AI, Robots and the Future of Tech

TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:03 – 00:00:28:22
Kevin Kelly
The main use of AI-s right now is in coding and that I would have put kind of like at the last end of what they were useful for. Someone was saying the other day that the image of the world in the future was that the AIS would take out the garbage so that you could write poetry, and it’s turning out that the eyes are writing poetry, and you’re gonna have to take out the garbage.

00:00:28:24 – 00:00:54:19
Alex Cleanthous
Today on the Growth Manifesto podcast, we’re speaking with Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, a bestselling author and one of the most original thinkers on the future of technology, artificial intelligence and human progress. Kevin’s been ahead of the curve for decades, predicting the rise of the internet, exploring the deeper implications of AI and robotics, and even writing about decentralized systems before Bitcoin existed.

00:00:54:21 – 00:01:13:14
Alex Cleanthous
In this episode, we unpack how AI and robots are going to reshape the way we live and work. What Bitcoin signals about the next chapter of the internet, and why Kevin believes that optimism is not just a mindset, it’s a strategy for building the future. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and make sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they’re released.

00:01:13:16 – 00:01:33:07
Alex Cleanthous
Now let’s get into it. So how much have you seen technology shift over the last 30 years since the founding of the wired magazine? Because I was a person who read wired magazine every single, month for a decade. And so you’ve been around for a while. How much of things, shifted in 30 years?

00:01:33:09 – 00:01:35:14
Kevin Kelly
Five out of ten.

00:01:35:16 – 00:01:40:21
Alex Cleanthous
The only five of the years well, been a shift. Is that what you’re saying?

00:01:40:23 – 00:01:43:21
Kevin Kelly
How would you like to give the. What kind of answer are you looking for?

00:01:43:23 – 00:02:11:20
Alex Cleanthous
How much are you saying? Things have shifted. I mean, early 90s. I remember, The matrix came out and that looked like it was the future. And I actually saw as part of, the biography that, your book Out of Control, actually was, required reading, for people on the matrix. Right. And so you saw things like at that time that were, well, us that seemed to be coming to fruition in 2025.

00:02:11:22 – 00:02:20:12
Alex Cleanthous
What did you say back then? And how much of that, is coming into kind of like how the world is operating right now?

00:02:20:14 – 00:02:27:07
Kevin Kelly
Maybe if you’re asking, is this the future that I expected?

00:02:27:09 – 00:02:32:13
Alex Cleanthous
Is this. Yeah, that is a good question. Yeah. So is this the future that you expected?

00:02:32:19 – 00:03:05:18
Kevin Kelly
In some ways, maybe some of the technology is, but in other ways, the actual wider world. It’s absolutely not. Stuart Brand has a saying which says that, this present moment was once the unimaginable future. And that’s so true because I was involved with dozens and dozens and dozens of scenarios making in the 90s for corporate America.

00:03:05:21 – 00:03:35:00
Kevin Kelly
So I worked with a group that was producing scenarios of the future for corporate America, you know, Disneys and the Codex and the, ABC’s of the world. And then not one single one of them was the scenario of today ever considered? Because had you presented what is going on today? Nobody would have believed you. It would have been dismissed as ridiculous.

00:03:35:02 – 00:04:03:24
Kevin Kelly
So in that sense, no, this future was not the expected future. Even technologically, we might have had some AI by now. That was sort of expected, but I also expected that there would have been augmented reality by now, and that hasn’t happened. Also, I probably would have expected that there would be flying cars by now. And they kind of tried to happen, but haven’t happened at the same time.

00:04:04:01 – 00:04:15:02
Kevin Kelly
There are maybe more drone wars than I would have imagined. So I would say, you know, I’m five out of ten.

00:04:15:04 – 00:04:16:17
Alex Cleanthous
The five out of ten.

00:04:16:19 – 00:04:24:00
Kevin Kelly
In terms of the expected future versus the future that we actually have.

00:04:24:02 – 00:04:32:11
Alex Cleanthous
So what has happened that you didn’t expect to happen, that you’re happy that, that that’s happened?

00:04:32:14 – 00:05:02:07
Kevin Kelly
I did not expect to happen. I think we’re a little bit ahead in the AI reasoning department. I think the ability of the AI to reason is happening faster than I thought it would. Given the pace that we were on, you know, like even 3 or 4 years ago, if you would suggested that I would be now where they are, that that didn’t seem reasonable, given the slow pace that we were going.

00:05:02:08 – 00:05:35:12
Kevin Kelly
So I certainly expected AIS to be coming on, but they’re a little bit ahead of. The reasoning is ahead. And I also did not guess that they would have been most useful for coders. The main use of AIS right now is in coding and that I would have put kind of like at the last end of what they were useful for someone.

00:05:35:12 – 00:06:02:01
Kevin Kelly
Someone was saying the other day that, the image of of the world in the future was that, the AIS would take out the garbage, that you could write poetry. And it’s turning out that the eyes are writing poetry, and you’re gonna have to take out the garbage. So garbage out. So, so so there kind of a little bit of an aversion of, like, what’s going to be affected most by AI in the beginning.

00:06:02:03 – 00:06:18:18
Kevin Kelly
And it was it would be that they’re writing code and poetry, but they still can’t open a door. So, so that was it was that’s, the unexpected thing was that they’re so good at poetry and writing code.

00:06:18:20 – 00:06:36:08
Alex Cleanthous
That’s really interesting. And it seemed that up until a few years ago, up until I think ChatGPT came onto the scene, everyone was thinking of AI would, it would disrupt first the blue collar roles, right? But now it seems to be disrupting the white collar roles first.

00:06:36:09 – 00:06:38:07
Kevin Kelly
Exactly. That’s what I meant by taking out the garbage.

00:06:38:10 – 00:06:55:23
Alex Cleanthous
Yeah, but that’s so interesting. So how did that happen? Because everyone was expecting this one thing and then, like, cut it, just cut it magically. The LMS just became super smart by predicting the next kind of word that someone was going to. Yeah.

00:06:55:23 – 00:07:18:04
Kevin Kelly
I mean, they were they were, they were they were invented to do language translation. And out of that came reasoning, which was a shock. And now that reasoning came the ability to write code, which was another shock. But of course, in retrospect, code is a kind of a language, and they’re kind of doing the translation. So those things were the unexpected, in the last decade.

00:07:18:06 – 00:07:38:05
Alex Cleanthous
So like, I think that this shift, I think it was in 2023, ChatGPT was launched a couple of years ago, I think maybe a year and a half ago now it feels like maybe a longer. It seems that there was some initial buzz, and then there’s a segment of society now who embraces ChatGPT and Geminis and all that, right?

00:07:38:07 – 00:08:02:10
Alex Cleanthous
And there’s a segment who doesn’t right now, in your TEDx talk. So you talk about the importance of optimism. So to the people who haven’t embraced it, can you talk through why they should and why they should be optimistic about it? Because I do feel like there is a bit of a, separation between societies and that there’s one that is going all in on AI and this one is saying, hey, I want to stay kind of organic and natural.

00:08:02:10 – 00:08:03:15
Kevin Kelly
And yeah.

00:08:03:17 – 00:08:06:08
Alex Cleanthous
I prefer to stay human.

00:08:06:10 – 00:08:38:00
Kevin Kelly
So I would separate those two out. The embracing the optimism. And I would say, first of all, that, I think everybody should try the AI. I think you should have some familiarity with it. I don’t think it’s actually that useful for everybody necessarily right now. So there’s no commandment that you need to keep using something you don’t find useful, but you should give it a good try out.

00:08:38:03 – 00:09:10:01
Kevin Kelly
And also, once you try it out, you should be aware that it’s going to change very rapidly and that, you need to try it every six months or something before you dismiss it so that I think the reason why you want to try and embrace it at that level is that’s how we steer it. There’s a fallacy called think ism that I call think ism, which is this idea that we can solve problems, we can anticipate the future by thinking about it.

00:09:10:03 – 00:09:31:17
Kevin Kelly
And when you have things that are complex enough, you can’t figure things out by thinking about them. You have to actually use them. You have to put them in the real world. And and it’s the actual use on a day to day basis that we figure out what they are good for, what they’re not good for, and we arrive at things that we can’t get to just by thinking about them.

00:09:31:20 – 00:09:57:01
Kevin Kelly
I think ism is something that middle aged men who think a lot think that it’s useful for, and you can’t just get where you want to go by thinking about them. You have to use things. And so we want to try these things out and use them in order to find out what they’re about, in order to find out what they’re good for, in order to find out what they’re bad for and where the harms are and where the benefits.

00:09:57:01 – 00:10:20:04
Kevin Kelly
We can’t get there by thinking about them. And so if you want to steer the technology, you’ve got to use the technology. And if you don’t use it, you don’t get to steer it. And thinking about it, it’s not going to make much difference. So you don’t want to think about AI, you want to use AI. And it’s through the use you’ll be able to steer it, make you use whatever it is.

00:10:20:06 – 00:10:59:00
Kevin Kelly
And if you aren’t using it as fine, then you don’t necessarily get to steer it. Okay. You don’t have to use it, but if you’re not using it, you don’t get to steer it. So that’s the embrace part. The optimism part is that all the good things in your room right now your piano, the guitar, the microphone, the headsets, the lights, these are all at once strange ideas and possible ideas that somebody saw in their mind could be possible and believed, could work and that’s a form of optimism.

00:10:59:02 – 00:11:28:20
Kevin Kelly
To imagine something that isn’t, that could be, and to imagine that it could really happen, and then to work, to make it happen. And that means that that our present today has been shaped by optimists of the past. And if you want to make a future in the world that’s good and friendly, that you want to live in, it’s not going to happen accidentally.

00:11:28:22 – 00:11:54:16
Kevin Kelly
It’s not going to happen inadvertently. It’s not going to happen while you stand there. It’s going to require having a vision of what that world looks like. If having a vision of what the AI that works looks like, of having a vision of the communicator so you can make an iPhone, it’s having something and believing that it’s possible, and that’s optimism.

00:11:54:18 – 00:12:23:10
Kevin Kelly
And so the future is going to be shaped by the optimists today. And if you want to shape the future, you have to be more optimistic than you are ordinarily. You have to be as optimistically optimistic as possible to envision a world that you want, and to believe that it’s possible. Otherwise it’s not going to happen. So I see optimism as an asset that you choose to acquire.

00:12:23:13 – 00:12:46:09
Kevin Kelly
It’s a deliberate choice of not it’s not a temperament per se. There are people who are temperamentally optimistic, but you can choose to be more optimistic than you are to begin with. You can improve, and your optimism is learned, and you want to be as optimistic as you can in order to be someone who shapes the future.

00:12:46:11 – 00:13:05:21
Alex Cleanthous
So do you think it’s past the point of no return right now with AI, that the people who are choosing to not be optimistic are going to be at the beckon of the ones who are, because the ones who are going to be identifying solutions to problems that haven’t been kind of thought about before, experimenting and kind of just changing the world around.

00:13:05:23 – 00:13:10:02
Kevin Kelly
No, AI has not even started yet.

00:13:10:04 – 00:13:12:15
Alex Cleanthous
Say more please.

00:13:12:17 – 00:13:24:06
Kevin Kelly
In 30 years from now, I will look back and we’ll say there was no AI in 2025. So? So it’s not too late. I’m saying it’s not too late. I’m saying has not even started.

00:13:24:08 – 00:13:47:15
Alex Cleanthous
Where do you see it evolving to like someone who’s who’s been pretty good on predictions and, you know, like who wrote the books and magazines and who’s posting on blogs and we’ve been talking about this stuff for 30 plus, years. You’re pretty accurate, right? Like, like I would say even kind of 50% is a very high accuracy for the future of like where technology could go, just to be clear.

00:13:47:15 – 00:14:10:12
Alex Cleanthous
Right. So this is the 90s. This is before the like this at the very start of the internet. Right. This was at the very start was 93. I remember I got the internet, the sound of the phone like I like this was then. And so from that point to even envisaging AI, that’s pretty that’s very impressive, Kevin. So I take a lot of, like like I respect the vision.

00:14:10:12 – 00:14:22:14
Alex Cleanthous
And so from today, you know, how do you see the future in the next 30 years if this is the start or this is not even the start? Yeah. This is, you know, just before the start of AI.

00:14:22:16 – 00:14:57:03
Kevin Kelly
The main mind shift that I would, suggest is that we’ll be talking about AIS, plural, that there’ll be hundreds, if not thousands of different species of AIS who are all engineered to do different things. And some of them will be very primitive and others will be incredibly complex, and there will be an ecosystem of them kind of like, rainforests or coral reef of all of them codependent on each other.

00:14:57:03 – 00:15:23:13
Kevin Kelly
And there’ll be some very large scale AIS that are conglomerates of sub AI, which is actually already happening even within the current models. They have a mixture of experts where they they have a bunch of different kinds of AIS. And so we’ll continue to have this sort of, collective aggregate compounding aspect of it and will compound different AI to do different things.

00:15:23:15 – 00:15:49:18
Kevin Kelly
And they will be regulated and managed in different manner, just like we have different rules for different kind of machines. We don’t have the machine, we have machines. Industrial age. It’s not about one big machine is ruling everything. It’s about hundreds of machines. And so we, we, we manage and regulate jet engines differently from watches, different from hammers, different from computers versus farm machinery.

00:15:49:20 – 00:16:18:18
Kevin Kelly
These are all different species. And we’re going to have many varieties of minds engineered to do different things. Some will be very small, some will be very large, and they’ll make an ecosystem. And for most of them, or for all of the AIS we make, none of them will think exactly like a human. They’re what I call alien intelligences.

00:16:18:22 – 00:17:14:23
Kevin Kelly
They’re alien. They think differently and that’s their main benefit, is because they don’t think like us to together with them, our minds. Plus the alien AI minds can achieve things that our minds alone cannot, vice versa. Together we can do things that they can’t do, and there will be lots of things that they can do by themselves. It’s kind of like, a second nature, kind of an ecosystem of different entities and agents that are, that are engineered to do different things and, a common trope is that you make an AI that can create an AI smarter than itself, and it cascades into this instant godhood.

00:17:15:00 – 00:17:45:17
Kevin Kelly
And, I think that is, that’s a fantasy. It’s a romantic fantasy. It’s a mythological. It’s almost a religious, statement because we don’t have any evidence of that. So far. And it’s the speed that people find scary that that all of a sudden there is a presence that’s bigger than us. And, we’ll take over. And there’s several things about that that I think are misunderstood.

00:17:45:17 – 00:18:15:06
Kevin Kelly
And one is this idea that intelligence is like decibels. It goes on. I think intelligence is not an element. It’s a compound. It’s made up of a bunch of different things. It’s in other words, it’s not a single dimension. It’s multi-dimensional. There are all kinds of factors. And we already see that in order to really achieve what we want, just in the current models, we have to have a mixture of different kinds of thinking.

00:18:15:08 – 00:18:51:08
Kevin Kelly
And so there isn’t a ladder, there isn’t a sense of something being a ladder of things. It’s a much bigger space in which you cannot optimize everything. This is the engineering realism. There’s no way that you can optimize everything. You can’t say, I want to make an animal that has optimized everything about animal ness. It’s both the biggest and the smallest is both the fastest and the most flexible.

00:18:51:08 – 00:19:16:19
Kevin Kelly
It’s the most economical and the most powerful. That’s just not reality. Reality is about trade offs. And there’s always trade offs. And when you make it AI, you’re going to be trade offs. So the idea that you can make one AI that’s optimized everything, that is just a fantasy, what it is, is if to optimize one thing, you’re going to have to trade off something else over there and there’s going to be another AI, they could do this thing in the other direction.

00:19:16:21 – 00:19:43:04
Kevin Kelly
And so the same thing with a machine, you say, I’m going to make the most powerful machine that optimizes everything about machines. No, you can make it. You can make a Swiss Army knife. That’s the general thing that’s mediocre in everything. That’s what you can do. So. So I refute and deny and contest the idea that this happens instantly.

00:19:43:06 – 00:20:12:13
Kevin Kelly
I think we will have enough time, even if the frontier models happen and invent very fast. So right as they are right now. So every day there’s an announcement about something new. So the frontier is very fast but the adoption is very slow. Right now it’ll take us a decade just to absorb the current AI that we have.

00:20:12:15 – 00:20:38:02
Kevin Kelly
It’s like we have time. We have time to it because just because it exists doesn’t mean that it’s going to take over. Because we’re not letting it taking over. We don’t with the AI that we have hasn’t taken over. Why? Because people don’t find it useful. Because because it the absorption of it, the use of it takes time.

00:20:38:04 – 00:21:21:10
Kevin Kelly
And so the idea of the urgency is I think the urgency makes people stupid. The urgency because it’s not true, because there is no urgency. In 30 years, we’ll have time to adjust to the AI that we make. And there could be multiple of them. Most of them will have a relationship with us. I will also say that in 30 years, we will be adding emotions to the AI as they will be capable not just of intelligence, of thinking, but also of emotions, perplexity, surprise, anger and love.

00:21:21:12 – 00:21:44:09
Kevin Kelly
And our bonding with these will be very, very strong. People will be shocked in ten years from now about the degree that people will bond with the AI agents who know themselves. People will fall in love with them. People will have very, very strong relationships like they do with their pets and and even stronger where they will really grieve for them.

00:21:44:13 – 00:22:12:12
Kevin Kelly
They will they will feel incredibly close to them. And because they’re going to respond with emotions because that’s a very, very powerful interface. So for me, the next big hysteria is going to be people freaking out about the emotional nature of the AI’s, not their intelligence, but the fact that people are very attracted to them, that they’re become friends.

00:22:12:14 – 00:22:45:20
Kevin Kelly
Constant companionship. I’ve already seen some young people who have always on AI, who always have it on, who are talking to this all the time already, and it’s uncanny. It’s a little disturbing the way in which they’re dependent on it. And we might say, well, that’s an addiction. And it is. But there are people today who go through life addicted to eyeglasses, who could not function without their eyeglasses.

00:22:45:22 – 00:23:01:11
Kevin Kelly
Are we upset by that? No. What? We just have to make sure they. So they always have glasses. You don’t say, well, you can’t have glasses because you’re going to be addicted to it. No, we say we just make sure you always have glasses. Maybe you wear context. That’s one way to always have them. And it’s a similar to electricity.

00:23:01:11 – 00:23:28:20
Kevin Kelly
If we turn the electricity off for a week, people would just we wouldn’t know what to do. We couldn’t do very much. So. So we’re wholly dependent on electricity. And the solution is make sure the electricity never goes off. And we’ll have I if people will be addicted to it. And the solution is not to prevent that, but to make sure the AI is never turned off us.

00:23:28:20 – 00:23:59:23
Kevin Kelly
My vision is is that we’ll have thousands of different varieties of AIS, and some of them will be AIS that we invent to help us solve problems like quantum gravity, or figuring out what dark matter is, or workable fusion. Economical fusion problems that we cannot solve with our own minds. So we invent these other minds to work with us, to do things that we cannot do alone.

00:24:00:00 – 00:24:31:02
Kevin Kelly
And I think just as a lot of computers are involved in the creation process for a lot of creators, whether they use them for photoshopping or whatever, a lot of the the generative AI tools will be part of the creative process for people who are being innovative, that they will work with these interns, they will work with these assistants, their work with these agents and doing whatever they’re doing.

00:24:31:06 – 00:25:01:21
Kevin Kelly
And that just becomes the common. It’s like having power tools. It’s like using electricity. Yes. That’s sort of what I do. And yes, you can make a painting by hand without using electricity by candlelight. And some people will. That’s good. And there will be people who will generate music without any computers or AI, and that’s fine. But a lot of creators will be assisted by these agents in all different capacities.

00:25:01:23 – 00:25:14:08
Kevin Kelly
And they’ll they’ll make things that we can’t even imagine right now. So together, these kinds of minds to us will have versions of things that we couldn’t get to ourselves.

00:25:14:10 – 00:25:35:04
Alex Cleanthous
So it’s like the brainstorming kind of process where there’s something that happens between kind of two entities, just when they have a conversation about an idea that’s like the third entity. Right? So it’s almost like the AI facilitates that process and helps you to find that part between the AI and between how you think about things like, like, is that a good way to think about it is kind of.

00:25:35:05 – 00:25:55:19
Kevin Kelly
This one, this one way and the other important way, which I don’t want to collect, and you reminded me of is that the Air Force be very, very instrumental in allowing us to collaborate between humans and a skill we’ve never been able to do before. Like, like, for instance, we like to have a collaboration of a million humans working in real time together.

00:25:55:21 – 00:26:15:15
Kevin Kelly
And right now that’s really almost impossible to do. Just keeping track of it. And part of it is like there’s a mismatch where the person human who knows the most about what needs to be solved next is not in the room. And so you have to have some way to match the talents with the current problem and making sure they get to it.

00:26:15:15 – 00:26:43:04
Kevin Kelly
And that’s something that I could do. I could be watching the whole thing is, oh, wait, this person knows here. He knows. He knows all about this. You’re now brought in and you solve this and then you go on to the next thing. So there we can invent new tools using AI and AI to make new tools that allow us not just to collaborate with the AIS, but to collaborate with other humans in a way that we’ve never done before.

00:26:43:06 – 00:27:00:12
Alex Cleanthous
At that level of scale. Yeah, that would be very interesting. It almost kind of feels like that’s happening by accident now, just through ChatGPT. The answers it comes up with probably has come from, the learning of, you know, like, like how many hundreds of millions of people kind is feeding it. Right? So it’s kind of on that pathway.

00:27:00:14 – 00:27:20:22
Alex Cleanthous
Right. Let’s talk about, the robotic part of things. Right. Because I think everyone saw recently the Tesla robot. Right. And this is an example of a robot. Like, I know the Boston Dynamics is like, has kind of the dogs in war and there’s all these different things. It feels like that’s where the starts to get.

00:27:20:22 – 00:27:39:10
Alex Cleanthous
Maybe a bit scarier is when you combine, you combine the AI that has all the emotions and has all of the thoughts and has all of the understandings of how to manipulate someone or not. Right, or how to understand someone, you know, and then all the history from talking to it for like ten years before the robots came.

00:27:39:12 – 00:27:57:19
Alex Cleanthous
Yeah. Where do you see that area going? Because that’s an area I have no idea about. Like I can have some like, like some guesses on AI, but I don’t know, just where the robots are going to like, is that something that I’m essentially everyone is going to have at home? Are they going to be there like like how kind of humanoid are they going to get?

00:27:57:21 – 00:28:33:17
Kevin Kelly
You know, going back to this, this analogy that it’s the, white collar workers occupations who seem to be most replaceable, whereas the blue collar physical things aren’t, because robots are really, really hard to do. And that’s still true. There is a special, a spatial intelligence that they’re not capable of right now. The earliest limbs had a real difficulty with near and far, and ordering and some fundamental things that even a toddler human would understand.

00:28:33:17 – 00:29:01:03
Kevin Kelly
That’s because they were disembodied. And so if you give them the ideas, if you give them bodies, they would learn this. And some people have theories that even consciousness may require a body and we don’t even know. But making bodies is actually hard. And the AI part of it, the intelligence part of it, is almost not as difficult as the physical part.

00:29:01:05 – 00:29:42:16
Kevin Kelly
So one of the the, the, the challenges for, say a household robot or is the energy. So here, here you sitting right there. Me we have a 25 watt supercomputer and we have a quarter horsepower body with the current robots are megawatt brains and make a horsepower bodies. And that amount of power untethered is very, very, very difficult for us to do.

00:29:42:18 – 00:30:12:24
Kevin Kelly
So. The efficiency is super beyond having something that could work, even go for an hour without having to plug in, going for a day without needing a delivery power, unless it’s a massive, huge, humongous thing is the challenge. So there’s a bunch of very I must say, it’s not impossible. I’m just saying that this is going to be slow coming, because it’s the mechanical compression that there are bodies are done.

00:30:12:24 – 00:30:44:11
Kevin Kelly
The efficiency of our biological system is so evolved that coming close to it, and for a lot of robots, it’s not necessary in factories and stuff. They can be big, they can be monstrous. They don’t have to be anything like us. But in our homes, we want human scale things. We want things that we can interface. We want things that can work, walk through our doorways and climb our stairs and work in our kitchens, whatever it is.

00:30:44:11 – 00:31:12:08
Kevin Kelly
And that’s an incredible challenge. So, I expect them, but I don’t expect them immediately for like, power reasons, for just the necessary inventions, the innovations that we need to compress either to make it more efficient or to compress more power in the danger of just making them bigger, more capacity. A batteries is that you basically have a bomb.

00:31:12:13 – 00:31:33:11
Kevin Kelly
You have so much energy contained in a battery to run. You know, that the 100 horsepower that you need for the day that if something happens is going to blow up. And so, so to make them much more efficient.

00:31:33:13 – 00:31:55:13
Kevin Kelly
We’re a long way from that. We’re a long way from just the kind of efficiency we could certainly make, that kind of concentration of higher powers. But, we need, you know, different kind of motors. You have to have more things that are more like muscles that are more efficient. And so there’s going to come but not immediately.

00:31:55:15 – 00:32:16:23
Alex Cleanthous
And so assume that that can be figured out and that we can figure out, the battery part of it all, the, all the power part of it, once that is figured out, is that when it starts to just be unleashed at that point, like if they can figure out how to kind of maintain, you know, the robot is going for a whole day and it can sleep at night, you know, just like a human.

00:32:16:23 – 00:32:25:13
Alex Cleanthous
Right. Once that happens, is that like like, is that the point that the world starts to change how it looks at that point?

00:32:25:15 – 00:32:38:02
Kevin Kelly
It might, it might, I don’t know. It’s like, okay, what do you want your robot to do.

00:32:38:04 – 00:32:48:23
Alex Cleanthous
Like a barista at a coffee shop, for example? All right, or. Yeah. Yeah, you know what? I mean. Essentially, all the retail jobs ever, the people who get the tips, right. Them. Right. So that.

00:32:49:00 – 00:33:10:10
Kevin Kelly
So how many retail jobs are there? I don’t know, I mean, what percentage of the people are working in a barista? I think yes. You know, it might change it superficially, but I’m not sure how much you change. And by the way, most of the jobs that will replace would be jobs that people don’t really want to be doing.

00:33:10:12 – 00:33:27:01
Kevin Kelly
I mean, I can imagine there might be some number of people in the world who love being a barista and they would they would do that service, and people would probably pay a little premium to interact with the human.

00:33:27:03 – 00:33:32:13
Alex Cleanthous
I love that that that becomes like, the novelty as a human.

00:33:32:15 – 00:33:41:24
Kevin Kelly
As a human, you got to go this one because there’s a human serving. And for some reason they love this job and they’re getting paid well to do it. They’re supporting themselves.

00:33:42:03 – 00:33:47:04
Alex Cleanthous
And I like the chance that it might not be perfect. It might not be perfect once I like the risk.

00:33:47:06 – 00:34:12:01
Kevin Kelly
Right. Exactly. And so they’ll be that kind of equivalent. But most of the I was the same way with cooking. Most of the stuff will be done by robots of some sort, whether they’re humanoid or not. Working in McDonald’s. Hopefully, when one hopes that in 30 years most of the food and McDonald’s is not being made by underpaid, but it’s being done with robots, why would you care?

00:34:12:01 – 00:34:30:24
Kevin Kelly
You don’t ever see them. I mean, it’s like, yeah, sure. So yes, I think that, you know, you would go to McDonald’s and behind the scenes are robots cooking it. I mean, people would probably assume that they’re robots right now anyway. I don’t that part, you know, I’m not sure how much it’s going to change. How many robots do you want in your home?

00:34:31:01 – 00:34:58:03
Kevin Kelly
Do you need more than one? I don’t know, but I think a lot of the work in, say, warehouses and things, again, jobs that people don’t really want to do, really should be doing, done with, with AI robots. And I think people will feel relieved that it’s been done this way. I think it’s a shame that there’s any human whose job it is is to collect money.

00:34:58:05 – 00:35:20:23
Kevin Kelly
It’s like, that’s a waste of a human life. I really like the Amazon, version where you will you just wave your palm to pay for things. That’s brilliant. That’s that’s perfect. There’s there’s a there’s enough of a deliberateness to it that you can’t inadvertently be charged. You’ve got to show your palm and show your palm, and then you pay for it.

00:35:21:00 – 00:35:46:09
Kevin Kelly
Or even, you know, like even the Amazon whole powerful things where you didn’t have to pay, you just walked into your palm and you took what it is and you walked out the store. There’s so much, so many jobs that we don’t want humans to be wasting their lives doing that. I think that kind of an adjustment is going to is it’s not going to be as disruptive as people think.

00:35:46:11 – 00:36:04:08
Alex Cleanthous
And also think like like if you were to think about the iPhone, you know, you know, people upgrade their iPhone every year. The phone is perfectly fine. I’ll let you do that. I mean, it scratches on it, but now there’s like another version, right? The waste of upgrading a robot if everyone has a robot. And now there’s another version.

00:36:04:08 – 00:36:17:17
Alex Cleanthous
I mean, we don’t know where to put them, right? That’s going to be the next biggest challenge is kind of storing the upgrades or storing the ones that have kind of. Yes, storing the ones that haven’t been. I don’t I don’t oh.

00:36:17:19 – 00:36:47:14
Kevin Kelly
I mean, again, in the ideal system they’re totally recyclable. They’re just you recover the metal, you reforge it, you extract out things. So there’s absolutely no reason. Again, you want a biological model. You want to have an ecosystem and the ecosystem is is that there’s an entire category of industry that is recycling things. And they don’t have to be accumulated.

00:36:47:16 – 00:37:02:17
Kevin Kelly
They should be recycled as quickly as possible. In terms of the materials, it’s just rearranging the atoms. So if energy is as cheap as we could make it, we have robots recycling other robots. And all right.

00:37:02:17 – 00:37:04:22
Alex Cleanthous
That’s another job that they should be doing I understand.

00:37:04:24 – 00:37:28:10
Kevin Kelly
Right, right, right. And also I think over time, this is a this is something that we should be doing more and mandating it, which is, designed for recycle. So you, you are forcing companies to take into account the end of life of their products, where you not just maximizing the use of them, but their disposal and recycling, you have to take that into account.

00:37:28:14 – 00:37:50:11
Kevin Kelly
And so there’s there’s been ideas about requiring the, the manufacturers to absorb the cost of disposal in some ways. And so that gets them to have to think about how do we make this easy to recycle.

00:37:50:13 – 00:38:27:18
Alex Cleanthous
That’s interesting. And then it sounds like the AI and the robots are not going to overtake humanity. Right. It sounds like the human structure, the mind, the body is a pretty advanced thing. Just when you’re trying to replicate it is with machines and AI and so on. But where do you see humans participating in society? If all the jobs that you don’t want to do are basically now handled and all the jobs that you need to pay per hour, and that is kind of simple enough, I assume all of the employers are going to hire some robots because they work 24 hours a day, and then I have to pay them.

00:38:27:18 – 00:38:40:02
Alex Cleanthous
Yeah, right. So I assume that’s going to happen. So where do you, where does humanity go with that? Like is it more in the arts? Is it more in creative? Is it more in community? Like, how do you see the evolution of the world.

00:38:40:04 – 00:39:05:19
Kevin Kelly
Or all the above, all the above? And so if I gave you $1 billion with my magic wand, what do you do for tomorrow and the next day? And, you would do things that you, I mean, maybe some of the things you were doing, you you said, well, I could do them, but I just want to do them myself in terms of creating things for the pleasure of it.

00:39:05:19 – 00:39:28:11
Kevin Kelly
I think a lot of the creation that we’ll do will have an audience of one, that will do for the joy of the creating of it, not even just for the audience. I think a lot of what we would do is but hanging out with other humans and do stuff with them because it’s joyful. So, could people make a living doing it?

00:39:28:11 – 00:39:57:04
Kevin Kelly
Yes. I mean, I just suggested that there will be something that you might enjoy that you would almost pay to do, that you love doing so much and because human attention is the scarcity, and we’re always attracted to other humans. And so I think that even for as long as I can imagine, we’ll always be able to tell the difference between a human and a robot.

00:39:57:06 – 00:40:31:15
Kevin Kelly
And that’s because there really isn’t universal computation. That’s because the the substrate, the platform that the the thinking is happening on makes a difference to the outcome. And the only way to really have the kind of thought, that kind of sense of humor that the humans have is to run it on wetware, on a, tissue. If you’re running on silicon, it just behaves differently, and it’s going to think a little differently.

00:40:31:15 – 00:41:29:19
Kevin Kelly
It’s going to be like Spock, it’s going to be data. It’s going to be smart, conscious, but not quite us. And we are incredibly at ease with us. We even hang out with people of our own nationality first. Yeah, why? They’re just as smart. They’re just. We’re just more comfortable with someone who grew up in our part of the woods that we tend to hang out with them versus someone else who is equally as interesting and whatnot, because we will hang out with humans first, and probably even pay for the privilege of that over an AI android artificial alien who is interesting in many ways, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them, but

00:41:29:19 – 00:41:57:01
Kevin Kelly
they won’t be as valuable to us. And so, we’ll have economies built around people spending time with each other. You can you can go get a clean tastic therapist. Some of the best therapists in the world will be AIS. People will still pay for human therapists who may not be even as good, but they like that face to face.

00:41:57:03 – 00:42:10:12
Kevin Kelly
And so you’ll have both people. Will will have a human therapist and the AI therapist and and sometimes the human therapist will be working with an AI therapist themselves.

00:42:10:14 – 00:42:33:16
Alex Cleanthous
It’s really interesting to think about, like essentially all the places that it could touch, like for example, schooling, school education, who’s educating other teachers, other teachers, actual humans, other teachers actually kind of robots either, like, like individual lessons per student because now, you know, each student has like their own personalized AI that teaches them, integrates. And so it’s really fascinating.

00:42:33:18 – 00:42:56:17
Alex Cleanthous
One more big area to ask you about, like, for cryptocurrency. So back in the early 90s, you know, had you for saying something like this happening. Because I think, Bitcoin I think was 2008, if I’m correct, that was like 15 years after the launch of kind of wired magazine. So I’m just wondering like how much you saw that coming and then like, how fast were you on it and how many bitcoins do you have?

00:42:56:17 – 00:43:00:19
Alex Cleanthous
No. The third question I can just ignore, but like because a futurist.

00:43:00:21 – 00:43:10:20
Kevin Kelly
So, in my first book, which was published in 94 and I wrote in the early 90s, there’s a chapter on crypto.

00:43:10:22 – 00:43:12:04
Alex Cleanthous
In the early 90s.

00:43:12:06 – 00:43:46:03
Kevin Kelly
Before blockchain. Wow, there was crypto before blockchain. I had some Bitcoin, but I sold it. So I don’t have any more bitcoin. And I’m not that bullish on bitcoin. Because it’s basically kind of gambling. Because in my observation nobody spends bitcoin except if you’re in the underground, criminal market. But nobody’s spending bitcoin. It’s not a currency.

00:43:46:03 – 00:44:11:20
Kevin Kelly
It’s not being used in that way at all. There are, blockchain currencies that, you know, Ethereum and others that stablecoins that can be used. But Bitcoin is kind of a special case. It’s not going to go away except very slowly as people die off and they keep their secrets with them. So over time, less and less of the bitcoin will ever be spent because people who have it will die with it.

00:44:11:22 – 00:44:36:13
Kevin Kelly
And, so it, I think the idea of using blockchains and I have from the very beginning thought that there was a very interesting model for doing decentralized stuff. And there are a lot of people still working, true believers working on ways to figure out. But, but, but the thing about it is, it’s a lot more expensive than people.

00:44:36:13 – 00:45:06:07
Kevin Kelly
So the idea of having like, you know, micropayments and using it to pay for a couple cents hasn’t really worked out because it is computationally expensive to, to, to, to do. And so part of what crypto is looking for is still the killer app that, makes it useful. And so, you know, my, my whole family, my, you know, sons on the log were into crypto for a while.

00:45:06:07 – 00:45:15:01
Kevin Kelly
And here’s and I would say, look, I’m I’m willing to have a conversation about crypto with one caveat that we don’t talk about money.

00:45:15:03 – 00:45:18:13
Kevin Kelly
So talk about all the things you can do that again.

00:45:18:16 – 00:45:27:23
Alex Cleanthous
You do it, but don’t talk about so so you don’t think it’s going to be a currency as way, but it can change how things happen behind the scenes.

00:45:27:23 – 00:45:38:17
Kevin Kelly
So tell me all the values that it brings other than making money. So why don’t you take out making money from it? It’s a very short conversation.

00:45:38:19 – 00:45:48:11
Alex Cleanthous
I mean the original idea was that it would replace the monetary system and I think it did start to maybe take off, but then it just turned. That’s money right. Then it turned into like an asset hold.

00:45:48:13 – 00:46:14:01
Kevin Kelly
Talk about things it can do other than anything to do with finance or money. And there’s very there are some things, but so far they haven’t really proven to be economically feasible. And so tell me about the values of crypto other than financial. And so, and I do believe there are some so so I still have hope.

00:46:14:01 – 00:46:40:02
Kevin Kelly
I would say that the people who are working on, you know, Web3 ways of, you know, like the DAOs or as an example of crypto that wasn’t just about money, it was about organizing a way for a self-governing organization. That’s fantastic. I actually I actually was trying to get funded in the original Dao. The one that eventually collapsed.

00:46:40:08 – 00:46:54:04
Kevin Kelly
But, that’s where I think the promises there has yet to be realized, as far as I can see. Because.

00:46:54:06 – 00:47:16:20
Kevin Kelly
Organizations are much more than just the rules. And here’s, here’s one little thing I’ll say about this. The the one of the perceived advantages of having something good. Dao, which is a distributed, you know, autonomous organization, the idea was, is that you have this thing with immutable laws, so it can’t be hacked so they can fulfill its promise without the version.

00:47:16:24 – 00:47:39:13
Kevin Kelly
Well, the thing about making a like a smart contract, the thing about contracts is that in real life, they are always renegotiated all the time. There’s always things that come up that you want to be able to go. And so this idea of immutability, it’s actually not a feature, it’s a bug. For long time organizations.

00:47:39:15 – 00:47:41:19
Alex Cleanthous
Innovation needs that flexibility, right.

00:47:41:19 – 00:48:12:16
Kevin Kelly
It’s ability you have to and things happen that you haven’t foreseen at all. And how do you deal with that. And so so so that’s the rub is that, you know, theoretically in theory these things can be very useful. But when you actually try to put them in the world, the world is so unpredictable and uneven and ragged that you have these adjustments sort of work against us having this completely code driven world view.

00:48:12:18 – 00:48:37:06
Kevin Kelly
And so, so that’s, I think, where some of the challenges are of implementing crypto outside of finance. You know, and so within the world of finance will change things. Sure. I’m just not that interested in it. Because right now the problem with crypto is there was so much money involved that are disguised and obscured anything else about it.

00:48:37:08 – 00:48:42:23
Kevin Kelly
And it became very, very hard to even think about it without being overwhelmed by the amount of money that was flowing around.

00:48:43:00 – 00:49:03:22
Alex Cleanthous
Exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. And I do like that thinking. And what’s interesting of the three kind of topics I asked you about that was the least interesting for the future, which is fascinating, right? Because it’s all about now. And like, how was like like it was supposed to change the world, but it it just became, like, like an asset class and a speculative tool, and so on.

00:49:03:24 – 00:49:22:18
Alex Cleanthous
Finally. So this book. Right. It’s called excellent Advice for living. Right? The wisdom I wish I had known earlier. So, this is a fantastic book for everyone. Who wants to get some ideas on how to live a better life? But what’s interesting, there’s no talk of technology in this book. At all.

00:49:22:18 – 00:49:42:02
Alex Cleanthous
It’s all things that are non-technical. So where did you get this idea? From someone who’s spent their whole life in kind of in kind of, the tech space in Futurism, who understands kind of, the problem of, yeah, just, how did you get the concept for this? Yeah, yeah. And why did you do it?

00:49:42:04 – 00:50:08:20
Kevin Kelly
Well, first of all, like, wired was really not about technology. Why was it the magazine was about the culture around technology and the great innovation that Louis Rossetto had? The true founder of wired was to wrap these technological things around people, to put people on the cover, to make the geeks, the stars, the heroes, to ask the people who were making these things what their dreams were.

00:50:08:22 – 00:50:50:09
Kevin Kelly
And so it was from my perspective, always the human, experiment. And I’ve always been interested in that cultural aspect of the technology. And not the technology itself. And so, this also the book represents sort of the while I’ve been a science nerd all my life, I’ve also been an artist all my life. And I was going into photography because it was a nice combination of merging of science and and art back in the day when you had to know chemistry and optics to do photography, which is what it was in the 60s and 70s.

00:50:50:09 – 00:51:19:22
Kevin Kelly
And so, so the artistic side of me has always paid attention to, you know, the, the emotional state, the, the, the very human condition that we’re in. And, I think, I was writing down quotes as I went along, in part to remind myself of these things. And, I have three kids, which we did not preach to very much.

00:51:19:22 – 00:51:51:16
Kevin Kelly
We were the opposite of a helicopter parent. We were lighthouse parents, which were stationed far away, watching over with the light always shining and knowing that we were there and available. And, but as I went along, I realized there were things that I was realizing even my older age, that I really wished I had known earlier. And I started to write those down to tell my adult children like, I wish I when I was your age.

00:51:51:16 – 00:52:15:12
Kevin Kelly
Something I had told me was someone had told me these things because it took me a long time to, to get to them. So I started writing these things down, and then once I got going, I found a lot more to say. So originally, it was me trying to remind myself of the, things like, you know, one of my favorites, which was, if you lose something in a lose device or something in your house, you know, you have, you can lose track of it.

00:52:15:12 – 00:52:40:10
Kevin Kelly
I know I have this hook somewhere, but I can’t remember where it is. And you look around and you finally find it. When you go to put it back, put it back where you first looked for it. Okay. And so I remind myself of that when I, when I’m doing this and so I started to write these things down as reminders to myself and then realized that they should really share them with my children.

00:52:40:12 – 00:53:03:04
Kevin Kelly
And so it wasn’t became an exercise in kind of trying to distill what I knew about life into a few words as possible, in a memorable way, in a way that that you could remember or be reminded at the very least. And so, it was a gift for my kids.

00:53:03:06 – 00:53:24:23
Alex Cleanthous
And there’s 415 there. Which piece of advice, is the one that, you would worry if the kids ignored it? Is there kind of one that you like? I really wish that they would have followed this one. And if they were to ignore this one piece of advice like that would be the one. You know, just follow that one.

00:53:25:00 – 00:53:28:11
Alex Cleanthous
Is there one that stands out to you? I mean.

00:53:28:13 – 00:53:40:12
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, I mean, I would be horrified if they ignored the golden rule, right? I mean, to do unto others as you do unto yourselves, which I’m not sure I put in there, but,

00:53:40:14 – 00:53:42:19
Alex Cleanthous
You did say the golden rule in there. Yes.

00:53:42:19 – 00:54:06:22
Kevin Kelly
Yeah. Right. So that would be horrible if they were ignoring that, because that is the golden rule. But there is one that I hope that they’re able to to follow through on. And it is something that took me. I was pretty old before I realized that myself, I was kind of doing it, but not really understanding that I was doing it.

00:54:06:24 – 00:54:15:01
Kevin Kelly
And that is is I don’t aim to be the best, try and be the only.

00:54:15:03 – 00:54:40:24
Kevin Kelly
The only is where you want to aim for. And that’s a very high bar to to be the only to be authentically yours, to do things that only you can do or you’re you’re the category of one. And for most people like me, it will take most of your life to even understand what it is that you might do uniquely.

00:54:41:01 – 00:55:03:07
Kevin Kelly
But I truly believe that every one of us has a unique mixture of talents and experience that would enable them to have a certain unique genius. If we have the right tools and technology and environment to allow it to to be released and unleashed. And so in addition to.

00:55:03:09 – 00:55:39:17
Kevin Kelly
Having that in people’s minds, we also need to equipped everybody in the world with education and hygiene and opportunity and tools that will allow them to try and have a chance at being the only. So it’s a big thing and part of what technology is about is, is equipping people with very special talents. If you could imagine, the musician Mozart being born before we had invented the piano and the symphony, he was, what would he have done?

00:55:39:18 – 00:56:07:04
Kevin Kelly
He maybe he could. Drummer, I don’t know, but that genius would have been lost. And so what if George Lucas had been born before the cinema and computers would a loss to the world. So? So there’s somewhere in the world. There’s a young Shakespeare, and she’s waiting for us to create the tools that she needs to unleash her unique genius in the world.

00:56:07:06 – 00:56:25:20
Kevin Kelly
And that’s why I think when we’re making new things, it’s not just consumerism. It’s not just, such as capitalism is actually, we’re increasing the opportunities and choices of everybody hoping that they are on their path to being the only,

00:56:25:22 – 00:56:39:14
Alex Cleanthous
That’s a deep one. And yeah, that is a that is a really good one and a really hard one, because even to figure out who you are and what you have that stands out, and then how do you kind of leverage that, to help society or to help your family and so on? It’s a really odd one.

00:56:39:16 – 00:56:43:19
Kevin Kelly
It’s a big bar, and you might spend your life doing it.

00:56:43:21 – 00:56:48:06
Alex Cleanthous
Yeah. There’s one question, because there was one which I really like.

00:56:48:06 – 00:56:49:00
Kevin Kelly
The last question.

00:56:49:01 – 00:56:56:23
Alex Cleanthous
The last question. Right. The first step is usually to complete the last step. The first step is usually to complete the last step. What does that mean?

00:56:57:00 – 00:57:14:10
Kevin Kelly
A friend was the one who reminded me of this. Is that, When you go to wash the dishes, put them in the dishwasher. You have to unload the dishwasher first before you can put them into the dishwasher. You have the finished the previous job.

00:57:14:12 – 00:57:15:03
Alex Cleanthous
I like it.

00:57:15:04 – 00:57:19:06
Kevin Kelly
Unload the dishwasher before you can load the dishwasher.

00:57:19:08 – 00:57:38:14
Alex Cleanthous
I get it, That’s deep. Okay, so, look, I just quickly just show just, in terms of the viewers, right? There’s like, 450 of these, super easy to read. I mean, it’s fantastic for a coffee table or for the side of the bed or for your young kids or for whatever. So highly recommended. The book’s going to be in the show notes.

00:57:38:16 – 00:57:44:12
Alex Cleanthous
How do people just connect with you? I mean, if they want to subscribe, obviously want to learn more. If they want to follow.

00:57:44:14 – 00:57:48:08
Kevin Kelly
My website, it’s my initials k.org.

00:57:48:10 – 00:57:52:01
Alex Cleanthous
Wow. Good domain name. Just quick side. Net that’s hard to get there.

00:57:52:03 – 00:58:22:00
Kevin Kelly
Yeah. And my email is the same K.K cakewalk. And everything’s there you know websites, cool tools, podcasts or five newsletters. And the one that I’m most active in right now is the Recommend the Newsletter, which is a free newsletter, a free, free, free. It comes every Sunday morning and there’s six very, very brief a few sentence recommendations of cool stuff.

00:58:22:01 – 00:58:47:23
Kevin Kelly
So it’s all one with one page in total. And it’s about cool people to follow, books to read. Maybe a program to watch, a destination place to go to. That’s worth going either way. An article to read, an app to use, a really cool tool. Every year, every week, a little different, but, recommend dotcom.

00:58:48:00 – 00:59:05:05
Alex Cleanthous
I’ll put that in, the show notes as well. Kevin, thank you so much for talking about the future of everything with me. I really appreciate your time, and I really appreciate all your contributions. Just to myself, because I was a person who consumed half of your content. So, thank you so much. And it’s been nice to talk to you.

00:59:05:07 – 00:59:10:13
Kevin Kelly
It’s really great. Thank you for having me. And, don’t be the best to be the only.