Kevin Kelly: Raising the Bar – Excellent Advice, AI’s for Better Living

Mark Bidwell 0:38

Hi, this is Mark, welcome back, or welcome to the OutsideVoices podcast. This week, we have another new guest, hot on the heels of Steven Kotler from last week, we have Kevin Kelly. Now, Kevin Kelly first appeared on the show several years ago, right at the beginning of launching this podcast to talk about his best selling book, The Inevitable, which was a review of the key tech trends that were shaping our lives. And reviewing the podcast in preparation for this conversation, I was struck by how prescient a number of his predictions turned out to be, in particular around artificial intelligence, which we talk about in this episode. His latest book is called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. And this is a curated selection of aphorisms, which really guide how Kevin lives his life, and which he was encouraged by his family to put together for a birthday several years ago. And he’s continued to add to that. Now, it’s a mixture of very practical, as well as quite counterintuitive advice for parents, for children, for grandparents, and I found it fascinating. There were echoes of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, the importance of thinking long term, of deferred gratification, of compounding, but there’s also some quite sort of different ways of looking at the world, drawing from the work from I think, James P. Carse, of Finite and Infinite games, which really guides Kevin and how he approaches things. So fascinating conversation with Kevin, as ever, he really is a very interesting guy. He’s done a huge amount of travel and enjoyed the conversation about how he actually travels, how he thinks about traveling, why he sees traveling is such an important activity for the youth to pursue. And towards the end, we talked about what his current projects are and his future projects are. And he’s embarking on a 100-year project, and he reminded me of a conversation I had with someone who was in conversation with Charlie Munger the other day, saying that Charlie Munger had just taken out a 30-year mortgage on a property at the age of 99. Kevin is 28 years younger than Charlie Munger, but he’s still enormously optimistic, enormously positive about the future, and just a fascinating guy to listen to, to read about, and whose books I highly recommend, in particular this latest one, as I say, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I wish I’d Known Earlier. Here is Kevin Kelly.

Mark Bidwell 3:13
We last spoke probably five years ago, we were talking about your wonderful book, The Inevitable and now you’ve got a new book out, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. So just curious about what led up to writing this book. And it’s very different from anything you’ve done before, I think, isn’t it?

Kevin Kelly 3:30
It is, that is true. It’s also much shorter than anything I’ve written before. So I began kind of writing notes to myself about these little aphorisms, little proverbs, because I found that they were useful to me to help me recall advice that I’d either heard from somewhere else, or kind of concluded on my own, and the having these in the little capsule, I found really, really easy to try to change my behavior. And, you know, an example of one of the bits of advice in the book was like, if I were to lose track of something in my house, I know I have it, but I don’t know where it is, and so when I found it, and I finally found it, it was repeating to myself, don’t put it back where I found it, put it back where I first looked for it. So that was kind of like a useful thing. I would repeat myself, Okay, I’m gonna put it back, put it back where I first looked for it. Or if there’s someone, there’s a contentious issue with two sides to it, and I would always say to myself, what’s the third side that kind of breaks the logjam of this dilemma, of this controversy? What’s the third side? And so these kinds of things, I would just kind of accumulate and then some of them, it took me until 10 years ago, to 60s, to realize these things, and I thought I really wished I’d known these earlier and I thought about writing them down to try and gift them to my children. We were not a family that, I didn’t do much preaching or even advising our kids. Our philosophy was that they learned by watching us, that they don’t listen to what we say, they watch what we do. So we were kind ofleading by example, rather than by preaching, but I felt that these little bits were important and would be useful, rather than a sermon. And so I wrote them down initially to give them to my kids, and they shared them with my family. People were very enthusiastic, they kind of went viral, and I decided that it would be really cool to put them into a little tiny book that you could hand to a young person or someone young at heart.

Mark Bidwell 5:36
And I think in the intro, you refer to it as channeling the wisdom of the ages. And as I read through it, I mean, I recognized some of, not the writings, but some of the sentiments of people like Warren Buffett talking about compounding, long-term thinking in a scorecard incentives. And then you know, people like Jim Rohn, talking about habits, and even David Allen talking about time management. But I guess, as you said, you come from multiple sources, is there any particular source that is over-represented or particularly represented here, beyond your own wisdom?

Kevin Kelly 6:12
Well, I am sure that my own Christianity leaks out here, from the golden rule and beyond. I call myself a Christian, and I think that that perspective is even more than Buddhism, it infuses this perpetual kindness and compassion, which is at the heart of a legitimate version of Christianity. And I think the idea of treating people as you want to be treated yourself, those golden rules, that is the root of all these; other ones of being patient, of trying to put yourself in other people’s views. I would say that by and large, for better or worse, this is infused with a Christian perspective, or there shouldn’t be much that contradicts it that I’m aware of.

Mark Bidwell 7:06
Okay. I mean, just thinking about how to start this conversation, or how to get into the content. I was just reflecting, I think it’s about 50 years ago you started traveling and you culminated in this wonderful book. I mean, I say it’s wonderful, when I go to America this summer, I’m gonna pick it up when I get there because it’s too heavy.

Kevin Kelly 7:29
Not a good idea, you have no idea. This is like, oh, my gosh, I’m touched, but I’m just letting you know that it is a monster.

Mark Bidwell 7:39
I should get it shipped to Switzerland, shouldn’t I?

Kevin Kelly 7:40
Yes, you should. You absolutely should. But it’s very expensive to ship because I had to do that. But you’re referring to my Vanishing Asia book, which is a 30-pound monster, three volumes, 9000 images, 1000 pages of my 50 years traveling in remote parts of Asia, documenting the ceremonies, festivals, the lifestyle, the designs that are disappearing. And it was a work of insanity, passion, compulsion, art. It actually touches on another one of the bits of advice, I have my book that I think is pretty core, which is, don’t aim to be the best, aim to be the only,

Mark Bidwell 8:26
And can we hold that thought, because I was getting to it. I’m a traveler as well, and there were a number of very interesting travel quotes. So maybe, if I just play a couple back to you, and then maybe you can comment on your overall philosophy: a vacation and a disaster equals an adventure. The major part of travel is to learn to leave stuff behind, the more you leave behind, the further you will advance. Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. And then you travel to passions rather than destinations. And the final one is, go to the most remote place first and then go back. There was a lot in there, and given that’s where you started your career, I’m just wondering, how would you comment on your view of travel and why it found a place in your book?

Kevin Kelly 9:21
Yeah, fair enough. There are, to my perspective, three categories or three main reasons to travel: one is restitution, refreshing, rejuvenation, that’s the inclination to go to spas and resorts where you can relax and and I’m a huge proponent of goofing off and sabbaticals and vacations and then stopping, I think it’s really essential. And that’s another bit of advice, is that to optimize your productivity, you have to have a good rest ethic. And so that’s one thing that travel can do, it can be a relief and a resort and pampering. That’s not my preferred style, but can be part of it. The other one is adventure: you’re going to test yourself to climb a mountain or ski down the steep slope, or go into the jungle or Safari, those kinds of things. And then there’s a third one, which is about encountering the other and learning, and that’s where I tend to go. So I tend to arrange things to maximize and optimize differences, learning, encountering a new, changing my mind, being innovative, and confronting all that kind of stuff. So my advice is a little bit more skewed to the kind of travel where the agenda is that kind of growth. I think that aspect of travel is so powerful, particularly for young people, that we should, as a nation and other nations to subsidize it. It’s so transformative when you’re young, that it’s almost to me essential to grow, and particularly in this coming planetary culture, planetary thing that we’re making, just to give you some idea of the scale, diversity that’s available and to change your mind. And I think it’s much harder to start wars if you’ve been to a place and visited and hung out with people. So anyway, I think travel is essential for growth, if at all possible, and there are plenty of people on the planet who are struggling just to survive and don’t have that privilege. So I would say, if you have that privilege, if at all, take advantage of that.

Mark Bidwell 11:44
Yeah, because I mean, in Europe, and also in Australia, and New Zealand, there is almost like a rite of passage, which is the gap year, and I don’t know whether it’s not such a thing in America, and I think there isn’t.

Kevin Kelly 11:54
There absolutely isn’t. And by the way, if there had been when I was growing up, I probably would have stayed in college. But I had to make my, there was no such thing as a gap year, there was no such thing as internship, there was nothing, it was just grade 13, 14, and I was like, I can’t take that. So yes, and we have Peace Corps and stuff. And that’s a great option, that people should take more advantage of, I believe we should have mandatory national service for everybody. I literally mean everybody, whether you’re handicapped or not, you can still contribute. And so a mandatory national service that would include options of going abroad, like Peace Corps and other things like that, and or military if you want it. I know the Mormons have basically a mandatory two-year missionary thing for all the males, and then that has transformed them. They’re incredibly prosperous, I believe in part because of those two years that they spent in another country trying to sell something, but still they were encountering a different way of looking at the world.

Mark Bidwell 12:58
Yeah, yeah. And before we get back to the book, I’m curious, you spent a number of years in Asia. If you were starting out again, not doing a similar trip, but on that sort of void, where would you be going if the lens was to document a vanishing world? Which part of the world would you set out to visit in 2023?

Kevin Kelly 13:21
Okay, I have been documenting these disappearing things until just the book was published. So there are pockets of the world where there are these extent, undeveloped areas of the world. And I spent an awful lot of time seeking them out and trying to get to them. And so, if you were to go out today and wanted to see these things that remained, I would go to places like Oman. Oman is the Arabia that hasn’t been completely paved over. Saudi Arabia itself, it’s very, very, very, because the money, is just very, very developed and altered and there’s not much traditional culture, but Oman does have an incredible Arabian culture still very intact. Myanmar, we called it Burma, is one of the least developed countries that has a very rich tradition, they’re still going, and particularly the countryside. Bali in a weird way, despite the fact that it’s a tourist attraction, they are doing things for themselves, ceremonies and stuff and it’s the one of the places in the world where tourism has actually helped them deepen and finance their own obsession with their rituals and ceremonies. Let’s see, Mongolia, among all the countries of the world, they decided to endorse their nomads rather than try to remove them from their nomadism, and that’s really interesting. So there’s a million nomads in Mongolia that are modernized, and they live in the yurts, and basically, they’re mobile ranchers. They ranch with two ranches, one summer ranch and one winter ranch and they move in between them. That’s basically what it is. But it’s unfenced nomadic life that’s very much very different from a city life. So I could go on, but those are a couple of starts.

Mark Bidwell 15:17
Yeah, that’s great. And then I interrupted you, but you talked about one of the things that came out of your travel was the idea of, don’t Be the best ,be the only. Can you say more about that?

Kevin Kelly 15:31
So that was my travel, my book Vanishing Asia, that’s a book that nobody else would ever make, could make, would want to make, has ever made. By the way, I have more than 20 feet of photo books of Asia, I have every single one of them. I have a library here with 1000s of 1000s of stories. And there’s not another book like this in the world, past or present. So this was sort of an only thing. And what I learned at my time at Wired, my role at Wired was often commissioning stories, we’d have story ideas, we get this great idea, we try to find the right writer for it to write the story. And oftentimes, they’d have this really great idea and try to sell it to the authors, the writers didn’t like it, they didn’t want to do it, didn’t think it was very good. All right, that’s the way it goes, most ideas are not really good. But then that idea would come back maybe a year later, now that, that really was a great idea. I tried to sell it again, try to give it away, and again no uptake. And then I said, okay, but then it would come back, it was like, wait a minute, that was a good idea, there’s something there, it’s not going away. Try to sell it again, no takers, and then I realize, oh, no, no, no, okay, I have to write this, this is a story that I’m the only one who thinks this is good, I need to write it. And that would turn out to be some of the best things that I would write. And so this idea of trying to give away things and end up doing the things that only I could do. And so I got in the habit of being really generous with ideas, and always talking about what I’m working on with the hope that somebody else would steal it, or do it because if they were to do it, that means I don’t need to do that one. Because that person has done it, I’m only going to do the things that no one else would do or could do. Now, that took me many, many years to realize, and it is something you can do, that takes most of your life to get to realize what it is that only you can do. So it’s a very high bar, but I think that’s where you want to aim to, you want to aim towards coming to the point where you are the only one doing it. And I have another piece of advice: if you’re young, trying to work on something where there’s no name for what it is that you do, because you’re more likely to be in the territory of the only rather than just the best. And so, if you’re young, like me, for many, many years, I thought the holy trinity of an occupation or career was to be working on something that I love to do, something that I was good at doing, and something that would pay well. It’s like, okay, what can be better? Well, actually, there is something, there is another level. And if you get to that one, the next level is to do things only you can do. So now I have four things I have to filter, to think about when I’m going to do this. There are things that I would love to do, it’d be fun to do, I’d be good at it, and I get paid, well, someone else could do that. I’m not going to do it, I’m gonna do the ones that only I can do. And so, that is again, I think there are maybe a few people who are born young and know that about themselves, but for most of us, this is a long, winding journey full of detours and serendipitous encounters and luck to get a sense of what it is that we’re the only about.

Mark Bidwell 18:38
Yeah, that struck me. I mean, there’s lots of advice which is quite easy to communicate, but, and it’s easy for a kid, I think my children are a little bit younger than yours, but it’s easy for them to get their mind around. But this is one where it’s clearly something that you said you’ve developed that insight later on in life. And it’s quite difficult to figure out how to explain that because, people need to have done quite a lot of living before they can get to that point, I guess.

Kevin Kelly 19:07
Right. But the point of this book, Excellent Advice for Living is to encapsulate things, so you can repeat it to yourself. And now that you’ve heard it, don’t aim to be the best and to be the only, you can keep that in your mind. You can remind yourself when you’re being asked to do something or have an opportunity to say, okay, don’t be the best, be the only. And so there is a lot packed into that. In fact, that’s what I tried to do with a book, taking entire books of advice and reducing it to a single sentence. My challenge and my joy was, can I take that? Put it into just a sentence that could be tweeted to a friend and I sometimes succeeded, and that’s sort of what the book is about. Yeah,

Mark Bidwell 19:49
One of the parts that I’m interested in, when did you uncover these insights and when did you come across, maybe the the next area is this idea of Finite versus Infinite Games, because it’s a very, very powerful concept, one that’s probably quite hard for people to embody earlier on in their careers. I was just trying to work out, the original book was published in 1985. Did this insight come as a result of reading that book, or was it more a case of you figured it out, and then just using this language, and it’s interesting how this came about, this particular idea?

Kevin Kelly 20:30
Yeah. So the book that you’re referring to is by James P. Carse, and it was called Finite and Infinite Games. He was a pastor, actually, and it’s a very long complicated book that I actually found very hard to read. And he gets into more, I wouldn’t say theological, but certainly more pastoral concerns. The book is worth the first chapter, and the last chapter are really the ones that are worth reading. And no, I did not come to this myself. This was his insight, but reading that book really did illuminate, and I had kind of intuitive leaning in that direction. But it articulated it in a way that felt very handy. And this was like, again, where I think this book can do it, it puts some language onto this idea, and it made it very handy. So I could reach for it, there was a handle now, and I could grab it when I needed it. And just to follow through the premise of the book, finding different games, what they were, is that there were two kinds of games in the world: there were finite ones, where there are winners and losers, and there were rules, and it was completely unfair to break the rules. So you had to adhere to the rules, and then you’d have winners or losers, and that’s what most sports are about. They’re fine, they’re good, but there’s another kind of game called the infinite game, where there aren’t winners and losers, and the whole point of the game is to keep the game going, and maybe to bring as many people into the game as possible. And there’s an analogy, of course, and his point was that most of the important things in life are more like infinite games than finite games. And that what you want to try to keep doing is have an infinite game. One of the things about infinite games that’s different from finite games is that the rules are always changing. One of the ways you keep the game going is you keep changing the rule, which is completely forbidden in a finite game. And so this idea of this ongoing, open-ended game, the infinite game where you’re rewarded by how long the game goes, how many people are involved, if you can bring more of the world into it. And the kicker, of course, which I don’t get into in my book of Wisdom, but it is in his book, is he says there’s only one infinite game. All right, so that’s as a spoiler. The spoiler is that there was only one infinite game, all infinite games are the same game. So that came from James Carse, and my takeaway in my retelling of it is that there are two kinds of games, finite games and infinite games, one are open-ended, and you want to always seek infinite games, because the upside is infinite. So if you feel that there is a game being played, there’s winner and losers and zero sum, that’s fine for sport, but it may not be a game that you really want to dedicate your life to.

Mark Bidwell 23:24
I was looking at one of your YouTube videos, I think, for China Mobile or something like that, when you were talking about the infinite game, this topic, and I think you said that Google, in some respects, was playing an infinite game. And that got me thinking that you can actually be playing an infinite game within a finite game, in the sense of, the capital markets are probably the most finite game that people are playing if they’re participating, but you were saying certain aspects of Google, and I suppose to some extent, certain aspects of Amazon during Bezos, his reign, were based on elements of an infinite game and on the finite game.

Kevin Kelly 24:02
I mean, our economy is the infinite game and a finite game, because we are actually increasing the amount of money. There’s not like, there’s a fixed amount of money, we still have the same amount of money that we had 1000 years ago. We have a lot more, money is growing, so there are winners or losers, but there is a growing economy that is infinite in potential. And so there is a larger economic infinite game going on, even though there are definitely finite games in terms of stocks, those are there, you can only sell one to another person who buys one, if they get one, you’d lose yours. But as a whole there is an infinite game going on, and I think people like Jeff Bezos can recognize that there’s more to be gained by expanding the economy, by expanding things rather than just trying to steal someone’s winnings, I think even investment, that’s the thing that you want to understand, that there is a way to grow the pie rather than just swapping pieces of the pie. And my advice is, both for your own development, for your own growth and for your own wealth, head towards the infinite ones that expand everything.

Mark Bidwell 25:19
When did you reach this conclusion? Because it’s again another one where it’s hard if I’m talking to my kids who are about to enter the workforce. It’s a hard one to reconcile with the realities of getting a degree and going out and finding a job. And I’m curious of your journey and how that translates into advice you might give to your kids or to the young?

Kevin Kelly 25:48
Well, again, I think intuitively, it’s very early. And there’s just an element of, well the infinite game rewards generosity, okay. And I have always known that, I’ve always said that there’s this very, very weird paradox at the foundation of our human societal collective existence. And that foundational paradox is that if you were totally selfless, the most selfish thing you could do was to be generous, okay? That the more you give, the more you get, that that makes no sense whatsoever, but that is, for me, a foundational element of the universe, that the more you give, the more you get; that if you’re kind to others, they’ll be even kinder back, that you cannot deplete your generosity and kindness. I don’t know why that works, it doesn’t make any sense, but it is, and I’ve always known that.

Mark Bidwell 26:49
Can you remember when you first reached that conclusion? I know you’re not talking as a West Coast woo, because there’s quite a lot of the world that looks at that idea in that way. And I’m just curious about, I know you’re a very different rational person, when there’s a point at which that would happen that led to that conclusion. Do you remember when it was?

Kevin Kelly 27:14
I think it was when I was traveling. I think it was when I was first traveled. I went to Taiwan in 1972, and we didn’t have very much money, and I had to rely on strangers, and literally had to rely on strangers and their kindness. And there were other travelers who were maybe not as generous or kind and trusting, whatever it is, and seeing what happened to them. They were like, if a person was really just trustful, they were a magnet for bad things to happen to. And so it was like, whoa, that’s interesting, that the people who are having the most fun, who have the best time, who get all these things, they’re the kindest, the most generous. It’s like, all right, I want to do that. So I think it was brought into relief when I was traveling, just seeing how things work that way.

Mark Bidwell 28:07
Yeah, that was one of the counterintuitive ideas that I flagged, that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Another one which struck me with rather than steering your life to avoid the unexpected, go directly for it.

Kevin Kelly 28:22
Yeah, yeah. So what’s the word I want? Yeah, I’m trying to maximize learning. I’m trying to encourage other people to be lifelong learners, to grow, to personal growth. And personal growth to me is a lot about that you have to be willing to have some discomfort, you have to be willing to say, I don’t know, you have to have a beginner’s mind. You’ve got to have uncomfortable conversations with people. And a lot of that is all about learning and being humble. And so that stance, I think, is something that I’m going to just keep promoting in the book tabs in many different ways, but it’s kind of repeating the same thing over and over again.

Mark Bidwell 29:05
Can you give an example of going towards the unexpected? What does that look like for you, recently, for instance, any projects that you’ve taken, which people have said, what are you doing, but that which has taken you towards the unexpected?

Kevin Kelly 29:23
Yes, it’s really good. So for a year, I did a piece of art a day, which I did myself on an iPad or other physical things, and then I decided this year to do a piece of art with AI. And that was unexpected, and some people will feel like I’m cheating. And it’s like, well, does that count, and that was unexpected and yeah, definitely counts to me because you have to become an AI whisperer, you’ve got to get to converse with this. The images that are produced take almost as long as my other ones to produce, these 20 minutes or half an hour, and so it counts in my eyes. Maybe that’s sort of headed towards the unexpected in the sense of calling it art or treating it as art rather than anything else. No, I am doing art. I’m calling it art, and that’s sort of unexpected for me, I would not have thought about it.

Mark Bidwell 30:19
Okay. We touched on rites of passage earlier on, in the context of the gap year, but you also talk about creating rites of passage in your family life. Firstly, given that you’ve studied cultures, and many of these cultures have quite clear rites of passage as people transition from childhood into adulthood, we seem to have lost it. Why do you think that is, and what have you done to bring that back to your domestic unit?

Kevin Kelly 30:49
Yeah, I don’t really know why we lost it. I mean, we have other holidays and things. I’m not sure why we’ve lost it, but I do think it is a loss. And as you correctly note, many cultures have a very ingrained rites of passage into adulthood, but we, at least in America, don’t. And we decided to rectify that by making our own ceremony. We have three kids, and as they went through this, which we designated at 21, we said, okay, this is a legal age, and so we had some things that we did for all three, and we also had the three of them help devise, tailor, customize their own version of this rite of passage. So for this reason the thing that we would do is, we’d have a little ceremony, and they could choose who’s going to be at it. Sometimes it was family, sometimes friends, very small, and there’ll be my wife and I and we would have a red ribbon tied around her waist and the red ribbon would go to our child, and they would take the scissors and they would cut the red ribbon connecting us, the umbilical cord, we would hand them their last check, so this is the last check from us, we’d have the first legal drink, we toast, the first legal drink, and then they would have various things, like our oldest daughter decided she wanted to get baptized in the hot tub in the backyard. And we have an old baptism ceremony, my son decided that he wanted everybody, this is interesting, to write bits of advice down on some edible paper with edible ink, and then he would read them out and consume them. And then he said he also wanted to go to the beach, and he wanted to run in and dive in as a boy and walk out as a man, which he did. And that was like, wow, that’s really incredible. My other daughter decided she wanted to bake bread and kind of give it out, feed everybody a little bit of bread that she made, almost like a communion. And she had another, I can’t remember what other thing she did, she had a couple other little very new ageish ceremonies that she did to mark this passage, I think she read some things. So these were very memorable, and they were, what’s the word I want, they were definite, they were saying yes, okay, we’re transitioning, you’re on your own, you’re an adult, now you have to be responsible. And to the point in the book, it was very easy to do, and I wished we had done more of them. If I had any regret, I wish we had more things like that in our family life. Because as the kids got older, they relied and went back to the few little things we did on a regular basis. And I realized that these were kind of really cheap, inexpensive, easy things that became very meaningful over time. And the joke is that it becomes a ritual if you repeat it for three times. Just for three times, it’s now a ritual, and if you keep doing it, it becomes meaningful in a weird way. So pancakes every Sunday morning without fail for years and years and years and years and years, that was a ritual. That was pancakes, but because you did it on a regular schedule, there was this anticipation, this expectation, this identity creating, that was invaluable.

Mark Bidwell 34:03
Yeah, lovely, lovely. I’m mindful of time. So if we can maybe just touch a little bit on some other topics around, when I reread our conversation about The Inevitable and yeah, I have to say, I knew you were a futurist, and my experience has indeed confirmed some of the things you were saying particularly around AI, they were very prescient. So there were a couple of points you were making: the first one was about AI not about replacing, it’s about replacing tasks versus jobs. And you talked about AI as being your partner versus something that you replace. I’m just wondering, obviously, there’s a lot of nuance happening in the world of AI, particularly in the last couple of weeks, but over the years behind the scenes as well. How are you thinking about AI and its impact on the workplace at the moment specifically? That’s my first question, and how your thinking is changing?

Kevin Kelly 35:02
I’ve been putting out challenges to people to actually name, give me a real person who’s actually lost their job to AI. And there hasn’t been any. I think I might be able to find one person in the transcription business, so the business of humans taking audible sound and transcribing it. If there were people who actually had their job that way, there probably aren’t very many, because that is definitely something that the bots can do now, today, very well. But in general, what we’re not seeing is this large scale unemployment due to AI. At the other end, what we are seeing and what I’m doing every day now, is using these things as interns. That’s my current frame of reference, my model. CahtGTP is an incredible intern, is an intern in the sense that you offload all kinds of things to it, but you have to check their work and you don’t release their work as your work, you have to kind of work on it. It’s like a first draft intern doing the summary, they’re doing all this stuff of behind the scenes and working with you, for you to present something. So even in the AI image generators is very rare when the very first thing you get is what you can use. I mean, you can be surprised by it, but it’s very hard to get it to obey where you want to go. And so there’s this long conversation of AI whispering, incantations and working with them getting better at it as if they were an intern. Okay, yeah, here, that’s good. Go back and do this. How about that? Okay, let me know, a little bit more of this, and so. And so this idea of partners, I think is being borne out. And what we’re seeing is that, say, in the image generators, there are some people who are really, really good at it, and you look at it, you say, how did you do that? And it’s sort of like Picasso says, well, yeah, it only took me 10,000 hours of practicing with this and doing it over again, and having seeds, and having my special prompts that I use, and knowing how it works. And so, until there are going to be people who are going to be better at working with the AIs than others, and also, they have personalities, there’s making the images, Midjourney has been engineered and trained to be more arty. DALL E-2 has been engineered and trained on more photographic type stuff, Stable Diffusion has its own kind of personality and niche and biases. And so, we’re going to use different tools for different things. And some people are going to be more comfortable with certain kinds of personal AIs, and others will find it too alien and don’t want to deal with it. And so first of all, we’re gonna have many of them. They’re not one AI, that’s coming true. And I think, the idea of having partners that we’re going to mix in our own human preferences into these partners. And so there, there’s going to be people who just can’t deal with the alienness of certain things, but are going to be comfortable with other things. And so, in people trying this, we’re going to have to understand that the first couple of API’s you try may not work for you, and you should not give up, but try a different one.

Mark Bidwell 38:08
I presume you’ve been following what’s happened recently about the jailbreaking in Sydney, and these are extraordinary stories. The second point, and I’ll come back, the reason I raised this is the second comment you made five years ago, when we spoke, was that you were concerned about, you were worried that we were going to abuse AI and treat it like slaves. And they were trying to jailbreak this, the Microsoft.

Kevin Kelly 38:36
Right. These are black mirrors in some way that they reflect how you treat them. And the full dialogue of this is yeah, I mean, these are imaginary friends, right? So the fact that you can get an AI to say something doesn’t mean the AI believes that, it’s like, they’re just mirroring you. They’re mimicking humans, and they can exhibit many personalities, because they don’t really have a unified personality. And so these are the early days, here’s what I would say about this. This is maybe where we are right now, which is that these versions of AIs are auto-complete, they’re mimicking humans, it looked at all the things that humans have drawn, all the humans, everything that we’ve written, and they’re gonna say, based on everything that you’ve written, or said or pictured, I’m going to predict that this is the next thing. You’ll start me going, and I’m going to complete it mimicking humans. So they’re mimicking the average human behavior, which is not necessarily the noblest human behavior. Alright, so on average, humans are probably racist, and sexist, and everything else flawed. And so these things are going to be like that. And here’s the important thing, we are going to demand that these bots be better than us, and we’re not going to accept them to be like us, we want them to be better than us. And that’s actually something we can do. We can actually program in ethics and morality into these bots. But we don’t have any idea what it means, or how to be better than us. We don’t have any consensus on what they would mean. Our own ethics and morality are so flimsy and shallow and inconsistent, that we don’t know how to make them better. And that’s the conversation we’re gonna be having is okay,we don’t want to be like the typical human, we want to be better. So what does that look like? How do you behave better? What is the consensus on that? And we don’t have any consensus on that right now. And so, that is the thrilling adventure that I think we’re headed into right now, is trying to elevate the AIs so that they’re better than us, even though we don’t know what that means.

Mark Bidwell 40:50
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s something very compelling, I haven’t been engaged with them in the way that some of the others have been, there’s something very compelling about being able to engage at the level that some people are reporting. And for them to jointly go on a journey of self-discovery with a co-pilot or an intern, it’s actually raising your game or giving you insight. So they’re not hallucinogenic insights, but actually can leave you as a better person. It’s quite exciting.

Kevin Kelly 41:17
It is. It’s very exciting. And there’s another frontier that’s epistemological, about how we know what’s true, and how we accept and trust things, and how we decide that we know things. That’s another frontier that these are unleashing, they put a crack into the world of the ways that we accept truth or not, we realize oh, there’s a whole bunch of assumptions that we can no longer rest on, that we have to actually become more precise about. And that’s the second frontier that we’re going to be headed into, which is trying to automate these trustworthy.

Mark Bidwell 41:55
Yeah, and I mean, you’re clearly optimistic about it. You wrote a wonderful piece a couple of years ago about the case for optimism. I’m assuming that’s still intact for you? And if so, are there any things that you are particularly optimistic about that you can share? And also the counter as well, any high points or low points in your view of optimism?

Kevin Kelly 42:20
I am optimistic, and I am more optimistic than I was, I think I have a natural sunny disposition. But I have actually been crafting deliberate engineered optimism, which I think is necessary today. And I think hindsight would prove that most of the things that we’ve accomplished had been done by optimists who believed it was possible to do, so yes, I am optimistic. Just recently, this past week, I got to visit some Silicon Valley startups that were doing NeuroLink, that were doing the brain computer interface, implanting things SO the brain could control a computer. So you would think, and the computer would understand what you’re thinking, which I had thought was 100 years away. And it turns out that no, this is actually something very close. And there’s more than one company doing it, there’s Synechron, there’s OpenSea, and they all have very different technologies to do it. They’re very complicated, but they’re actually starting human trials. And I saw the monkeys doing it and it’s amazing. So in terms of optimism, and a sense of something that I didn’t think was really feasible, I thought it was really science fiction-y. I didn’t think it was near-term feasible, and it was possible and inevitable, but I thought it was, again, not in my lifetime. And now, wow, there’s something happening there. So that’s optimistic. I’m optimistic about green meat, lab grown animal cell meat, as someone who doesn’t eat mammals, I’m looking forward to that very, very, very much. Where that’s, again, you can make meat, you can have animal cells existing, but you also can make meat that’s better than the meat that we have right now. Maybe it tastes more meaty, or the taste is even more delicious and still being of animal cells. And so I’m optimistic about that. But there’s lots of things to be optimistic about.

Mark Bidwell 44:10
Yep, I read the book recommendation of that Daniel Suarez sci-fi book that you liked, there’s all sorts of stuff on the planet to be optimistic about as well, but I’m just interested in..

Kevin Kelly 44:24
Near orbit space for energy and industry – again I was sort of skeptical of that, I am a total skeptic about colonies on Mars, is never, not in for a long time, if ever, but near orbit space mining asteroids, I think there’s a good argument there, that seems more feasible than I had thought. So that’s again, I don’t know enough about that to bet on it, but I’m changing my mind slowly about that.

Mark Bidwell 44:54
Yeah, I think he prides himself on not putting anything out there that doesn’t have some kind of scientific basis on which he’s building a story.

Kevin Kelly 45:04
Yeah, I know Dan, and just saw him recently, and the amount of effort he put into the research for that was phenomenal. And yeah, you’re right, he said it was one of the questions that people asked is, did he ever kind of gloss over something he knew was wrong for the sake of the story? Because he’s writing science fiction, right? And he said that occasionally he did that, but it does hurt him so much, it just killed him, that he said he rarely did it. But when he did it, he said it just rubbed him the wrong, because he would know that’s not quite right.

Mark Bidwell 45:43
Wonderful. Wonderful. So final question, and then I’ll let you go. What are your future projects that you can share about, that you’re working on now? I remember when we last spoke, we talked about the need to get a project a good five years to a runway, so just wondering what to expect if we’re speaking in five years time, Kevin, what would you’ve been talking to me about?

Kevin Kelly 46:04
So I have started a five-year project this year, and I’m calling it Protopia, or it’s the 100-year desirable future. So my approach will be as my term for a future that’s not dystopian, like most Hollywood movies. And it’s not utopian like the old days, because I think utopia is impossible, it doesn’t work and nobody would actually live there anyway. And so Protopia is a world that’s a little tiny bit better, it’s full of problems, big new problems, but there are solutions, our ability to solve those problems is actually greater. And so there is an incremental crawling and creeping towards betterment, that is Protopia. And so I’m trying to imagine 100-year of Protopia in 100 years, a feature that’s full of high-tech, AI, ubiquitous AI monitoring, genetic engineering, all this kind of stuff. And it’s the world that I want to live in, so I’m trying to generate some scenarios of this 100-year desirable future, and 10-year increments of how we arrived there, and I’ve only got started. It’s very, very difficult, because a lot of the downsides to these things are very, very evident, and as you would imagine 100 years of them, it’s to understand how we absorb them and civilize them and make them work. It’s hard, but that’s my five-year project.

Mark Bidwell 47:22
How will you bring that into the world? I mean, will it be a book?

Kevin Kelly 47:27
It’s unlikely to be a book, people don’t read books, my kids don’t read books, they watch YouTube and play games. So it’s likely to be in the format of video or a world that can be inhabited. My premise, my hope is that I make a world that writers and other people can tell stories in, so that there’ll be versions of it, multiple versions, many people will be interpreting it, and that it becomes maybe not something in itself, but some tool that other people use. So the answer is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a database, maybe it’s all three, but it’s unlikely. I mean, there could be a book spin off, but it’s not gonna be a native book.

Mark Bidwell 48:02
Wonderful. We’ll watch this space, I guess it’ll be, as things are released, it will be on your website, which is www.kk.org, right?

Kevin Kelly 48:09
That’s right, www.kk.org. My email’s been public for 30-40 years, it [email protected], and I’m Kevin2Kelly, the number two, on the socials. And again, these days I do a piece of AI art every day and keep writing for Wired if I can.

Mark Bidwell 48:27
Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Lovely new book. Congratulations and best of luck with your new project.

Kevin Kelly 48:34
Sure, thank you.