Transcript: 'How to Predict the Future Like Kevin Kelly'

The transcript of AI & I with Kevin Kelly is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:00:50
Why Dan and Kelly love Annie Dillard: 00:01:10
Learn how to predict the future like Kelly: 00:12:52
What the history of electricity can teach us about AI: 00:16:10
How Kelly thinks about the nature of intelligence: 00:20:13
Kelly’s advice on discovering your competitive advantage: 00:25:44
The story of how Kelly assembled a bench of star writers for Wired: 00:29:33
How Kelly used ChatGPT to co-create a book: 00:34:43
Using AI as a mirror for your mind: 00:39:12
What Kelly learned from betting on VR in the 1980s: 00:43:43

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Kelly

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be seen.

Dan Shipper

I'm very excited to have you. In addition to being a personal hero of mine, I am a longtime Wired reader. I had a gigantic shelf of magazines growing up. So it’s sort of crazy to get to get to chat with you.

There's a lot of things I wanna talk to you about, but I want to start with— We have a mutual love of Annie Dillard.

Kevin Kelly

We do.

Dan Shipper

She’s my favorite writer and I know she's your favorite writer as well. Tell me why you like her.

Kevin Kelly

For those who aren’t familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with a meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that, for some reason— It's an account of her spending some years on musing, kind of like Henry David Thoreau, intimate investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia—I don't remember. And the writing and the style and the ideas and her blazing brilliance in being able to capture this into a few words, was almost like poetry in its prose that somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about literature to describe her in relation to other writers and why it doesn't work for me as much, but there was something about her spirit as well as her writing, which was very expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic, questioning— I don't know. She talked about feeling as if, at one point in the story, that she was a bell that someone else had rung, and I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, “lifted and struck.”

There’s another part in the early part of the book where she talks about the tree with the lights in it. And that moment, I think, is very evocative of one of her big themes, which is you can just be sort of walking around in ordinary life, in ordinary nature and somehow the veil is lifted from your eyes and you can experience these moments of transcendence where everything feels like it's glowing from within.

Kevin Kelly

So yeah, there was this— Her kind of cosmic, poetic ability to kind of take these moments, but then interstitial with those were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that you would be grounded in before the next jump. It was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with very concrete science trivia or oddities. And that combination just somehow appealed to me.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, the thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henle’s loops, which are this little part of the kidney and it's just like, where does that even come from? And yeah, I think she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the smallest stuff. But another thing that's really interesting about her writing, and I'm curious how you've thought about this in your own work, is she spends a lot of time talking about the beauty of the world, but she also spends a lot of time talking about the worst of the world. There's an entire chapter on insects and how gross insects are. And I think she's also angry about it and not afraid to be angry about it. And I think a lot of writers are usually either one or the other. Either you're really angry or everything's beautiful and awesome, and she does both pretty well.

Kevin Kelly

That's true. I think either she said in the book or elsewhere that she wrote the book as if there was a patient of cancer dying in her room and she was talking to them. So yeah, that was— It is not just saccharine, it's not just sweet kumbaya. She can be pretty harsh too. And you said that is part of the attraction of the sweet/sour flavor.

Dan Shipper

How has she, if at all, influenced how you write or edit?

Kevin Kelly

Well, in some ways it's why I won't write at all because I came across that book in the weirdest of all places. It was in an American library in Kandy, Sri Lanka. And I walked in because there was air conditioning and there was a book—why they had the book there, I don't know. But there was the book, I opened it up and from the first immediate paragraph—”I once had a tomcat”— I was caught and I didn't put it down and it was like, I don't know what she's doing, but I want to do that. It was like, if I could do that, I would. You know? I'm golden.

Dan Shipper

I feel the same way. Have you read any of her other stuff?

Kevin Kelly

Yeah. I didn't read her fiction book, but the other books of essays—Teaching a Stone to Talk

Dan Shipper

Holy the Firm, The Writing Life.

Kevin Kelly

Yes. And her account of the total eclipse was just— What's the word I want? It's sort of never to be equaled. Anybody who writes about eclipse has to start with Annie's version of it.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. It's so funny because the reason I started with Annie is I love her so much, and she evokes all the same kind of feelings in me that I think she evokes for you and gives me that same kind of energy to write stuff. If I write stuff after I've read something that she's written, it just brings something out in me that I just love. And also no one else I know likes her or even really has heard about her. I feel like a lot of her work is maybe taught in school, but it's kind of the thing that you're assigned, but people don't like it as much.

Kevin Kelly

Well, they probably also don't read the whole thing. They probably wouldn’t have understood if they only got the excerpt. There's probably some one passage about the lights in the trees or whatever. It is true because she didn't really— I mean, she wrote a couple other books, but she didn't really go on to have a huge amount of work and a huge amount of output for whatever reason.

I actually sent her a book that I did when I was riding my bicycle across the country. I did a haiku and a sketch every day, and I sent her the book—the original—because I was inspired by her, I just thought that she would enjoy it. And she actually sent some nice words in response to the book and sent it back. So that was my one time when I wrote to a hero.

Dan Shipper

That's really nice. I bet a reply from Annie is probably pretty rare. So that's pretty great.

Kevin Kelly

I think I still have it. I think it's right behind me. I should dig it up and see. There was one little drawing. She said she really liked that little drawing, so that was good.

Dan Shipper

To move on from Annie for a second, one thing that you wrote in your book, The Inevitable that I really loved and thought was interesting is: “After living online for the past three decades, first as pioneer in a rather wild, empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes.” I really love this sort of pioneer to builder transition. I've been watching this show— It's an old HBO show called “Deadwood.” I don’t know if you've seen it.

Kevin Kelly

I haven't seen it.

(00:10:00)

Dan Shipper

It’s basically about Deadwood. I think now it's South Dakota, but it was a mining town in Indian territory before it was annexed into a state. And so it had no law. And the whole show is kind of about that transition from pioneer or order out of chaos. And I think there's a lot of resonance with what you wrote and this transition from pioneer to builder feels like something that's deeply embedded into tech. Even with every single wave, like in this new AI wave, there's this whole movement of pioneers kind of figuring out the whole new landscape and then the builders kind of move in. Tell me about what that's been like for you to participate in and watch over the last couple decades.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah. There are always feelings of loss of the freedom of no laws. The unvarnished, the unconstrained ability to do what you want without having to ask permission, that goes away. And oh, actually, I just had another experience that was like that, which was Burning Man. I was reminded of that because I did a podcast with Burning Man today and we were reminiscing about the first—‘96 or so—the first time I was at Burning Man when there were no streets. There were no there's no adult supervision at all. There was no sense of order. It was crazy and chaotic and wonderful. But the second year, I think, there was somebody who died because they got run over by a car and they were just sleeping on the sleeping bag. And so it was like, oh, we need streets. And over years and years of Burning Man, they have more and more of the layering of law and order, and they have tons and tons of police and sheriffs and whatnot, and laws and the bureaucratic stuff that I had to go through because I did artwork last year—that was unbelievable. It was like dealing with somebody in India. But at the same time, I think Burning Man's better than ever. And so, you lose something.

But actually, I think, there's more to be gained by adding that layer of organization and structure and governance. And so, you still wanna have those zones where there's a frontier. You wanna keep making new territory that generates new frontiers. And some people are better on the frontier than back at the center. And I think that's a wonderful way the world would work. And so for me, I want to maintain both constantly new frontiers where those who are suited to not having to have many rules, are able to thrive. And then those who prefer to have the discipline of working within rules also can thrive.

Dan Shipper

What about in your own life? Because as someone who's interested in new technology, that requires being on the frontier. And the interesting thing about the frontier is if you're a little bit of a restless spirit, it's pretty cool as it is, but being a restless spirit is. It can be hard, it can be lonely. How have you balanced that in your own life or dealt with it in your own life?

Kevin Kelly

So, I tend to visit the frontier. I spend a lot of my adult life in very remote parts of Asia, where there's very little infrastructure. I had spent an early portion of my adulthood for extended time in areas where there was very little modern infrastructure. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it, but I would've died if I needed to live there. I mean, so it was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was gonna leave. And so, I have the same kind of things with the frontiers. Yeah, Burning Man's fantastic for two weeks, but it'd be horrible to have to live there year round. And so, and being at the frontier of the internet and or AI, my understanding is that it’s a moving frontier. It's gonna move. I can keep going up to the edge to see what's happening, but I don't need to stay there and I'm gonna actually come back and report anyway. So I have the liberty of being a nomad in that sense of occupying it. So for me, it's a fantastic place to spend some time in, but not a place that I wanna spend all my time in.

Dan Shipper

And how does that work? Because I understand sort of the frontier of going to another country and being able to come home. But with technology, you can be at the frontier in your house. And so is that structured for you? There are periods in your life or periods in your day where you're sort of immersing yourself in what's new and then periods where you're kind of in the sort of stability of whatever you're familiar with? Or how does it work?

Kevin Kelly

Right. So one of the things that I discovered over time is that my favorite people who were best about the future were actually great historians too. So that would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And, I balance wrestling with the latest AI stuff with working in my workshop and using my hands. So for me, yes, that's exactly what it is. Jeff Bezos said he was trying to build a business on the things that didn't change. And so the Long Now Foundation, which I've been very central to, is trying to take a long-term view and not just to forward, but also the past. And so for me, I would spend time on this ephemeral frontier, but also then try to think about the next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years.

Dan Shipper

As you're digging into the current AI wave, what are the historical periods that you're thinking about or diving into?

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, actually I spent a good amount of time recently reading about the discovery and or invention of electricity. Because my contention right now is that we have no idea what intelligence is, that we're as ignorant of it as Isaac Newton and others were of electricity when it was first encountered. And Isaac Newton, one of the smartest humans ever, was totally wrong about electricity. He had these weird weird ideas about it that were just wrong.

Dan Shipper

What did he think about it? I have not heard anything about Isaac Newton and electricity. That's really interesting.

Kevin Kelly

He was one of the people who kind of thought that there was this— have you heard of phlogiston?

Dan Shipper

Yeah. phlogiston. Yeah, a thing that creates fire.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, well no, it was just this kind of element—and that there was another element—and the discovery of electricity was happening at the same time that basically we were understanding what elements and atoms and compounds were. And so Davy and Faraday and those guys were almost discovering stuff about electricity weekly. And the origins of the Royal Academy came out of the weekly meetings that they would have where they would sell tickets and do demos with electricity and make sparks and stuff. And one of the biggest news items in the shocks was when they—and I forget who it was, maybe Faraday—proved that electricity would happen in a vacuum because of the ether. You don't need ether. It's like, well then what is it? And some of the earliest beliefs about electricity was that it was primarily a biological phenomenon. And there's all those reflexes and stuff. So there were just endless theories about what it is. And they all reminded me of all the theories we have about what intelligence is because we don't really know what it is. And I have been saying, I suspect intelligence is not an element, but a compound that is made up of a complex of different cognitive elements.

(00:20:00)

And we haven't even identified yet in the same way that salt's not an element. Salt is actually a compound of some elements that they had not yet identified. And so you can think of the current AI is we're making some kind of salt and we don't even know what it's made from.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, I think that's true. Where it makes my mind go, and I'm curious how you would respond to this, is we actually do know what it is, but we don't know it in the same way that we know what electricity is. So we don't have an explicit, exact mathematical theory in the same way that we can talk about electricity, and we don't have a way to decompose it into parts that reduce down and then recombine into it. But we do know what it is in a different way. I'm talking to you and I know that you're intelligent and that's harder to grasp. It's not the same kind of grasping. I can pin it down to the wall kind of thing, but I think that that just may be a property of intelligence that it is sort of like this fuzzy thing. What do you think about that?

Kevin Kelly

Well, I don't know. You may be confusing recognizing something with knowing it. So, I think we can recognize it, but I actually don't think we know what it is. And in fact, I think our brains are incredibly opaque to introspection deliberately. I think we have these complex things that deliberately do not allow the organism to interfere and meddle with it. Could you imagine if we had access to the source code, we would be completely wrecking ourselves. And what it is again, I think we humans have a very peculiar complex of things that if we map it out in the possibility space of all possible minds, which is a very high-dimensional space, that we're gonna be our compound way at the edge. We're an edge species. We're not at the center of anything—the galaxy or the solar system or evolution, we are an edge. Our kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture that's evolved for us. And then what we're gonna be doing with AI is making hundreds of various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking.

And so we look back and we won't even recognize some of these other things as intelligence right now, because we don't have a very good definition. It's like what are the definitions or what are the marks for something that isn’t a humanlike intelligence? Some people say, well, there isn't anything. There's only universal intelligence, and that we're just gonna make more of it. That there's only one thing and that's possible, but I suspect that's wrong. I suspect that there are many compounds and that they will be engineered to do different things and to some degree we won't understand even how they work. But that's because they're different. And so I think we are very much like the early days of electricity where we simply didn't have a clue about what it was, even though we could use it, even though we couldn't recognize it.

Dan Shipper

Where does your intuition that it is made up of compounds come from?

Kevin Kelly

Well, several ones. One is Marvin Minsky, the first who suggested it, called it in The Society of the Mind. And then these days the AIs are a mixture of experts. where they are already doing that, where they already are taking different kinds of cognition and making them into compounds. And so I think we'll have various layers of this, like tissues where you have cells and or molecules made from elements. And so we're gonna make some very high-chain heavy compounds of intelligence at some level made up from lots of little bits of elemental cognition. What we haven't done yet is done the chemistry of identifying what some of the basic cognitive units are, or the cognitive elements and, we may be starting to do that.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, thinking about the way neural networks work, a way to look at them is they learn many, many thousands or millions of rules for what to do in particular situations that they can partially apply and run many of those rules in parallel to find the right set that sort of applies to a particular situation. So in that case intelligence is a compound of rules that are about little micro correlations, that are applied depending on how relevant they are to a particular situation. But it's interesting to think how much of those rules are contingent—they're just situational vs. universal. Because we do know, for example, how neural networks function at a low level—we know the atomic units. And in fact, the specific architecture, the specific set of atomic units that you use doesn't really matter for the high level behavior. It does to some extent, but you can get basically the same behavior no matter the simple components you use, right? So there’s something always not hard to understand in between the simple components and the outward behavior that we observe.

Kevin Kelly

I mean Danny Hillis has made a computer with Tinkertoys, so you can make computers out of all kinds of elements, logic gates, and stuff like that. So I don't want to confuse your neural nets. I don't think that is the basic unit. I think there's a type of reasoning or learning or something that happens with the neural nets that we haven't quite identified yet that I would say that would be the element is what is that process of pattern matching or if that is what it is, or deduction. What's the dynamic or what's the logic or what's the workflow for doing deduction? And so it could be agnostic to the actual platform.

Dan Shipper

It seems like it must be, in some way, but that's interesting. One of the things I love about the way that you've set up your career and I think probably also the way that you think about just creative work in general is, it's about being honest and authentic to who you are instead of what you think you should be doing. And I found that over and over again, especially at the beginning of a career, it's really easy to be like, I need to do things in this particular way. And then at some point you're like, I don’t know, this kind of, at least for me, you're like, this isn't working as well as it should and this kind of sucks. And I guess I have to like to do the thing that's more honest to who I am and more shaped to who I am. And it removes all of this daily friction. So, honestly hearing you talk about that in various forms over the years has been quite helpful for me. How does that look now after many years of thinking that way? Is that still something that's on your mind that's difficult that you have to unstick yourself from? Or do you get used to living that way after a while?

Kevin Kelly

Yeah. I mean, my own life was never very planned or deliberate in that sense. I had more directions than destinies or destinations. A phrase that I like or advice that I like to give these days is about don't aim to be the best aim. To be the only. But that was not something that I was doing consciously when I was younger. That was something that I only realized I was doing much later. And it’s part of the book. A wisdom I wish I had known earlier is that I really did wish that someone had told me that earlier. And so I think I did a bunch of things very intuitively without necessarily having a grand plan about it. And so I kind of naturally move in that direction. And this idea of being the only was made clear to me first at Wired where I was trying to assign stories that I had to other writers and often not getting any traction with a great idea that I couldn't sell to anybody. And after years of trying to kill it, I would wind up doing it myself and then realizing, oh, that's because of money. I can do it and that's what I should be focusing on to begin with. And so that was so I think the clarity of it. I think I have more clarity, but I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, but maybe being a little bit more aware of the actual process of doing it.

(00:30:00)

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I resonate very much with this, trying to get writers to do an idea. So Every, the company that I run, it's a media company and it’s so different from any other business because I come from the software world and if you have a product idea and you build a little bit of it, you can have someone else build a lot, or build most of the product, and it can be great, but getting a writer to write your idea—it’s never any good. Almost never. The people who are good ghost writers are such a small portion of writers.

Kevin Kelly

That actually wasn't my experience. My experience was that the writers were even better. So I had just discovered, reading IEEE Spectrum, that they were laying fiber optic cables around the globe, and I thought, they're wiring up the news sphere. That’d be a great story. So I assigned Neal Stephenson to that. He just did his masterpiece that I could have never, ever have done. And Bruce Sterling and the other great writers, they did a much better job of writing it than I ever could have.

Dan Shipper

Well, I wish I had Neal Stephenson writing for me.

Kevin Kelly

Well, okay, here’s the thing. This is what I tell every aspiring— Get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments. They love it because they're born storytellers. You're paying them to go learn something that they wanna learn, and they'll come back with something amazing.

Dan Shipper

I think that's the key thing and what I'm more talking about rather than it's— I’ve worked with a lot of really talented writers. Everyone that I work with I think is super talented, but trying to get someone to write about something they don't really wanna write about, it's never gonna be that good in my experience.

Kevin Kelly

Well, yeah. So you have to match with something that they're interested in. So that's the trick. I wasn't making them write something they weren't interested in, but I was, and sometimes that's how the conversation would start, you know? What's something you're really interested in that we can help make happen? That we can pay you to educate yourself and we could jointly come up with an idea. And, I mean, again, if I was running a magazine, the first thing I would start doing is finding the youngest science fiction writers and giving them assignments.

Dan Shipper

I should look into that. Well, mostly I just find people who write good tweets that I find interesting.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, that's fine. That's a good way too. But find someone who can tell a good story and has a little bit of an ability to fantasize or whatever. So Neal was not Kneel when we were first starting. He was still at the beginning of his career, which is of course why he agreed to it.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. One of the things you talk about a lot is being a reluctant writer and born editor. And just getting into AI for a second, one of the things that strikes me about AI is it puts you into editing mode much quicker.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, it does.

Dan Shipper

How has that worked for you?

Kevin Kelly

It's been great, because I can get over that big hump—just kind of helping get something on the page and starting to work with and kind of illuminating the spots that I'm most ignorant of. And, yeah, for me it's a really great way to start.

Dan Shipper

Is there anything that has worked particularly well as part of your workflow to get it started?

Kevin Kelly

Well, I use some of them for research too, and that's another way I— You know, while you're researching, you're summarizing stuff and synthesizing. So there's these elements that begin to take place. The LLMs are really good at organizing things, and that's another thing. See, I'm not that organized normally. I’m a gardener rather than an architect in terms of things. And so I can get a little bit further along in thinking about it in an architectural way. So for me it's a great way to start on things.

Dan Shipper

What are you using day-to-day AI-wise? Which models?

Kevin Kelly

I'm using mostly OpenAI right now.

Dan Shipper

Do you use any particular one? Are you using 4o, o1, o3?

Kevin Kelly

I have 1 pro.

Dan Shipper

Do you like it?

Kevin Kelly

Yeah. I mean, I've done some of it for very deep research and it's astounding. But I'm just reminded again that this is a skill. Getting the most from it is a skill that will take your 10,000 hours and it's definitely not just pushing the buttons. It's not just clicking. And so, it's very apparent to me that I need to spend a lot more time whispering and understanding how it is and what is how to use it. And so, my needs right now are not so that I'm using that level of research every day.

Dan Shipper

Do you have specific examples of when you've used it for research that it has blown you away?

Kevin Kelly

I did something, and this is a little bit of something I've been meaning to write about, which is, I had this fantasy. I had some observations that I realized that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Christopher Columbus were all alive at the same time. And I said, this is my conversation with AI. I said, imagine it's a snowy evening and all three are stuck in the same hotel together, and they have a conversation. Give me the conversation based on your writings and or their interests and their personalities and their. And so they did the conversation and I said, that was amazing. But, they got along so well. They decided to collaborate on a project. What would that project be? And this was the AI's idea. The AI's idea was that they would want to start a new city in the new world that was based around science and religious freedom. And I said, okay start writing Wikipedia articles about this and we'll start filling it in.

And then we had characters and peoples and histories. And then I was starting to tell research stories based on these characters. And then I introduced other things like other contemporaries like Queen Victoria who was alive at the same time, used the main rival trying to take down the city. They reached China 10 years before the Portuguese, and then they would bring all the books from China. And so I was just making this bigger and bigger thing—world building. And I started 10 different novels from it and then I had them synthesize and iron out all the contradictions between the novels and make a big epic saga.

And then I had it making book covers and writing the marketing materials. And the point of all this is that I'm not gonna show it to anybody because I don't need to. The joy of creating it was better than reading it. It was the audience of one. And so what I'm hypothesizing is a lot of the generative stuff, the 50 million images that are generated each day with AI, 99.999 percent have an audience of one, they're generated for the pleasure of the co-creator. And this idea of people will be making feature length movies for themselves, and the pleasure will be in the generating of the movie. You'll be directing the movie for yourself and anyway. So that was a project I was using because the degree of historical realism and fantasy was mind-bending.

Dan Shipper

That's really cool. I love that. It seems like there's an interesting line from 1000 True Fans to an audience of one. How have you thought about that?

(00:40:00)

Kevin Kelly

Well, of course there's no economic model for the audience of one.

Dan Shipper

There is one for OpenAI.

Kevin Kelly

You're right. Exactly. I think that this is the abundance mindset where you have the time to do this. So I think this is not so much a business or someone's career. I think this is a kind of a different form of entertainment or self-expression. It's just like Sunday painting or keeping a journal or someone doing ice skating. It's a form of self-expression, relaxation, enjoyment, and entertainment. So it's closer to entertainment than it is to actually a career.

Dan Shipper

It reminds me a little bit of— Are you familiar with active imagination?

Kevin Kelly

No.

Dan Shipper

It’s a part of Jungian psychotherapy. The idea being, you can do active imagination where you take a dream that you've had recently and you sort of re-enter the dream world while you're waking. You explore some of the archetypes and themes, either by writing them out or just exploring them to and with yourself. And in doing that, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be a little bit more latent in your psyche. So the fact that you're playing around with these characters and these novels are going in different directions or whatever. The decisions that you're making might say something to you about what you're processing or what you're currently thinking about that? In addition to just being really fun, it might tell you something about yourself.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, so it may be something like that. In fact, I mean, I think there will be very, very good AI therapists. And maybe to the extent that we may not even make that distinction. Maybe some particular AI companions, AI buddies, AI partners. We'll perform some of that and people will use them in that capacity even though they're maybe not nominated for that. And again, this is something else I've been saying. I think people are gonna be shocked by the degree of emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs. And some people will be very, very close to these on an always-on basis and very dependent on them to do their best.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. One thing that I don't know if you saw but just came out today, a couple hours ago.

Kevin Kelly

No, I haven't seen it. I’ve been on podcasts all day. What happened?

Dan Shipper

Well, you're in for a treat when you get off the podcast grind. But OpenAI released a new memory system for ChatGPT. So previously ChatGPT you could access it to save memories, but it would like to do it when it was really explicitly told to and when it really thought, okay, this is definitely something I need to store. But what the new memory system does is it is able to access all the past history of all your chats that are relevant automatically. So you can ask things like, what do you know about me from all of our chats that I might not know about myself. And it will just go through all these historical chats and tell you a lot of really interesting things. I've been playing around. I was playing around with it all day before we got on the show. I think you'll really like it. And I think of that sort of emotional attachment point. I wanna use something that feels like it knows me. Sure. I get more attached to it. And, I personally think that's really good. But there’s trade-offs obviously, and I'll be curious to see how that changes, how we relate to each other too over the next couple years.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah. That’s cool.

Dan Shipper

I've noticed that you're also doing a lot of tweeting with what looks like AI-generated images. Are you using native image gen for that? I think you're mostly Midjourney?

Kevin Kelly

Midjourney, yeah, which for me, I just have a habit of— It's comfortable. I know DALL-E— I mean, not DALL-E. The chat now has some, which I've tried and it's pretty good. But I just actually liked the public aspect of the Midjourney Discord where it was a huge quick learning curve because you were seeing what the prompts other people were doing and how you could get there. And I liked that public aspect of it.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I'm curious if we zoom back out, you've seen a lot of different technology waves. I think one of the interesting things about this particular one is, how scared people are and that's probably been true to some extent of previous ones. But I think in a lot of ways, like with mobile, it was like people didn't even care. It just wasn't even on their minds for a while, at least in my lifetime. And I'm curious what you've learned about seeing all these different ways come and go, what you've learned about the future and how to think about the future.

Kevin Kelly

That's a pretty big question. The first thing I think about is all the places that I was wrong.

Dan Shipper

Where were you wrong?

Kevin Kelly

Oh, so many, so many times. I was very wrong about VR. Jaron Lanier showed me VR in ‘87—something like that—in his lab. And I was completely blown away. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. This is amazing. And to be clear, the VR that we had back then, which was 30–40 years ago, it's crazy. I can't remember. It's a lot of years ago. Many decades is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that that was multimillion dollars and it was now $100. That's the main difference. It was not that it was actually that much better. Now it is. It is better. It's not a million times better, but it's a million times cheaper. And I've been very, very surprised about how resistant, how slow that has been because I really expected that to take off. I was wrong about eBay, just as a trivial example, I thought— I don't get who would use this? And I just didn't have the imagination to see it. And then I'm trying to think of other examples. I was early to blockchain, but I didn't think Bitcoin was really going to be much. I didn't understand. I didn't foresee the way in which it became this store of value. And I expected like everyone else that it could be used for micropayments. But I didn't understand, or we didn't appreciate it. We didn't know how expensive it was going to be to do processing. And so my expectations about the role of blockchain, I also thought that we would have more of a headway into things that were not financial and again, so blockchain became completely overwhelmed by the amount of money in it, and it became about money and finance. And I always thought that it would be used for things that had nothing to do with finance and that really didn't happen. So that's when I think about what I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true.

Dan Shipper

Well if we go back to those specific cases, it seems like there is one case where you're like, this has definitely got a future and two other cases where you're like, I don't think these are really that great. And what do you think you missed? Let's talk about the first one. You're like, this definitely has a future. What do you draw from that? What do you think you missed there that made it much harder than you expected to get people to adopt it?

Kevin Kelly

I think technically it required a lot of biology and understanding or being able to work with biological things. Rather than just our mind. you are focusing on your eyes. You have just the weight of the thing on your head. There's just a lot of biological things in addition to the hardware, things you have—hardware, biology—and that is just going to go slower.

(00:50:00)

And so one of the things I take from that is I think the arrival of robots is gonna take a lot longer than people think because, of the power of the necessity of— We have a 25 watt supercomputer and a quarter horsepower engine and there's no way we can do all that kind of stuff with that kind of efficiency anywhere close to that. So the amount of power that we need to either compress or to eliminate by making more efficient things is a huge gap. And so that, again, that physicality of it, particularly around our bodies and stuff, or near the scale of our bodies, I think, is gonna be a lot slower. And that's what I've taken away from the thing that, what I've learned about VR is that it's going to take a lot more time than just making AI.

Dan Shipper

Well that's interesting. because I was gonna bring up AI as an interesting parallel example where it also took a lot longer to do AI than we thought it would, but then it just all seemed to suddenly happen in like. 10 years. And I'm curious what you think the leading indicators are for something like, okay, so AI didn't work for 50 years and then suddenly in 2010 or so, it started to— There was some glimmers of hope and then ChatGPT a couple years ago as like, really, wow, this is a thing. In VR, if we wanted to measure where we are in that cycle, do you have a thought for that?

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, I mean, you could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment where there's some technical breakthrough, in the lenses or focusing or something, or projection that allows for that. So it's interesting too that the LLMs were kind of not working on reasoning directly. They were doing language translation and they noticed that there was some reasoning happening in language translation, which was completely unexpected. And maybe the key technology for VR and AR will come from somewhere else, but it hasn't happened yet. It doesn't look like it's happening, right now. So AI is a 50-year overnight success.

Dan Shipper

And what about going back to the other two examples—so eBay and blockchain of, hey, this isn't really that interesting.

Kevin Kelly

Right? So eBay. I think with the auction stuff, and I think the only reason why eBay worked is that people move beyond the auction. I use eBay all the time, and I've never used auctions. I just have no patience for it. And so I think the idea that it was this idea that it was auctions and that I didn't connect to and I was never really interested and I could be wrong. But for me, eBay's only now succeeded because most people aren't using the auctions, but I don't know if that's really true or not. Do you use auctions on eBay?

Dan Shipper

I got really into eBay when I was like 10 and I was like, I wanna sell everything in my dad's garage.

Kevin Kelly

Did you?

Dan Shipper

I didn't end up doing it because selling things online as a 10-year-old was a complicated situation. But I was really into it for that reason. But I've never really bought anything on eBay. I’ve never bid.

Kevin Kelly

So eBay is actually very, very useful. It's kinda like, there's Amazon and then there's Alibaba and then there's eBay, which is sort of like all the things that either aren't officially for sale or the way out of stock or outta print, or they're totally obscure. And so for me, if I can't find it on Amazon, you look at Alibaba and then you're onto eBay. Etsy is another level, which is like handmade stuff, but eBay's really good for really obscure stuff. And then they do have the option of auction, but I never used it. But anyway, so for me, the thing was this idea of auctioning for everything didn't seem like that was gonna work. But for a while it did, and that was just me personally, just not being much of a bargainer type.

Dan Shipper

I guess you can't win ‘em all. I know you have a hard stop, Kevin. It was really great to get a chance to chat. Thank you so much. Would love to do this again soon.

Kevin Kelly

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Great things and, I'm glad there's another Annie Dillard fan.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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