#84 — Landscapes of Mind

Today I'm speaking with Kevin Kelly. Kevin helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor for his first seven years, so he knows a thing or two about digital media, and he's written for the New York Times, the Economist, Science, Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

His previous books include out of control.

New rules for the new economy, cool tools, and what technology wants. And his most recent book is the inevitable understanding the twelve technological forces that will shape our future. And Kevin and I focused on this book and then spent much of the conversation talking about AI, the safety concerns around it, the nature of intelligence, the concept of the singularity, the prospect of artificial consciousness, and the ethical implications of that. And it was great. We don't agree about everything, but I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And now I bring you Kevin Kelly.

I am here with Kevin Kelly. Kevin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Oh, man, I'm joining this right now.

Listen, so many people have asked for you, and obviously I've known you and.

About you for many years.

I'll talk about how we first met.

At some point, you're so on top of recent trends that are subsuming everyone's lives that it's just great to get a chance to talk to you. Well, thanks for having me.

So before we jump into all these.

Common topics of interest, how would you describe what you do?

I package ideas, and they're often visual.

Packages, but I like to take ideas, and not necessarily my ideas, but other people's ideas, and present them in some way.

And that kind of is what I.

Did with magazines, beginning with the whole.

Earth Review, formerly called coevolution corally, the whole Earth catalogs, wired websites like cool tools, and my books.

So you've written these two recent books on technology, what technology wants, and your most recent one, the inevitable. How would you summarize the arguments you.

Put forward in those books.

At one level, I'm actually trying to devise a proto theory of know. Before Darwin's theory of biology, the evolutionary theory, there was a lot of naturalists.

And they had these curiosity cabinets where.

They would just collect biological specimens, and.

There was just one weird creature after another.

There was no framework for understanding how they were related or how they came about. And in many ways, technology is like that with us.

We have this sort of parade of one invention after another, and there's really.

No theory about how these different species.

Of technology are related and how they come together.

So at one level, my books were trying to devise a rough theory of their origins. And perhaps no surprise, cutting to the punchline, I see these as an extension and acceleration of the same forces that.

Are at work in natural evolution, or.

Cosmic evolution, for that matter.

And that if you look at it.

In that way, this system of technology.

That I call the technium is in.

Some ways the extension and acceleration of the self organizing forces that are running through the cosmos. So that's one thing that I'm trying to do.

And the second thing I'm trying to.

Do is to say that there is.

A deterministic element in this, both in.

Evolution and in technological systems.

And at the very high level, a lot of what we're going to see.

And have seen is following kind of.

A natural progression, and so therefore is.

Inevitable, and that we as humans, individuals.

And corporately, need to embrace these things.

In order to be able to steer the many ways in which we do have control and choice the character of these. So I would say, like, once you.

Invented electrical wires and you invented switches and stuff, you'd have telephones. And so the telephone was inevitable, but.

The character of the telephone was not inevitable. IPhone was not inevitable.

And we have a lot of choices.

About those, but the only way we.

Make those choices is by embracing and.

Using these things rather than prohibiting them.

So now you start the book, the.

Inevitable, with some very amusing stories about how clueless people were about the significance of the Internet.

In particular, I was vaguely aware of.

Some of these howlers, but you just wrap them all up in one paragraph.

And it's amazing how blind people were.

To what was coming.

So you cite time and newsweek saying.

That more or less the Internet would amount to nothing. One network executive said it would be.

The CB radio of the 90s.

There was a wired writer who bought the domain name for McDonald's, McDonald's dot, and couldn't give it away to McDonald's because they couldn't see why it would.

Ever be valuable to them. Now.

I don't recall being quite that clueless myself, but I'm continually amazed at my inability to see what's coming here. And if you had told me five years ago that I would soon be.

Spending much of my time podcasting, I.

Would have said, what's a podcast? And if you had told me what.

A podcast was, essentially describing it as.

On demand radio, I would have been absolutely certain that there was no way.

I was going into radio. Just, it would not apply. I feel personally no ability to see what's coming.

Why do you think it is so.

Difficult for most people to see into even the very near future here?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't think I have a good.

Answer about why we find it hard to imagine the future, but it is true that the more we know about.

That, in other words, the experts in.

A certain field are often the ones.

Who are most blinded by the changes. We did this thing at wired called.

Reality check, and we would poll different experts and nonexperts in some future things.

Like whether they're going to use laser.

Drilling in dentistry or flying cars and stuff like that, and they would have dates.

And when these came around later on.

In the future, it was the experts who were always underestimating who are, I.

Guess, overestimating when things were going to happen.

They were more pessimistic.

And it was sort of the people who.

So the people who knew the most about things were often the ones that were most wrong. I think it's kind of like we know too much and we find it hard to release and believe things that seem impossible.

The other observation I would make about the things that have surprised me the most in the last 30 years, and.

I think the things that will continue.

To surprise us in the next 30.

Years all have to do with the fact that the things that are most surprising are actually things are done in.

Collaboration at a scale that we not.

Seen before, like things like Wikipedia, Facebook.

Or even cell phones and smartphones to.

Some extent, that basically we are kind.

Of organizing work and collaboration at a.

Scale that was just really unthinkable before. And that's where a lot of these surprises have been originating, is our ability to collaborate in real time in scales that were just unthinkable before, and so they seemed impossible.

And for me, most of the surprises.

Have had that connection.

Well, I know you and I want.

To talk about AI, because I think.

That'S an area where we'll find some.

I think significant overlap, but also some.

Disagreement, and I want to spend most.

Of our time talking about that.

But I do want to touch on.

Some of the issues you raise in.

The inevitable, because you divide the book into these twelve trends.

I'm sure some of those will come back around in