause, 'cause that first draft of writing or the first draft of anything I make, it's the real bear. And I used to have too much of the interference from the, the creator, from the editor mind working on things that I was trying to create. Whether you're making something or a piece of art, there's two, there's two functions that you need to make something great. And one of them is, is this kind of unleashed, unhinged, irresponsible generator of ideas and stuff. And then there's this, the editor polisher critic who is saying, well that's not good enough that that's not new, that's not authentic. That's whatever it is there. It's a valid necessary step, but you don't want it too early. You don't want it to be present while you're trying to generate in the beginning or each in each round. And you have to learn to separate those functions in, in that process of creation. And that was, again, no one had ever told me that, but that was something I had to discover. Something that many people who are creative know and some now teach is, is that that separation of those functions.

Kevin Kelly [00:20:57] And so now when I'm writing whatever it is, the, the com, a common prompt or exercise is that you write without stopping. You're right until you can't go and you don't edit anything as you're going forward. And most of it will be thrown away and minutes later by the editor function, you're saying that's terrible, but there is one or two bits that you can save. And the same thing with you're doing art, you're generating lots and lots of stuff. And then, then you follow that phase with the more critical phase of tweaking it, redoing it, eliminating part of it, cutting it, cropping it, all kinds of stuff. And the same with photography or making a wooden bench or furniture. It's the same process. And I'm thinking too, it's also true when you're innovating in an entrepreneur thing, you're, you've got ideas and stuff, and so you want to separate that, that, that, that function of it. And it's very, very powerful if you can.

Vance Crowe [00:22:02] Yeah. I feel like that's true with friends, right? You have friends that may be much better editors than they are creators. And if you put yourself, if you're trying to create and you share your ideas with the person that is, is good at correcting, but maybe not good at thinking that, that that seemed to be, to be an important step in that.

Kevin Kelly [00:22:21] Absolutely. And, and I'm a, I've become a really big believer in writing out loud in that sense of, of, of sharing things early in that process. But they can't be present at the very initial stages. It'll kill it. So, so, so that's what I'm saying. You have friends, but you, you, you want, and this is was the genius of the Skunk works. The skunk works that was originally done by Ma Lockheed, where they would take a, a group to try to make a new product and they would separate them from the rest of the organization. And it was called Skunk Works. It was a little off to the side and they were protected. And that was because in the beginning when you had that genesis, you don't want all the other corporate pressures of the bean counters and accountants and people telling you no. And the salespeople who all have valid criticisms about why this should be this way or that you don't want them present in the beginning, it's too, too delicate. You want to have that, that period where you are unleashing and you're being truly, truly creative and innovative and you want to get enough of that going so that it could withstand and be subject to that inevitable critical process that, that you would have to get something out in it. So you can't, you can't release something without that, but you just want to delay that and separate that from this other function.

Vance Crowe [00:23:51] So you have a very interesting balance between technology and the creation of it. And also art and photography. One of the things that you wrote that I still remember vividly the first time I ever encountered it was a thousand true fans where you discussed like how the creator economy can empower people. Like how did, how did you tell, talk a little bit about the thousand true fans and kind of what happened when you put that out into the world.

Kevin Kelly [00:24:19] Yeah. So, so, so, so just to summarize very briefly, it says that, you know, traditionally creators would, would aim to, to have blockbuster bestseller hits of millions of fans with stuff that, that, you know, publishers and studios and labels would, would put out, they would produce it and the labels would distribute and sell it and market it. And you'd have these really large fan bases. And that was seen as the success you were aiming for. And it occurred to me from the technology that was developing with internet and then social media, that you could have a different definition of success, which is that if you had direct contact with your customers or audience and you got the entire amount that they were paying for the stuff that you produced, then you needed a far, far, far less number of them. And I did kind of, you know, a kind of a back of an envelope approximation saying, well, you know, if you could get a hundred dollars from your truest fans, the fans who were completely nuts about whatever it is, and they would buy the paperback soft cover in the Kindle version, they would buy the box set, they would drive 200 miles to see you play, they would do anything. You're true fans. If you had a thousand of those true fans and paying a hundred dollars a year, then you'd have a hundred thousand dollars a year, which was, you know, kind of a living, not a fortune, but a living.

Kevin Kelly [00:25:53] So that was the idea. And and the, the, the, the, there's a lot of caveats to that. The caveats are of course, like if you're not a single person, if you're a duet or something, you have to multiply by more two times. And if you a hundred dollars, if you only $50, then you need twice as many. But the order of magnitude was correct, which was saying you don't need a million of these, you need thousands of them. And the other caveat though is that tending to the fans is a almost a full-time job itself. It's a lot of work. And not only that, not everybody may be suited for it. And not only that, there are some artists who just don't wanna deal with it for a number of reasons. They just want to create. And so you have managers and whatnot. And so, so you, you, you, first of all, it may not be for everybody. And secondly, you might want to have more people involved. So you have slightly higher numbers, but again, it's not at the level of millions. And thirdly, it, it's a great place to start, even if you do eventually not want to manage. I mean, you have a runaway success. It's a good place to start. And then the final summary of this, of this idea is that there are several billion, there are billions and billions of people in the world now connected to the internet.

Kevin Kelly [00:27:30] And if your passion appeals to only one in a million people, some weird thing you're into making left-handed fishing gear or left-handed, you know, golf gloves, whatever, whatever strange little thing, salt water, aquarium jellyfish that you're raising, if there's something that appeals to only one in a million people, because there are billions of now people connected, you can still have find a thousand of people like you, there's still a thousand in one in a million around the world. The the, the challenge becomes matching those, those people finding you, you finding them. And that technology is in its infancy. We don't really have a super great technology for that. We have technologies now that since I wrote it, like Kickstarter and Patreon that help facilitate those kind of what we now call crowdfunding, which was an idea that came after 10,000, 1,002 fans. And we have those technology that can service those people once you found them and once you have made them your audience. But we don't yet have the really good usable technology that helps us make that matching to find those one in a million thousand true fans anywhere in the world. And that is what I'm hoping for the future that we'll see so that anybody who has this really one in a million weird idea will be able to match up with those other thousand people in the world.

Kevin Kelly [00:29:12] We share that, oh,

Vance Crowe [00:29:12] That's actually a really interesting observation. You know, it's something that we face all the time, right? How do I, how do I get this job that I have to the right person? How do I, how do the people find my service? But like, you think of this as just a foregone conclusion. It must always be this way. But certainly technology could help pair people up with the things that they want.

Kevin Kelly [00:29:32] Absolutely. Absolutely. And so it'll probably be some level of AI and being aware and, and all kinds of other things. And, and, and you know, there'll, there'll be problems with it and people who try to spam it and all these other things, but it, it is, it is a technology that we can invent technologies that we can invent that do that matching. And, and by the way, this is needed not just for the thousand true fan creator, but many, many large organizations with, you know, like say, you know, say like a 3M with, with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of employees. They have the same problem. Meaning that there are people in their organization that they know have certain abilities, expertise, but they aren't able to actually connect them with the people in other parts of the organization that need them. They're not even, it's, it's the, the, the, the, the complexity and the combinatorial explosion of possibilities is so large that even within these very large organizations, they're not able to do that matching. So this, so this technology is, will be useful not just for the creator, a thousand true fans, but also within all kinds of other applications, including within organizations.

Vance Crowe [00:30:51] So you used the magic words of the, of the day, artificial intelligence. This is something that's a big thing. Now you're in the unique position in that you kind of envisioned this long before most people could even fathom that, that you could have this. 'cause you wrote a book called What Does Technology Want? And prior to that, people would say, what do, what does that even mean? But if you've used GPT chat for even just a few moments, you start to get this sense like

Kevin Kelly [00:31:18] It what

Vance Crowe [00:31:19] It, it it is reacting like it wants something, right?

Kevin Kelly [00:31:21] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:31:22] So talk a little bit about like how did you conclude that technology wants something at all, and then how does this work in a, in a world where people can now start to see the vision you saw years ago?

Kevin Kelly [00:31:32] Yeah, so, so the, so I-U-I-I-I use want in, in a very deliberate way. It's not a conscious want. It's closer to what we might say a, a leaning a tendency is. So what I'm saying is, is that in the same way that we might say that a plant wants light will tend to grow towards the light. It's not a conscious, deliberate sentient wanting. It's more of a tendency to need it and grow in that direction. And so I'm saying that technology is a system, not just individual pieces of technology, like a hammer, a saw car, computer, refrigerator. I'm saying that all those things are codependent on each other. You can't really make a saw today without using a computer. You need something to cut to make the computer, you need a computer to make the saw. These are all co-dependencies. And that codependent complex ecosystem of all the technologies that we make and depend on each other is a system. I call that system the technium. This system, like every system in the universe has its own biases, tendencies that it, that it, that it kind of recurring, they call 'em stranger attractors things that it kind of tends to want to do because it's a system that's what systems do is they have systematic tendencies.

Kevin Kelly [00:33:11] And so I'm asking what are the tendencies of the system of technology? And those tendencies are independent of our own, the our own agenda, our own desires. The thing wants to do certain things because it's capable of that and not capable of other things. And so the, so the larger question is saying, we've built this technium that's full of all this technologies, what does it kind of want to do? We should know that because it's going to want to tend to move in this trend, this direction, whether we want or not, just because it's this large system. But even though it has those tendencies, there are so many other aspects of it that is, that are under our control that do, that do respond to our choice. So I would say in a certain sense that once the planet Terry civilization invents or discovers electricity and they make, make sound speakers that they're gonna have telephones. Okay? So any plant has electricity, telephones will become inevitable. Some telephones at some capacity. The, the iPhone is not inevitable, but telephones are, you know, chat GBT may not be inevitable, but AI is in some form. And so the, the general form of these things at the high level are inevitable. But the character of the ai, who owns it, who governs it, what's it regulated was, is it open sourced or closed?

Kevin Kelly [00:34:49] Is it commercial or nonprofit? Those are choices that we have to make and they make huge difference on us. So the a so we'll have ai, but the character of the AI and how it's governed, how it's regulated, how it's developed is something that's totally under our choice. And we can decide collectively one way or the other. And so while we have no choice that AI is coming, we have a lot of choice about the character of AI and how we use it. So I think that's what I mean by the technology wanting certain things

Vance Crowe [00:35:27] In that regard. If you think about different civilizations or different cultures right now all working on AI for their own ends, to me it seems like we are in a nuclear arms race, that, that there'd be no way to stop at this point because even if you decided in the United States we're gonna regulate it, then people in China or Russia or somewhere else would all have that. So to me, like it's hard to imagine that we could come to some consensus about what we are going to do about this because somewhere someone is going to allow it to run wild and free.

Kevin Kelly [00:36:01] Right? So that is true, but there are, there are uses that we, I mean we have collectively as a species currently right now, we have decided on certain things that we're not going to do. Like we're not gonna use chemical for warfare weapons. So, so, so there are things that we can agree on and, and, and without them they would be an arms raise, right? And so, so we, we are capable of overcoming arms raises. We have, we have, believe it or not, we have some weird agreements about nuclear weapons. So it's not, it's not totally outta control. So, so we can, we can collectively agree on things to prevent arms races. The question is, is those are probably fairly restrictive. So, you know, there's, there's plenty of, of weapons still being made. I mean if we were really sane as a civilization, we would out, well all weapons of war, we would eliminate war completely. But we're not up to that point yet. So, so I think in terms of ai, I expect that there will be some, some kind of regulations. And I hope actually that we regulate the, the weaponization of it. I think there are some kinds of AI weapons that we probably will have and maybe should have as an, as an interim period.

Kevin Kelly [00:37:33] And there's other kinds that I hope, you know, that we don't, that we don't allow, that we kind of agree that we're gonna outlaw. And that's one of the questions that we have right now that we haven't agreed on. And one of the places I do worry about is like cyber conflict, cyber war, we have no agreement on what we allow in cyber conflict. It's like, is it okay to take down someone else's hospital system? Cyber, cyber war? Can, can, can you, what about interfering with the, the, the water system or the power system? Is that, is that permissible on this planet? Okay. And we don't have those kinds of, of agreements right now and we don't have agreements about like, you know, to what extent would we allow AI to be weaponized Beyonce, even kind of like robo soldiers. And so I think it's the larger point is that we do have choices in this. So even though these things are inevitable at the higher level, we have a choice about those kinds of things.

Vance Crowe [00:38:39] So you've put your ideas, so many of your ideas into writing that you, I can now go to, in fact I did before this interview and go to chat GPT and and talk with it about you. Right? Right. And you've taken and distilled your wisdom and and put it in there. Right.

Kevin Kelly [00:38:55] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:38:56] What do you think the distant future looks like when we think about like being able to go to a chat bot and be able to have discussions with you maybe after you're gone?

Kevin Kelly [00:39:07] Yeah, yeah. I would welcome that. I, I I I think, you know, the future of, of, of, of, of the chat is, is a really interesting question. So by, by my, my own version of the story of where we are right now is the, the current AI that we are experiencing. The capabilities have been present for a while, for some years. The capability of kind of like generate answers to generate images, what's new, what we're all kind of excited and flipping out about is the fact that we now have a conversational user interface. That we now have this conversational user interface that we can converse with it and that we can make a image by having a conversation about what the images that we want. We can have a, a synthesis, a summary by having a conversation and that conversational user interface is gonna migrate to almost everything else. And that was, feels very similar to me, to the excitement that we had back in the early nineties when the graphical user interface came along to the internet. So there was the internet which was running for, for decades, nobody was really interested in it. It was teenage boys and bulletin boards and that kind of stuff. You had to use command line code to, to enter it. And then the moment the graphical user interface called the web came pow, it just exploded. It was just, we're off to the races, everybody was joining.

Kevin Kelly [00:40:38] It was just fabulous. So that graphical user interface made all the difference to the internet. And now we have this conversational user interface, which is gonna make all the difference to ai. And the question is like, well how far can that go? And so the ais right now will also just as the conversational interface gets better, so will the ais over time. And the, the question is, and and, and, and there are some issues with them right now. The, the reliability of them, they tend to hallucinate to make up stuff. So we are going to have to figure out how to distinguish it sometimes when they hallucinate is what we want them to do to imagine things that we can't. And other times we want them to be very truthful and and reliable. And so we are going to have devise tools to deliver what it is that we want. We're gonna have to tell them, no, no, no, look, tell me, just give me the, the correct answer, the truthful stand. Other times you'll say you'll make up something crazy, you know, Ima imagine some other version of of the world that doesn't exist. And so, so we can, we'll be able to do that and, and it will become more, more reliable. And

Vance Crowe [00:41:55] I think for somebody that hasn't used GPT chat, it's kind of hard to imagine what you're saying, but you can go to it and, and ask it some problem or give me some thing that happened in history. And unless it's really specific, it may make up an answer. Yeah. It's not going to tell you I don't know the answer, it's just going to create an answer. Right. And and so sometimes if you rely on those answers, you'll, you're like, I had it doing some math the other day. Yeah. Is I looked

Kevin Kelly [00:42:20] At the number. Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:42:21] It's horrible. It's really

Kevin Kelly [00:42:22] Bad at math

Vance Crowe [00:42:23] Way, way over a hundred percent. It was adding up numbers and Yeah,

Kevin Kelly [00:42:26] Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's famously really bad at math, but it could be better. We hook up to wolf from engines and it'll do math. Great. So what it's really good at, by the way, there, there's several things that is really good at the current version right now, which is synthesis is really good at those in between things of taking two dispersed spreadsheets, merging a spreadsheet and just figuring out what they, what the commonalities are. Taking two different lumps of knowledge like chemistry and archeology and you combining to something in between or taking two different painters, you know, Picasso and, and you know, Keith Herring and say, making something in between, synthesize the two of them. It's really, really good at that. That is something that humans can do. But we require so much time and effort to do it that for doing it for frivolous reasons, it just doesn't happen. But here it costs nothing, so to speak, to do it. And Theis will do it repeatedly and they're really good at doing that. The question is like, well where does that go, you know, down the line in, in, in a hundred years when they become really good at answering questions that we can rely on. So the way I've said it before is that answers become cheap, become free. And, and you know, when I was growing up, school was all about learning how to get correct answers. That they were the valuable thing. Getting an answer was like, what you did as a human and you provided really good answers.

Kevin Kelly [00:43:58] Well now answers are cheap. And I think what becomes valuable or questions, having a good question, being able to, to, to, to create something that is being driven by the kind of questions that you're asking to ask a good question that can keep on rolling up new questions and new answers. And, and that's what they're not very good at right now. What they have been trained on, they, the models, whether they're visual or musical or textual, they're trained on all of humans, the best and the worst. And they tend to produce the average thing. They're autocomplete, meaning that they're going to give what they expect the normal, average human would produce, even including that synthesis. They're producing something that is taken from what's known. And so they have trouble producing things that are completely outside the human experience. Somebody was telling me the other day that they could not get the image generators to make, to put an hourglass on its side. It was just like, did not compute. It just was beyond any experience. And so for the time being, as long as they've been trained on this stuff that we've made, they're gonna have difficulty in really producing something genuinely new. They do what I call lower c creativity. Things are kind of like creative in the sense of what you expect the average human to create.

Kevin Kelly [00:45:31] What they can't create is what the genius humans can create, where they're really kind of going outside of anything that we've experienced before. They're not good at that. And that becomes much more of our assignment. What we are going to be doing is trying to go beyond to imagine things that humans have not imagined before. And therefore the theis aren't gonna imagine 'em 'cause they're just trained on what we have already done.

Vance Crowe [00:46:03] Well, as you think about that, you know, let's just imagine they're at the average human. I mean, like, if we look at the median of the distribution, that means half of all people won't be able to keep up cognitively with ai. And that that would be probably very generous, right? It would be quickly, the AI will get above a 100, right? Right.

Kevin Kelly [00:46:21] So, and, and so we overestimate the value of intelligence. We over

Vance Crowe [00:46:27] Tell me more.

Kevin Kelly [00:46:27] Well, well like, you know, let's take, we'll take a human and a line and put them in the cage. Who, who wins the smartest one? There is a, there's, there's, I call think there's a fallacy among people who like to think that the answer to everything is more intelligence. The, the more intelligence succeeds. But, but we know from our own personal experience, it's not the smartest person that necessarily is the most successful. It's not the, it's not the company with all the smartest people that actually will prevail. There's so much more in achieving things than intelligence. There's grit, there's oftentimes empathy needed. There's, there's other varieties of of iq, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence. There's so many other things, strength, adaptability that are necessary to make something happen in the world besides iq, besides intelligence. And so among those people who like to think a lot, they believe that IQ will trump everything. And, and, and that's just not the how the real world works. And so, so even though are, even though maybe the IQ of the average AI will be higher than the average human, it doesn't mean that there isn't a role for those humans in the world.

Kevin Kelly [00:48:10] That means that they're not gonna be giving answers. They could be that they could be asking questions, it could be that they are doing the other things that we crave as humans. The small talk, the, the, the contact, the hospitality, the, the genuine authentic experience of of, of being somewhere. So, so, so I I I just think there's an overemphasis on intelligence from people who like to think,

Vance Crowe [00:48:44] Well, if that's the case and you've been thinking about your children and grandchildren, what do you think of education in a world where answers aren't as valuable?

Kevin Kelly [00:48:53] So, so, so several things. One is learning the skill of asking questions will become paramount. And secondly, I think really the only skill I think you should graduate from school with high school say, is the ability to learn how to learn learning. Because everybody, digital natives or whatever are gonna be learning the rest of their lives. They're gonna be newbies the rest of their lives, learning new things. All the digital natives who have been rubbing their hands saying, I'm a digital native, I grew up with this. Yeah, but you didn't, you're not a digital native anymore. You've got the AI coming and they're gonna have whole new skill sets that you're gonna have to learn. So you're a newbie just like the rest of us. And so that is a big bar, learning how to learn. And, and, and, and I mean, I mean, down to the personal level is like how I learn as an individual, how I optimize my own learning, which I'm now 71 and I don't even know to this day exactly the most optimal way for me to learn, say a new language or a new subject area. Like how much repetition do I need? How much sleep do I need between intervals? How much rest do, and you know, how much am I more audible versus visual, you know, versus kinetic. Like, like I would like to know that I wish that I would graduate with the help of all the teachers and testing and stuff so that I was fully aware and could, could, could improve my ability to learn in all different kind of contexts.

Kevin Kelly [00:50:27] And I would say, oh, oh, here's the language. Here's what I, here's here's what I need to do to, to optimize my learning about this. 'cause I've, 'cause I've already been trained to learn how to learn. And I think that's the major skill that we should be teaching in school. And actually I've, I've met a couple of different experimental elementary schools that we're doing that and they were claiming two x to 10 X increases in learning of, of the, of the material because they were teaching the kids how to learn.

Vance Crowe [00:50:57] So this book that you just put out, it's really different than the highly technical, I mean, you make it approachable, but the technical idea is the futuristic thinking. Do you imagine that you'll return to writing futuristic books about, you know, the the envisioning the future? Or is this a change in your demeanor and what you care about?

Kevin Kelly [00:51:21] I I will go back. I'm not sure I go back to books. I think we're at peak book right now. My children, three young adults, they're not reading books. Their friends are not reading books. They're watching YouTube, which is where I spend most of my time, my discretionary time. They're watching videos. So, so, so we've mo we've become, we've moved from being people of the books to being people of the screen. And, and, and this information is also on the screen and that's sort of where it's really native and really where it's best. But this is a very, very handy little way to gift it. And so, so the thing I'm doing next is probably not gonna be a book native. It may turn into a book, it's something, but it's probably be much more screen oriented to begin with. And I don't know what exactly that is. And that project that I'm working on is the a hundred year desirable future. I call it protopia. It's, it's, it's, it's a's future in a hundred years full of all this high technology, the ai, the genetic engineering, the monitoring, the, all this stuff that we're making. And it's a world that I wanna live in. It's, it's a, it's, it's a world that, that, that other people wanna live in. Say, oh yeah, I wanna live in that world. It's very, very hard to imagine. It's kind of like a highly improbable world and therefore hard, hard to imagine. But that's what I'm trying to do is, is is to imagine it so that as more of a chance of it actually happening, this is the root of optimism is to, is to, is to describe and imagine something and then to believe that we could make it.

Kevin Kelly [00:53:00] So it's not a prediction in that sense. I'm not predicting it, I'm just trying to imagine it as a possible goal to work towards.

Vance Crowe [00:53:09] What have you done to be able to keep your imagination so flexible and pliable? Yeah. And, and open

Kevin Kelly [00:53:17] It. It is a skill that you can get better at. And I think there's a bunch of different exercises, but we're going back to the, again, to the kind of divorcing the, the creative mind from the editors is, is you have to allow yourself to have a lot of stupid ideas. You have to, you have to be, you have to be willing to say something stupid. And, and, and, and, and Brian Eno and I who work on these sometimes together, we talked about an unthinkable future. So one of the tricks is to, to to to to, to start with things that seem unthinkable and then to kind of work back from that to, to things that are more plausible. But it's, it's kind of like using AI in a certain sense to put you somewhere that you could not expect it to be and then kind of work back to something that's more reasonable. So there's, there, there, there are, there are exercises that, that brainstorming sessions and scenario sessions we can use to help liberate it. But the main thing that you have to overcome is to forget what the future should be or is expected to be to, to, to forget what everybody knows, to forget all the expectations. And that is so, so hard because these things are kind of unconscious and they're kind of built into us. And so we, we always kind of expect the future to be reasonable, but we can tell from today, it's not, it's not at all reasonable, right? Who, you know, who could have guessed.

Kevin Kelly [00:54:50] And so, so you have to kind of get in a state where you allow yourself to be kind of unreasonable and to imagine those things, most of which will be totally wrong, most of which will be totally useless. But you need to have those to generate the few that will be useful. And so it's that kind of playfulness that, that you need to cultivate the kind of childlike innocence of like where, where you're kind of beginner's mind and you're kind maybe going back to first principles and working from there, which is really, really useful for any kind of business and any kind of entrepreneur of, of kind of forgetting what everybody knows. That's, it's the one, the imagination is the one thing in life where you really pays to forget what everybody else knows. Most of the time, by the way, what everybody knows is usually true. That's wanna emphasize that whatever most of what everybody knows is true. So there are, but there are times we wanna forget that. And that's when you're working with the imagination.

Vance Crowe [00:56:01] Well, Kevin, to, to finish this out, one of the questions I asked during my Legacy Interviews, and I think you're in a good position to answer this, is as you look back on your life, what was one of the most difficult lessons to learn that was the most valuable to know?

Kevin Kelly [00:56:16] Yeah, that's a really good one. It took me a long time to arrive at this little bit of advice in the book, which is don't aim to be the best aim, to be the only. And that came through my experience at Wired where I was trying to pitch stories to writers and nobody thought were valuable. And I kept trying and trying and eventually I realized that those were the ones that I had to write because nobody else would do 'em. And they turned out to be my best ones. And so the idea of trying to give away my ideas all the time in the hope that somebody else would steal 'em and do them, because I only wanna work on the things that only I can do. And when you're doing that, when you're working on something that only you can do, it's really wonderful because you don't have any competitors at that point. That was wired, wired in the beginning was so wired, was very, very difficult to sell. It seems inevitable now. It seems easy, but it was like impossible at the time. It was very improbable. There was no consumer lifestyle magazine for technical technology people. It was not a lifestyle. It was not, it was like, it was for nerds. It was for teenage boys. And so when we started, there was no competition for a whole decade or, or almost two. And we were the only in that sense. And so aiming to be the only, and trying to move in that direction of not trying to be the best into the category because the categories are occupied and it's very, very difficult.

Kevin Kelly [00:57:51] And there's a limited number of successes and it's someone else's definition of success. What you wanna do is you wanna move and work in the area where there is no name for what it is that you do, and you're trying to become the only in something. And that's a long high bar that will take most of your life and you'll never arrive there. You can only move in that direction. But that I wish I'd known earlier was to kind of define success for myself. And that definition would be in trying to do something that no one else is doing. And for me right now, that is my optimism, technological optimism. It's, it's not, it's not the norm right now. It's not the, it's not the occupied niche. And so I I, I'm fully aware of the problems and I think, I think the, the pessimists are needed and the pessimism are needed, but many other people are doing that job. So it's, it's a necessary job, but other people are doing it. And so I leave it to them to do that. My job is to imagine a future that we wanna live in.

Vance Crowe [00:59:01] Well, if people wanted to read your extraordinary book, where would they, where would they go and what would they be looking for? Right,

Kevin Kelly [00:59:08] So as of today, May 2nd Amazon is selling, delivering this book on Amazon. They have a discounted as usual, it's by Penguin, Viking, Viking Penguin. And they're audible and Kindle versions. So go there. And I think it makes a great gift, even if you are fully wise yourself, there may be a young person in your life who could use this.

Vance Crowe [00:59:37] Oh, without question. And I am a person that hears a lot of advice. This was an extraordinary book. I would highly recommend it. I'm going to be getting one to sit down on our coffee table because I think it's one of those things you could pick up and, and play that it felt like Benjamin Franklin writing. And I, I mean that in the highest way that I can. I

Kevin Kelly [00:59:54] Love that. Benjamin Fra modern Benjamin Franklin's a Poor Richard Alman neck. Okay, I'll take that. Thank you.