50 Comments
Mar 7, 2023·edited Mar 7, 2023

Kevin Kelly is a very thought-provoking writer but he doesn't really address your question about the isolating impact of social media. I don't find his comparisons with cable TV and radio encouraging because the sheer reach and instantaneous effects of social media signal something qualitatively and not just quantitatively new. Throw in the long-term mental health effects of short attention spans and echo chambers and I don't think you can quickly dismiss social media problems as overstated.

Expand full comment

Noah, it was a great interview. You let KK talk and he was interesting and provocative. A lot to think about.

Expand full comment

Such original and though-provoking stuff!! Thanks so much to both.

"Information wants to be copied, like life" - beautiful. There's competition there though, and it's needed - just look how much life spends on immune systems against some virus. Would be careful to conclude how we must manage copyrights in our society - I know it's strange for a free subscriber to say...

"Consciousness-free AIs will be advertised" is also beautiful, though I wonder if it's not really about individuality-free intelligence. Like organisms get rid of individualist cancer cells. But it will be interesting to see what kind of intelligence can emerge that is not individualist.

Expand full comment

When the topic is technology and the future, here's a simple efficient method of determining whether a writer is an expert. Before you read the article, you can do a quick search of the article for "nuclear weapons". If the search comes up empty, you're not reading an expert.

You may still enjoy the article of course, as all of us have the right to speculate about the future. Just keep in mind, if we don't meet the nuclear weapons threat, there isn't going to be a future worth speculating about.

It's the simplest thing. Imagine that you have a friend that walks around all day with a loaded gun in his mouth. But he's too bored by the gun to bother discussing it, so he'd rather talk about his dreamy plans for his future. But you know that his future will last only until the next time he trips over a curb, or bumps in to a door.

It's the simplest thing. That's why "experts" have so much trouble getting it.

Expand full comment

“ Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting.” This is a good example of an exceptional individual making a difference, not just simultaneous discovery. What use is an invention without someone to distribute it?

Expand full comment

When KK mentioned similar technologies simultaneously arising on separate continents I thought he might venture into the idea of the collective human unconscious (Joseph Campbell and Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as intrigued by this phenomenon). I mean talk about the undiscovered region---our unconscious seems to be uniquely human, out of reach by AI.

Expand full comment

Are you adopting some kind of number-for-word cipher, Noah, like the Culper Ring? I guess 5 = which...

"His books and articles are a mix of technological prediction, interpretation 83 of the current zeitgeist, and philosophical exploration. Interestingly, his most recent book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is a book of life advice! His intellectual breadth and ability to synthesize various seemingly unrelated trends and ideas are something to 5 I can only aspire. "

Expand full comment

Brilliant on AI! In general excellent at speaking in well-edited, pithy summaries. If more people were like this I would listen to podcasts

Expand full comment

Never heard of this guy. Its nice that the world is big enough thats theres still interesting people with new ideas I haven't heard before.

Expand full comment

One of the best writers on the subject of the emergent properties of a technological society writes here on Substack: Paul Kingsnorth. He writes The Abbey of Misrule.

Expand full comment
Mar 8, 2023·edited Mar 10, 2023

"It is NOT difficult to program in ethical and moral guidelines into AIs — it is just more code"

You know I'm thinking this guy might not know what gradient descent is (or any other training method).

Consider some extremely simple guidelines: don't tell users how to hotwire cars or rob banks. LLM developers are working pretty hard on controlling AIs and yet they can't reliably follow even the simplest guidelines like those.

Modern AIs consist of billions of parameters, which are just numbers, they're called "model weights". Trying to figure out how modern AIs work is hard, it's called "interpretability", and interpretability researchers still have very little idea how GPT2 works, let alone GPT3.

Expand full comment

If I want to start reading Kelly, what book should I start with.

Expand full comment

Great article and interview, thank you! So inspiring, refreshing, and energizing. KK is one of my favorite humans. I profiled him in one of my first pieces https://silviocastelletti.substack.com/p/the-inevitable-kevin-kelly

Expand full comment

Great interview! I read Out of Control like a quarter century ago and its overarching themes have informed how I think ever since.

Expand full comment

Very Nice Interview... On AI, one worry is the impact on innovation. On the plus side, generative AI programs such as chatGPT are great at building a first draft .... kind of like your own "creator" buddy and preventing the blank page syndrome. On the other hand, the integration of these programs into core editing functions creates a sort of uniformity which raises the barrier for building unique thought. The advantage of uniformity is clearer communication. However, there is an old philosophical paradigm where miscommunication and misinterpretation lives in a world of knowledge much bigger than the original. Some very creative and innovative things have been discovered from miscommunication and misinterpretation.

Expand full comment

I used to work for this guy. I didn't really appreciate it at the time but the culture and vision he built around Wired and HotWired in the mid 90s was really rocket fuel for the Internet. As Louise Rosetto said in the original issue of Wired "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon." And it did.

Expand full comment