In this short episode, I’m sharing an excerpt from my recent interview with Kevin Kelly. He’s got a new book coming out in May 2023, called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. We’re going to release the full interview when the book is out, but in the meantime, it’s worth sharing with you some of Kevin’s insights into the topic of AI, which is one of the areas in which he is genuinely a world leader.
There is immense interest in the media and in boardrooms around the world in the topic of AI, stimulated by the exponential uptake of ChatGPT, and the subsequent evolution of chatbots and AI. Unless you’ve been living in a cave or under a rock, you’re likely very interested in how this technology is going to shape out – whether it is just one more iteration of the Silicon Valley hype machine, which we saw with Bitcoin, Crypto, or Web 3.0, or whether this is something far more fundamental, something that threatens a number of our global institutions relating to democracy, to the economy, and to what it means to be human.
Be sure to also check out my previous interview with Kevin Kelly, linked below in the show notes, as well as my recommendations of two other shows where you can learn more about AI.
What We Cover:
- Where we are right now on the path of AI development
- How we can use AIs as interns and still keep our jobs or create new ones
- The challenge of ‘ethical’ AI and how we can use AI to be better humans
- Reasons to be optimistic about technology
Key Learnings and Takeaways:
- There is no large-scale unemployment due to AI, but there is a big case for using AI chatbots as trained interns to offload your work to them
- We can program ethics and morality into AI, but we currently don’t have any consensus on what ethics and morality mean and how to be better than humans
- Another frontier to break with AI is epistemological – how we decide what’s true and how we can automate trustworthiness
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Kevin Kelly: The Formula for the Next 10,000 Startups, Failing Forward and Becoming a Teaching Organization on OutsideVoices
- Connect with Kevin Kelly on social media @Kevin2Kelly
- Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GTP4, ChatGTP, and the Future of AI – Lex Fridman Podcast #367
- Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Midjourney AI tool
- DALL E-2 by OpenAI
- Stable Diffusion AI tool